Digressions&Impressions

On Emersonian Circles and my Dad

In reflecting he length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon.--Emerson, Circles.

My dad graduated the Fashion Institute of Technology, then a community college part of the State University of New York, class 1957.  I found his yearbook on a shelve while cleaning out his library. In it I also found a folded newspaper clipping and a pristine social security card with his address; the YMHA on 92nd & Lexington. I knew he had lived at Young Men's Hebrew Association (now the 92 street Y) once -- I believe after he moved out of my maternal grandparents' place --, but upon seeing it I felt instant regret not having visited the Y with him on our many visits to New York. I wondered what stories he would have told me if we had gone there. 

Touching the social security card I realized I had no idea what job, if any, he worked at during college. He liked to tell of going to double features at the end of the month because of the cheap popcorn and excellent air-conditioning and survive on popcorn once his dad's money had run out. The Summer heat had made an impression on him.  

The newspaper clipping is dated 7 May 1958 (in Dutch) and is an anonymous review of a fashion show at the Doelen hotel (still on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat in Amsterdam). The newspaper, Het Vrije Volk, does not exist anymore (it has long been folded into Algemeen Dagblad). I read the piece, but only found what I was looking for in the drawings of some collars on the bottom left (see the picture below). My dad is not mentioned at all in the review. The only person named is Nancy Cooke de Herrera, who is described as the famous American visitor bored to tears by the show. (The Dutch journalist is clearly fascinated by the idea of being named the 'perfect American housewife.') Cooke de Herrera had preceded my father from the world of fashion to spirituality and, thereby, became an impression in popular culture: Her son is satirically memorialized as Bungalow Bill in the Beatles' "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill."

Almost certainly the newspaper clip was preserved by my dad because of these NETEX collars. NETEX was the family business. (The rival, Berghaus, later bought NETEX.) Had these fur collars of the 1958 Spring collection been my dad's first contribution to Dutch fashion (or were they really his mom's)? Last week, when we were visiting NYC with my son, my wife disapprovingly commented on the revival of fur collars. No progress is permanent.

I then looked at the picture (see below). I was startled. I did not associate my dad (recall) with 'Karl,' nor with Emerson. He had been a 'Micha' my whole life. (His middle name was Michael.) I knew, of course, his first name was officially Karl. But it seems for his classmates at FIT he had really been Karl. 

He had not kept in touch with most of them. Most of the names in the yearbook were unfamiliar to me. Except for Guenter. He had stayed in touch intermittently with Guenter Ruecker (with whom he shared a German background), who later became an instructor (in tailoring) at FIT. Ruecker had been paired with a quote from Keats. I remember joining my dad for drinks once at least twenty perhaps twenty five years ago near grand central station with Guenter; Guenter drank at a much faster rate than my dad. Neither spoke much. 

All the yearbook pictures were accompanied by famous quotes. I wondered if they had been supplied by the yearbook editor or if the students  had to submit them at some deadline. Because there was no reason to think my dad had been reading Emerson's essays in the 1950s I opted for the former. I wonder if he ever checked out the Emerson essay.  It's not my favorite of his. I understand why the piece would have enraptured Nietzsche, but in re-reading it  -- and to add an Emersonian affectation -- under the shadow of the Akropolis, I find his language, despite the simplicity of sentences, gratingly pompous, even obscure at times ("Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.") 

And yet, there is a thought in it that  seems sufficiently true:

People say sometimes, 'See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events.' Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear, as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

Emerson is right that to say 'I have overcome X' involves a kind of performative contradiction. (It does not follow that forgetting or deliberately being silent about X is any better.) But despite being a 'circular philosopher,' he still assumes the possibility of true conquest, that is historical progress.

