Revision and Identification: Emerson and the Ethics of Skepticism and Sympathy

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Revision and Identification:Emerson and the Ethics of Skepticism and Sympathy Russell Sbriglia (bio) It can prove quite challenging to attempt to champion Emerson as ethicist these days. In light of powerful and nuanced critiques of Emersonian individualism, critiques which Emerson certainly supplies enough ammunition for, as well as continued interest in the "cultural work" of literature, such a championing of a man who unabashedly asserts that "A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him" (490) is apt to leave one feeling that his case must rest upon a significant degree of sophistry.1 Yet, there are those of us who will risk, or will at least brave being accused of, engaging in perhaps the greatest of philosophical sins and nonetheless make the attempt. James Albrecht, for instance, diverges from John Carlos Rowe's now widely accepted reading that Emersonian transcendentalism and ethico-political commitments are "fundamentally at odds with each other" (25) and that the former "works to rationalize present wrongs rather than bring about actual social change" (40) by arguing that Emerson's writings "do not reflect [the] absolutist extremes of autonomy and deter-minism"—or, to adopt Stephen Whicher's classic formulation, freedom and fate—but instead reflect a process of "limited transcendence," one which "extend[s] his balanced, proto-pragmatic analysis of the power and limitation of individual acts" (178, emphasis added). Taking an altogether different approach, Gustaaf Van Cromphout, responding to critiques of Emersonian transparency, insists that Emerson was in fact [End Page 1] more preoccupied with ethical rather than epistemological questions and concerns. As he sees it, "the question that really concerned Emerson was not 'What can I know?' but 'How shall I live?'" (1). Van Cromphout's often insightful examination indeed represents, as he puts it, the first "extensive study" of Emerson's "ethics as such" (2); however, I find his insistence upon the mutual exclusivity of these two questions—"What can I know?" and "How shall I live?"—perplexing, for it is often the case that the most convincing critiques of Emersonian ethics focus upon the rapaciousness of what Stephen Esquith has wonderfully termed Emerson's "oculocentric individualis[m]" (252), an oculocentrism which, in Emerson's case, seems inextricable from the epistemological. The quintessential example of Emerson's oculocentrism is, of course, the transparent eye-ball passage from Nature: 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. (10) Critics have often preferred to disagree with Emerson here. Contrary to all mean egotism vanishing, what comes most troublingly to the forefront in this passage is Emerson the solipsist, the Emerson who, in response to philanthropic supplication, "grudge[s] the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong" (262), and who, in response to the "deplorable question of Slavery," insists, "I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes" (Selected 599). As Cornel West puts it: "Emerson's understanding of vision—in fact, much of his obsession with seeing and sight—promotes separateness over against solidarity, detachment over against association, and individual intuition over against collective action" (18). We thus have an Emerson whose championing of such a transparent epistemology threatens to eschew or erase ethics as such. And yet, it is for this very reason that Emerson's epistemological questions and concerns are perforce ethical ones. Perhaps there is a way in which to reclaim Emerson's oculocentrism as precisely ethical. [End Page 2] I would like to posit that by focusing solely on the distancing and deleterious effects of Emerson's oculocentrism, we have overlooked the equally enabling, equally ameliorative power...