Thread
"Emerson and Whitman’s adherence to order: The social significance of striving for an aesthetic existence."
This one is very good for tying together my other threads on this topic.
www.academia.edu/31110522/Emerson_and_Whitmans_adherence_to_order_The_social_significance_of_striving...
This one is very good for tying together my other threads on this topic.
www.academia.edu/31110522/Emerson_and_Whitmans_adherence_to_order_The_social_significance_of_striving...
"...many scholars have criticised the contradictory nature of Emerson’s writings and completely ignored the fact that the texts represent a cultural, utopian vision as well as a methodological attempt to integrate the country’s institutional faultiness into something..."
"...more complete and purposeful. Similar is applicable to Whitman, whose political agenda underlying the all-inclusiveness of Leaves of Grass (1855) aimed at a transformation of the deadly contradictions of the nation into a transcendental feeling of democratic tolerance."
"The contradictions within Emerson and Whitman’s writings may appear chaotic on the surface, but since they both followed a vision, there is an undeniable weeding out process involved of what they think is detrimental to an ideal American society."
👍
👍
"Thus, both are bringing into being a new form of hierarchy, a new order...This thesis is going to argue that both authors have had a consistent world order they adhered to and that this was closely interlinked with their belief in the power of aesthetics."
"The first part is going to be on Emerson, the proof of consistency in his philosophy between 1831 and 1842, the identification of his belief system, the pragmatic approach he employs it with and the linguistic tools he uses to induce social change."
"The linguistic tools he uses to induce social change" is one of the main things to get about Emerson.
I don't think that the main effect of his work is allowing people to get stuck in their own heads, even if it's hard to articulate how it leads to action and social change.
I don't think that the main effect of his work is allowing people to get stuck in their own heads, even if it's hard to articulate how it leads to action and social change.
"The second part is then going to focus on Whitman, an explanation why his famous poem ‘Song of Myself’ is often perceived as chaotic and how underneath it all lies a robust theory. This will then finally pass on to his hedonistic aesthetics and the changes it undergoes..."
"...what Emerson aims at in his essays and lectures is not having a direct political influence as such, but rather contributing to the social evolution of humankind. What Emerson wants to point at in his monistic-pluralistic framework is that, by advocating individualism..."
"... and encouraging people to find their own way to position themselves in the world, even if this changes on multiple occasions during their lifetime, one promotes a dialectic similar to Hegel’s dialectic, but more organic."
The section on Whitman gets at why the Northern Dem. narrative is warped, even when ideology was not yet driving the party, and even before the GOP/Civil War.
"It was well known that Whitman was abhorrently afraid of the threat of his country’s disunion."
"It was well known that Whitman was abhorrently afraid of the threat of his country’s disunion."
"... although Whitman ‘always believed in the moral principles behind the anti-slavery movement, he was afraid that the slavery issue might split the Union, and nothing was more important to Whitman than preservation of the Union of states'."
"This goes to show that the idea of order was so important to Whitman that it even jeopardised his moral code."
I mean, societal collapse or loss of national/political identity and future aspirations is a pretty big deal.
I mean, societal collapse or loss of national/political identity and future aspirations is a pretty big deal.
But the point is that while Republicans thought slavery was going to bring down the nation eventually, and felt it had to be dealt with, Democrats disagreed, and, on top of that, felt that discussing the issue might bring down the nation.
While the Republican position seemed far more extreme and likely to lead to short-term conflicts, it was coherent and comprehensive. The Democrats didn't have a great response...they either acted like it would all work out if we just acted reasonably, or played games.
What Douglas was doing reminds me a bit of the authorities over the last few years. He kept coming up with some compromise or maneuver that would fix everything, and it sounded plausible enough. The story would just change periodically and you were supposed to roll with it.
The whole thing really does remind me of covid. Northern Dems are the people who want to believe the authorities, and everything sounds reasonable enough to them, especially given the danger of the situation, and they don't see why it's a big deal to someone like Lincoln.
Meanwhile, Lincoln basically snaps over the dishonesty, casual unprincipled behavior by top leaders that many don't any perceive, and reckless disregard for second-order consequences and long-term stability/coherence. Whereas Douglas sees himself as a savvy pragmatist.
I'll paraphrase a blog comment I found: "No one is in charge. That’s what led to the Civil War. The presidents of the 1840s and especially the 1850s are all ranked low, but they were exactly what the system selected for: do-nothings. Power was supposed to be local..."
"...Which worked when Senators and other politicians were strong, visionary leaders. Calhoun was the only one still living, and he was retired. Who was left? Preston Brooks and Stephen Douglas. Fools, ideologues, snakes. Or random Whig 'compromise' candidates..."