My mind circles back to my father, who in the last years of his life told the story of his calamity to the young in Dutch schools and in Germany. He did so not to assert his conquest over the calamity -- he believed in no such thing -- nor even primarily to remember the dead.  I was about to reflect on  to what degree these school visits were a form of therapy and a means of calling these kids to extend their generosity to vulnerable refugees, when I recognized that for that Karl to become Micha that had been an attempt at such conquest. He stuck with his new name long after he must have realized the futility of it. 

On Catching up with Revolutionary Thoughts

I am, however, discussing with you troubles which concern us both, and sharing the remedy with you, just as if we were lying ill in the same ward. Listen to me, therefore, as you would if I were talking to myself. I am admitting you to my inmost thoughts, and am having it out with myself, merely making use of you as my pretext.--Seneca, Letter, 27.

I was re-reading Emerson* and trying to figure out why, despite finding regular nuggets of insight and wisdom in his essays, his authorial persona is so grating to me. Take for example, the following paragraph, which is the third one in the opening essay, of his first collection of his Essays:

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. Emerson (1841)  History

Emerson's underlying metaphysical commitments -- as expressed in the first sentence(s) of the essay, "THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same." -- are familiar enough from the Plotinian, Idealistic strain in Spinoza and Leibniz; they are expressed, with a kind of overflowing urgency, which echoes the emanation from the divine, that ought to be appealing. For, unlike those worrying types, who, in the face of One and Unity, despair that any particular individual is ephemeral and fleeting and only perceive the risk of dissolving into the one and only acosmic substance, Deus sive Natura, which has metaphysical umphyness, Emerson grasps that each of us has, thereby, direct access to everything including the whole of history.+

As an aside, for all the aura of elitism that Emerson often displays, this is a truly democratic thought. He expresses it in a lovely image: "all that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men;—because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded." Each of us can be a hero and our greatness and heroicism can be expressed in infinite number of ways. (Emerson certainly is capable of taking the thoughts of girls seriously, but it is notable that his favorite image of possibility is boyhood.)

Be that as it may, much of the time this direct access to infinite thought has to be triggered by or mediated through encounters with others. And Emerson's writings are dense with allusions and references not just to the familiar Eurocentric canon of philosophy and religion; he assumes an encyclopedic, universal library in his audience. I find this endearing and his urgent even hectoring call to make our individual experience the touchstone of all we encounter inspiring. 

Of course, Emerson understands the risk -- endemic in Whiggish history -- , that all we encounter in our engagements with others is the familiar self; that we become disaster-scene-tourists, who ends up reassured with the familiar contours we see in the mirror each morning. But Emerson's writings call us to new possibilities: every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

And this, not the hectoring, is, I sense, the trouble. Emerson is so enthralled by the creative possibilities inherent in us -- the Romantic cult of pre-meditated, divine creativity --, and so right in demanding of us complete, sympathetic identification with those we encounter in history and books "there is properly no history, only biography....every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground," that he does not allow that, quite often, the revolution comes first and that thought plays catch up. By this I do not mean to hurl at Emerson a romantic-fascistic decisionism; rather I merely alert us to the equally familiar experience that so many of our reasons are post hoc interpretations of others and ourselves. (I have been reading Sperber and Mercier's The Enigma of Reason--more about that some other time).

Seneca captures something of this last fact by artfully displaying himself as a vulnerable authorial persona. Like a clever magician he pretends to give away a secret: that he is self-medicating and that, in this vulnerability, he is no better than his audience. Death is necessary for us all, after all. But he also needs his audience, not to receive his gifts, nor to have spectators to his vulnerability, but to occasion, as it were, the articulations that follow the re-cognitions.

 

On Virginia Woolf on Thoreau being a Counterpart of Emerson

But for a time he was to live in the world of men, at least in that very remarkable section of the world of which Emerson was the centre and which professed the Transcendentalist doctrines. Thoreau took up his lodgings in Emerson’s house and very soon became, so his friends said, almost indistinguishable from the prophet himself. If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began ‘…in his manners, in the tones of his voice, in his modes of expressions, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson.’ This may well have been so. The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny.--Virginia Woolf (July 12, 1917:) commemorating the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth for the Times Literary Supplement.

