On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Here's the passage again:
>
>> Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded
>> sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
>> fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.I am glad to the brink of
>> fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his
>> slough , and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the
>> woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and
>> sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not
>> how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return
>> to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, --
>> no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot
>> repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air,
>> and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become
>> a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
>> Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The
>> name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be
>> brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and
>> a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.In the
>> wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or
>> villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line
>> of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
>
> He's "in the woods." There's no one around. The name of "the nearest
> friend sounds...foreign and accidental" - society is nothing but "a trifle
> and a disturbance." Can it be much clearer than that?
>
> "I am nothing" is followed by an identification with nothing less than the
> universe - a nice instance of the narcissistic personality, with feelings
> of emptiness defended against by grandiosity. At the end, nature becomes a
> projection of "man" - or in this case, Representative Ralph.
You've clearly put a lot of time and serious thought into this, as well as intensive study, so you've probably already heard the objections I'm about to make. But it's precisely for that reason that I'm curious as to what your response is. (And if in the end you think I have to read your proto-dissertation, I'm willing to submit :o)
You seem here to be going out of your way to ignore two key elements in Emerson's description of his experience. First, that what he is experiencing is the obliteration of the self -- not the projection of self, and certainly not of a particular self with a name. And secondly, that the oneness with the universe he is experiencing is a unity with nature and a unity with god -- two terms you seem to skip. It is the combination of these three things, together with a feeling of enlightenment, that fills him with joy -- and not with an emptiness that terrifies him and needs to be defended against. Negative feelings seem entirely missing from this passage.
Do you maybe think think that all of these statements are being made in transparent bad faith? Because otherwise, on the face of it, this seems like the exact opposite of grandiose or narcissistic. Taken on on own its description, this is a feeling based not only on the apprehension of one's littleness and insignificance, but in the celebration of that insignificance as one's deepest truth, and as something that you share with every other person. Seeing oneself as a particle of god is another way of saying you're a speck -- and that it's not only all right to be a speck, it's a glorious thing. What is grandiose in this thought is not you, but the nature that dwarfs you, and pervading and dwarfing both nature and you, Being.
So on the face of it this thought seems to be be anti-grandiose, anti-narcissistic, as well as very egalitarian -- it is a truth everyone is capable of reaching simply by looking within, where they'll find exactly what you found. I mention that last because narcissism, as I understand it, requires some feeling of specialness or privileged access.
In addition, at least on the face of it, this idea doesn't seem to have any features that are distinctively American -- or even distinctively modern.
To my mind, this entire passage seems like a very stock variant of the experience of the Sublime, which had by this time been a popular descriptive exercise in Europe for almost a century. And from the long view, you can trace this back to the beginning of religion and philosophy. Brian rightly pointed out the Buddhist parallels, but actually I think the more relevant document is the philosophy that preceded Buddha and which he was in some ways trying to return people, namely the philosophy of the Upanishads. And it's not just a gratuitous parallel. Western translations of the Upanishads are very prominent in the writings and speeches of both Schopenhauer and the Theosophists, both of which were central influences on Emerson. And at first sight, to someone who is not an intensive student of either, there seems an obvious and detailed parallism between the Hindu conception of Atman and Emerson's conception of the Oversoul.
So you find this idea all over Europe, for a century in either direction, using exactly the terms and imagery that Emerson uses, and in more abstract form all over the world and in all eras. Many people in the 19th and early 20th century, among them Freud and William James, argued that this feeling was as close to a universal feeling as there was -- it was one you could find in all cultures. So given that distribution, it seems hard to use it to explain the distinctiveness of the American national perspective -- which I entirely agree with you, is very distinctive. But which I think rests more on the Chosen People paradigm than the individual mystic experience of oneness.
Lastly, the focus on this oceanic experience was consciously taken up in the 19th century by people who were trying to salvage something "objective" from religion -- who were trying to find a core of religious meaning that could be accessed without the intervention of any religious texts, and which would stand up to the test of experience, and which would therefore survive the demolition of the literal narrative of all religious texts by the onslaught of science and historical analysis. Emerson's passage culminates with another of the key ideas in this endeavor, the idea that that the human soul is part of the natural order.
So when it comes to the big religious divide in America, between the modernists and the fundamentalists, this seems definately one of the landmarks of the former, the tradition that tried to remove the conflict between science and religion by naturalizing and reasonable-lizing religion. In other words, as an influence on American cultural history, this seems clearly to be one of the founding documents in the transcendentalist tradition that gave birth to worldview of blue state liberalism -- which is the very opposite of the worldview of red state conservatism you seem to be mapping it onto.
Michael