Critique, Belief, and the Negative Tendencies of New England Transcendentalism

Critique, Belief, and the Negative Tendencies of New England Transcendentalism David Faflik (bio) Yet, what is my faith? What am I? —Ralph Waldo Emerson In his early essay “Spiritual Laws” (1841), the Massachusetts-born Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist agitator Ralph Waldo Emerson confronted nineteenth-century New England’s divided spiritual experience. On the one hand, Emerson was alive to what he called the “intellectual obstructions and doubts of his age.”1 Among these he counted the “theological problems” that he says beset the region’s “young people,” whom he describes as being preoccupied with “original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like.” On the other hand, the Yankee in Emerson remained connected to the “practical life” of his native Commonwealth state. This life, too, qualified as part of what he named our “spiritual estate” (CW, 2:84) Whether “we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance meeting, or the Transcendental club,” Emerson wrote, and no matter if we were “farmers,” “poets,” “women,” “laborers,” or “children,” we must find that “a little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us, that a higher law than that of our will regulates events.” “Belief and love” are ours, Emerson seems sure. “The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We only need obey” (CW, 2:77–81, 84). This was a lesson the writer embraced in- and [End Page 518] outside the traditional Sunday service, wherever his life’s work carried him. Emerson’s commentary will hardly strike today’s readers as revelatory, unless they recognize that the reflexive skepticism now informing academic criticism derives in part from the religion practiced by Emerson and the members of his antebellum generation. Even if we agree, as Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman write in their “postsecular” assessment, from 2014, that “the secularization thesis is dead,” we must nevertheless acknowledge that the respective roles played by the contemporary cultural critic and the religionist remain unreconciled.2 “Seeing” may no longer be accepted as an unquestioned basis for believing, given our collective ambivalence about the uses and abuses of positivism. But, at least among self-identifying cultural critics writ large, a decades-long depreciation in hyperrationalism’s fortunes has not made belief an alternative basis for believing. This is the case even though our criticism continues to express a religious crisis that just won’t quit. Emerson anticipated why the spiritual would prove no more reliable a position from which to practice cultural criticism than the secular. As his remarks above suggest, Emerson never regarded “faith” as the straightforward matter he might have wished for. He admitted in his private journal he was out of step with his contemporaries’ religious norms. “They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness,” Emerson confided in the summer of 1838, just three weeks before delivering a contentious address at Harvard’s Divinity School that outlined what the writer regarded as New England’s compromised spiritual condition. In fact, notwithstanding the celebrated optimism of a figure who maintained, in 1837’s “The American Scholar,” that we “can read God directly,” Emerson could still ask, in his 1841 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” “Yet, what is my faith? What am I?” (CW, 1:56–57, 1:214). My contention is that these questions, ostensibly spiritual in their origins [End Page 519] and aims, retain a defining relevance for the criticism produced in a “postsecular” age. Not only is the work of the critic necessarily ambivalent; our criticism’s ambivalence depends upon the same unresolved relation between faith and faithlessness that animated Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Compared to the skeptical critical tradition that has largely replaced conspicuous soul-searching among public intellectuals, the spiritual questioning that Emerson’s famous “Divinity School Address” performs sounds altogether different from most of what now qualifies as critique. Rita Felski describes critique as the quintessence of self-possession, a rational interrogative posture effectively “negative” in the interpretive encounters it facilitates with varying “texts,” literary or otherwise.3 The motivating force behind critique is suspicion; critique’s impetus is to ferret out the ideological complicities that practitioners believe lie hidden in or behind all artistic and...