It's almost a century ago that Woolf published these remarks. I was reminded of her moving essay, and this passage, in particular, yesterday when, in the company of my former supervisor, I heard him (my Doktorvater), say, in passing (in a festive mood after a succesful defense of one of my students), that's just swell.+ (As it happens we had just discussed Allan Bloom's distaste for Zelig.) Now, I was not surprised by his use; I have long known that somehow, without initially noticing it, I have picked up the habit of using this (folksy) expression from him. Luckily, despite my fascination with prophets, we do not share many doctrines (but recall) and, as he will be the first to remind me, I am no Thoreau (and he is no Emerson).

While few philosophers live with their intellectual mentors, the phenomenon that Woolf describes is familiar enough. There are many mannerism associated with certain intellectual environments (when the Oxford trained philosopher of a certain generation in a galaxy far away says (recall), 'I am confused' to you, you know they think you are a moron.) I am sure the next sentence will land me in  trouble (but here goes): for a while, I could unfailingly pick out a Pittsburgh trained philosopher based on the way s/he nodded during a lecture (in apparent disagreement) or used the phrase 'deep' to pick out a favored position. (There was selection bias.)

Of course, what makes Woolf's description (she is quoting a description by a former classmate of Thoreau, the Rev. John Weiss,) especially amusing is that both Emerson and Thoreau strongly attacked conformism and praised robust forms of individuality (recall this post, for example). In fact, Woolf enjoys her own joke so much that she adds for good measure, "The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength." Here she is also recalling Emerson's and Thoreau's interest in magnanimity (of course a strong soul need not always be a magnanimous soul, but, following, say, Thomas (inspired by Seneca), Emerson couples them (for example here) and so does Thoreau) [for a lovely paper on this topic, see Andrew Corsa, himself a former student].

Besides joking, Woolf makes the further point that certain forms of submission may well be the expression of a form of courage.* At first, she does not explain what she has in mind. But she returns to the topic later in her essay, "He was a wild man, and he would never submit to be a tame one." Again, she echoes Thoreau here (his work is suffused with the strong tropological contrasts between wildness/strength/true America vs civilization/weakness/cultured Europe (false America). Somewhat mischievously,** Woolf goes on (in the original quote at the top of this post) to conflate the persona as presented by Thoreau to his readers with the author/the man Thoreau.

Be that as it may, we may say that for Woolf, on her reading of Thoreau,*** that in one's education, or path to wisdom, a species of courage consists in submitting to the right sort of influence or exemplar. In so doing, one need not become inauthentic (colours...natural to himself) nor loose one's identity/strength++ (lost any of his own force), although even the strong soul may do so along the way (permanently).

Woolf here reminds the reader that much true education involves a potentially temporary submission to the will of  another. (My blog-persona reminds you, dear reader, that this is also true (recall) of reading other people's ephemera.) And sometimes education involves oneself in a comical, repetitive mimicking, with or without difference, of other people's ticks or turns of phrase.

    Isn't that swell?

 

On Historical Necessity and Morality (Art & Propaganda in John Williams's Augustus)

In the matter of passion, whether of love or war, excess is inevitable. Yet I have always been bewildered when, in the ease of peace, men raise the questions of praise or blame. It seems to me now that both judgments are inappropriate, and equally so. For those who thus judge do not judge so much out of a concern for right or wrong as out of protest against the pitiless demands of necessity, or an approval of them. Necessity is simply what has happened.--Maecenas to Livy, in John Williams Augustus: A Novel (70)

You forget that I am artist myself, and know the necessity of asking what to ordinary people would seem the most insulting and presumptuous things. How could I take offense at that which I myself would do, without the slightest hesitation, for the sake of my art? I detect the odor of a moralist. And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. And it would be a heavy burden for even the deepest friendship to bear.—Maecenas to Livy (128)—John Williams Augustus: A novel