"...Stephen Douglas ramming through the Compromise of 1850 only to destroy it--four years later--with the Kansas Nebraska Act, to make a few bucks, is as Current Year as it gets." It is. The political environment is very similar in some ways. Kicking the can and careerism.
This destroys the Whigs, and damages the Dems, and the Republicans come back and win because they have focus and vision. Someone needed to organize around a principled but accessible issue to restore order. Anti-slavery/anti-relativism was that issue.
The Dems are basically out of the running for a while, but what can they do? Saying the war was unnecessary and the Republicans broke apart the country worked for a brief period, but once the war is won and the Union restored without slavery, it's kind of beside the point.
They can continue to carp about what happened, but they need a more positive vision about what they'll do going forward. Which they had on some level, but not in a way that could differentiate them from the Republicans. Before the war, they'd proudly been the nationalist party.
And also the military/expansionist/progress/unity party. Now, the Republicans could make at least an equal claim to those titles.
"...with the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ‘opened up the western territories for slavery. The states...were hardly united’..."
"...with the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ‘opened up the western territories for slavery. The states...were hardly united’..."
"...and Whitman underwent a period of anxiousness, which was further reinforced by a series of events that hit him also on a more personal level. For example, Whitman’s Democratic Party started internally dividing over quarrels of slavery as well and Reynolds remarks that..."
"... the poet felt like ‘the three presidencies before Lincoln [were of] 'our topmost warning and shame'’. On top of that, there was political corruption and growing class divisions. Being confronted with a country in decline and an uncertain future, it is not difficult..."
"...to to imagine Whitman undergoing a crisis of his own, leading him to disintegrate his persona into complete chaos in the hopes of discovering a new order that could provide him a solution on how to work against, what he perceived, his country’s decline."
So, in the 1850s, Northern Dems like Whitman now felt the country was in decline, on the verge of collapse even, with all their optimistic illusions of national progress and greatness discredited. New vision needed.
"From this perspective, 'Song of Myself' [1855] is more than just a utopic vision of a new, all-inclusive, democratic America. It also harbours the progression to this new end, starting with a falling into what was in the first half of the 20th century theorised as Absurdism."
"....the context and circumstances of the 19th century...are completely different, but the feeling of existential angst & uncertainty are well comparable....[Whitman was alienated] due to the clash between his orderly personality & an environment of sociopolitical instability."
"[In 1855,] Whitman cobbled together imagery...that convey all kinds of emotions in a non-chronological, disorderly manner, because he believed, as Henkel notes, that ‘America in the 19c needed a new conception of democracy to differentiate from Carlyle’s 'old order',' which..."
"‘...defend[ed] hierarchic institutions like the 'Aristocracy.'"
Wait, what? Why would you need a new conception of *democracy* to differentiate from a non-democratic system? My guess is that this is a misread due to failing to understand how America differed from Europe.
Wait, what? Why would you need a new conception of *democracy* to differentiate from a non-democratic system? My guess is that this is a misread due to failing to understand how America differed from Europe.
Whitman was probably trying to put forth an appealing, viable vision of democratic society, in response to people like Carlyle, who thought the overthrow of traditional social arrangements in Europe led to disaster. Emerson tried to make a somewhat similar pitch to Carlyle.
"Whitman’s aim was not to cause conflict in favour of Hegelian-inspired dialectic...The suggestive content of Leaves of Grass certainly challenged traditional view...and one could argue...it followed a similar scheme as Emerson’s dialectic, but it becomes clear..."
"...from the...sexual openness that Whitman displays in his work, that he was specifically aiming for intense counter-reactions.....unlike Emerson who creates a stir...but...provides guidelines on how to find what is true, good and beautiful, Whitman [does not moralize.]"
While it's true that part of what Emerson does is encourage individual development/progress, there's a social component to his work that is much like Whitman's here. They both wanted everyone to be able to really "see" each other; to come to terms with the variety of experience.
And learn to appreciate and navigate these differences and contradictions. This would hopefully allow people to intuitively communicate around the conventional set of possibilities and transcend the unrest by building new alliances on new grounds.
"Whitman labels the people he lists in ‘Song of Myself’ and in doing so, one could insist, he reinforces differences instead of eliminating them. However, one needs to see this in juxtaposition to the passages that trigger emotions of their crudest form."
"In Whitman’s order, the conventional and conservative are valued the least...it can help the reader to become more conscious of the categorisations and its nonsensicality. Ideally, in the end, the labels do not matter anymore and the body and soul are taking over."
"It is widely assumed that Leaves of Grass was a lot more personal to Whitman than he first may have anticipated it to be. He wanted to be that poet Emerson claimed America was so desperately in need of, but his preoccupation with his personal matters prevented him to..."
"... fully decentralise himself and become ‘representative’ of all men...Even his image of the working-class poet was a mirror of a damaged father-son relationship, and...an ‘impersonation...[of] the father he wished he had known’."