There was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue; and no effective idea of virtue that was not encoded in the law.--Octavius to Damascius (302), John Williams Augustus: A novel

If we allow ourselves the thought, we probably tend to think of propaganda as not-art or, perhaps, as bad art.+ Williams's clever novel reminds us that some of the greatest art (Virgil, Horace, etc.) is, in part, propaganda for what we might call, military dictatorship and empire. In addition, in the second quoted passage above, Williams portrays the chief artist-propagandist, Maecenas, not just as a Spinozistic-fatalist -- with his repeated invocation of necessity --, but as would-be-censor of the historian Livy. It is to Williams's credit that he makes us see both the case for benevolent, imperial dictatorship as well as the price the establishment this extracts not just on the protagonists themselves (notably Augustus and his daughter Julia – ultimate Augustus trades the daughter of flesh and blood for an "adoptive daughter" [the Roman empire], a trade that, in turn, is said to be made legitimate because "acknowledged" by "the adoptive daughter" [that is the laws] (306; as if all trade requires the sanction of law) -- ), but also on the arts (history, poetry, and philosophy).

Few professional historians would claim that they are in the business of judging. In so far as Historicism has won the day (see Beiser's majestic book), historians see themselves as scientists (if not akin to natural scientists than at least as practitioners of their very own special Geisteswissenschaft) and not as moral judges. Obviously, even those that advocate moralism in history would wish to see it consequent knowledge.* Williams's (1972) novel (recall this post) subtly invite us to see constraints and power in (or outside) the margins of works of art, history, and philosophy. Williams's readers were familiar with the McCarthy era, of course, so, perhaps, they need little such reminding. It is an open question to what degree some readers at the time thought the US was, itself, heading -- amidst major disagreements over civil rights and Vietnam war -- toward its own civil war (and to what degree they were tempted to follow the model of benevolent dictatorship). Perhaps, too, Williams makes the reader reflect on the nature of the post US-Civil War settlement (which, after all, is a key feature of Butcher's Crossing (recall my post)).

In Williams's portrayal of Maecenas, art (poetic and historical) is (amongst other things) supposed to be useful. In context, it is entailed that if political circumstances had been different some other art would be useful. The moralist is said to be useless because he can't contribute to knowledge-generation and, less explicitly, change what's happened. Meacenas's argument presupposes not just the Hobbesian idea that within the context of state of nature, there is no justice, but a distinction between two kinds of judges (moralists/artists). Those that judge appropriately with authority (and force) and those that judge – for lack of a better word -- frivolously. By 'frivolous' (recall) I do not mean consequent-free; the novel is very clear that death (Cicero) and exile (Ovid) may well await frivolousness.

A definition of analytical philosophy by a true critic; Or Margaret Fuller discovered

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions. Of these the only law is, "Speak the best word that is in thee."--Margaret Fuller (1840) "A Short Essay on Critics" The Dial, I, July.

The only true criticism of these or any good books may be gained by making them the companions of our lives. Does every accession of knowledge or a juster sense of beauty make us prize them more? Then they are good, indeed, and more immortal than mortal. Let that test be applied to these Essays which will lead to great and complete poems--somewhere.--Margaret Fuller (1844) "Review of Emerson's Essays."

I 'disovered' Fuller by chance yesterday; well not wholly by chance--I have Anca Gheaus to thank. While ruminating on the role of Emersonian ideas in Butcher's Crossing, I decided to teach my 2015 Spring seminar on 'natural philosophy,' -- a course I inherited and, by the absolute rules of Belgian bureaucracy, whose title I can't change -- on Emerson's On Nature (and a few other essays), Thoreau's Walden (recall) and, perhaps, if there's time, Cavell's The Senses of Walden. All books I have been meaning to re-read in part in light of each other. But before I set this all-male syllabus in stone, it dawned upon me that especially with such works of, permit the expression, male anxiety, a feminist voice could be illuminating. I asked around and that's how I encountered Fuller. After spending my first day with her, I note with surprise that at the origin of true American philosophy -- who could invent this? -- we find a distinctive feminist; more about that in the future. (In defense of my teachers, I could say that they left me to find Fuller by way of their oversights and silences.)

Fuller measures Emerson with the most exacting standards and, and after nobly refuting the charge that he is unclear and not logical, finds him, nevertheless, wanting: "We miss what we expect in the work of the great poet, or the great philosopher-- the liberal air of all the zones; the glow, uniform yet various in tint, which is given to a body by free circulation of the heart's blood from the hour of birth."* Despite Nietzsche's well-known admiration of Emerson, it is likely that Fuller's point will have to be conceded. (But I withhold judgment until after my seminar.) Yet, even falling short of greatness, Fuller insists there is plenty to strive for, and in the passage quoted above she gives us a method to develop the standard of judgment of all good books ("the only true criticism of these or any good books may be gained"). The method is:

• make them the companions of our lives.

I read this as meaning that such books are not so much a mirror to our lives, but themselves are true friends (recall Seneca, and here), in part, exemplar, in part, running commentary on our experiences, and, in part, means by which we make others, ourselves, and the world intelligible. Undoubtedly, some will flinch at this because it so obviously is meant to have some books displace the Bible in the seasons of New England (and Homer in Athens, etc.). Perhaps, 'displace' is the wrong word because (part of) the Bible is one of the many good books.* I am unsure if Fuller meant this method to be necessary or sufficient, but I am inclined to think she thought it necessary.

The standard itself is an enduringly positive answer to the following question:

Butcher's Crossing, on the Fate of the Emersonian Oversoul and Thoreau's Experiment

[T]he wildness and freedom that his instinct sought...He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unbeknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight...On this side is the city, he thought, and on that the wilderness; and though I must return, even that return is only another means I have of leaving it [the city--ES], more and more. From John Williams, Butcher's Crossing (51-2)*.

He would not return...to his home, to the country that had given him birth, had raised him in the shape he occupied and the condition that he had only begun to recognize, and that had relinquished him to the wilderness in which he had thought to find a truer shape of himself. No he would never return...nor could he recall the force of that other passion which had impelled him halfway across a continent into a wilderness where he had dreamed he could find, as in a vision, his unalterable self. Almost without regret, he could admit now the vanity from which those passions had sprung. (324)

The action of Williams's (1960) Butcher's Crossing takes place within two uncontrollable fields of action: one is the wilderness. The four main protagonists survive drought on the Plains and being trapped by snow in a mountain valley during a harsh winter; but ultimately one, Schneider, dies during the return journey--drowning after a kick to his head by his horse after a floating log unexpectedly, "thrust into the side" (264) of the horse that had been carrying him across a river. (Arguably a second, Charley Hoge, looses his mind; after the journey his eyes are described as "dull and blue, they were like bits of empty sky reflected in a dirty pool; there was nothing behind them, nothing to stop Andrews's haze from going on and on." (308*))

The second is the market economy: "the bottom's dropped out of the whole market; the [buffalo] hide business is finished." (292) From one year to the next the price has dropped by more than 95%. The change is due to both a change in fashion -- "everyone that wants one has a buffalo robe" (293) --, which alters the demand for hides, and oversupply of hides due to over-hunting (and lack of property rights, etc. cf. tragedy of commons). The novel intimates that at least some of the older buffalo hunters could have known that such price-swings are at least possible ("you remember what happened to beaver?" (293)), but failed to learn from history. Moreover, the novel also suggests to the attentive reader that at least with better communication technology, the information that was available in the area of demand ("back east") might have been relayed to those supplying the demand (294). The novel does not explore how to address such fundamental uncertainty about price movement (insurance, options, etc.).