Yeah, this is still the issue.
Yeah, this is still the issue.
"This in combination with the utter disillusionment he was left with after the civil war, which he had hoped... ‘would cleanse the nation of its most serious ills’ but turned out to be ‘a great slaughter-house’ as Whitman calls it himself, made him realise..."
"...‘his own failure to achieve the celebrated prophetic character of Leaves of Grass’. As a consequence, Whitman resorts to calling for ‘native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known’...Whitman becomes notably more pessimistic [by 1871]."
So now, he keeps thinking that something new and unprecedented needs to show up and save the cause, because he can't actually relate fully enough to the society as a whole, and sees it as needing some sort of fundamental change before anything can be done with it.
Basically, the material he's working with, including himself, is now considered inherently defective. That's a dysfunctional political attitude, although it is typical of the northern Dem. analysis to equate the war's violence with failure. I don't think Whitman felt that way.
But then it takes a sharp turn. Faced with the post-war problems, Whitman abandons all notion of equality. IMO, this is much less mystifying than most Whitman scholars understand it to be. But they'd have to study the 1850s and 1860s more closely.
"While Whitman still advocated equality and a democratic mind-set among the men and women of the nation, he suddenly hypocritically excluded black people after having realised ‘the appalling dangers of universal suffrage’."
"Although he does not further elaborate on that, he clearly adopts a new elitist stance not only in terms of the question of race, but even in terms of American people, which he heavily criticises of ‘lack[ing] a common skeleton.’"
"Over the course of the piece he seems to come to the conclusion that a reasonable explanation for this problem must be the discrepancies between ‘great revolutionary authors, leaders, poets, &c’ and the ‘mass or lump character.’"
He basically felt that the degree of conflict and difference made it not worthwhile to try and reconcile everyone within the political system, especially as he had idealistically envisioned it. This was just calling it as he saw it, even though he hadn't abandoned his ideals.
He thought the white "masses" were salvageable: "‘open up to cultivation’ if the right person came along and showed them how."
He was obviously never committed to a democratic political system on principle. Unity and equality appealed to him, but results mattered most.
He was obviously never committed to a democratic political system on principle. Unity and equality appealed to him, but results mattered most.
"Whitman’s materialistic philosophy...suddenly becomes a lot more defined. The extensiveness of the soul that is able to connect all human beings [is no longer portrayed as bodily feeling, but as] a purely spiritual inclination that ties in with conscience."
So, to his credit, he goes back to the "all men are created equal" and Emerson to re-establish common ground, because he still has those ideals of unity and equality and appreciating difference. This was a very common position at the time. More so for Republicans, though.
"Emerson and Whitman validate Kurzweil’s assumption that the human being is truly a pattern seeking animal...what is distinctive of both...is that [by] pinning down of the hierarchical structures they adhere to, one can deduce an aesthetic scheme...geared towards social change."
"...the aestheticism of [Emerson's] philosophy of self-fashioning is not the choice or the continual adaptations to life’s situations... but the consent to allow nature and its beauty to have an impact on one’s outlook. That is all of the guidelines that Emerson gives..."
"... to his audiences and readers and theoretically that would already be enough to have an influence on the social sphere, because the conflicts resulting from people subjective conception of beauty, morals and truth would then help progress history in Hegelian manner."
"But since his order is not completely deterministic, Emerson knows that he can exercise power over the turnout of society and so he does through the language of his essays, but in compliance with his overarching principle. In constantly linking nature and beauty..."
"...to society in his essays, Emerson gradually changes his readers’ mind-set. The pull of his work...temporary suspends everything around them; paradoxical and controversial actions by the government...commonly accepted norms...It re-establishes a relationship with nature..."
"...that seemed to disappear, and if it does not changes society for the better, it at least exerts a counterforce to the socio-political circumstances and anything opposing self-reliance...Having been heavily influenced by Emerson, Whitman’s order [has similarities]..."
"They both attempt to uncover fundaments of human nature that appear...obscured by processes of socialisation, but [while Emerson] tries to achieve this [with] a religiously-based transcendentalism from the start, it takes Whitman almost 2 decades to adopt a similar approach."
🤣
🤣
"Regrettably, after the civil war and the disappointments it brought about, Whitman changes and instead of aiming for a universal comradeship, he makes it exclusively ‘national’ and primarily orients his suggestions for a better future to the elite of creative minds that need..."
"...to steer the masses into the right direction by stimulating their imaginative energies... [his] aspirations & expectations have become more realistic...& his audience more specific....[He] still sympathised with the ideal of a harmonious togetherness..." 🤷♀️
Mentions
See All
Venkatesh Rao @vgr
·
Jan 31, 2022
Great thread thanks