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Abstract
‘Genius, cannot be taught,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson reports, reiterating Socrates’s conclusion in Plato’s Meno. This article considers this claim and its significance for moral education, specifically in modern science, by focusing on Emerson’s account of genius and the virtue of self-trust that perfects it. Genius, for Emerson, does not refer only to extraordinary works or persons. It is also the creative action of the soul to be cultivated by all. Self-trust, in which all the virtues are realized, is its chief virtue. Emerson knows that virtue begins but does not end in imitation. The goal of moral education is not simply to ape the virtues of those we love and admire, but to cultivate the virtues needed to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars who have gone before. Can genius, then, be taught? Emerson’s answer is not so simple as it may appear at first blush.
Notes
1. (Emerson, Citation2006, vol. 12, p. 432; Walls, Citation2003; York & Spaulding, Citation2008; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Citation1971, p. 10, xxvii n.1, lxxxvii–xciii). (I use the 1971 Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson throughout, hereafter CW). The attribution of this citation to Emerson is somewhat troublesome as it is found in the highly redacted version of Emerson’s lecture series ‘Natural History of the Intellect’ edited by James Elliot Cabot. See Ronald Bosco and Joel Meyerson’s ‘Historical Introduction’ to the Collected Works volume 10, York and Spaulding (xii) and Walls (pp. 203–204), among others. It was Emerson’s custom to turn his lectures into published essays and books, but by 1870 Emerson found that he was unable to do this work. He turned the lectures over to Cabot and his son, Edward Waldo Emerson who also proved inadequate to the task, mainly because unsympathetic to Emerson’s philosophical and poetic approach. Thus, we cannot know the precise source for this citation. Nonetheless, this provocative question and answer are very much in keeping with Emerson’s account of genius from his early lecture on the topic to his later work. The present article focuses on Emerson’s early lecture ‘Genius’ among other earlier works as a guide to his account of genius, which he would develop over the course of his literary career. I do so because this lecture, Emerson’s most explicit and thoroughgoing treatment of the term ‘genius’ (sections of which can be found in later essays), illuminates aspects of his account of genius (namely, its relation to love, virtue and moral perfection and these as divine gift and inspiration) that have gone unnoticed in Emerson scholarship that looks mainly to ‘Self-Reliance,’ or Representative Men as the touchstones for his account of genius. Stanley Cavell, for instance, in his excellent work on the theme repeatedly returns to Self-Reliance to expound genius as a (religious/sacrilegious) act of leaving family to pursue one’s calling, namely for Emerson, that of writing ‘Whim’ on the lintels and doorposts (see Cavell, Citation1991, p. 49, p. 55, p. 97; 2003, pp. 54–55, p. 93). This article grew out of a paper for a colloquium about theology and science. For this reason, my reflections on Emerson’s account of genius—though intended to be sufficiently wide in scope so as to abet considerations about moral education broadly—are constrained by focusing on questions about genius in relation to moral education in science.
2. (Emerson, Citation2006, vols. 12, p. 432) The whole quote (which again we cannot confirm is, in fact, Emerson’s) reads, ‘Ah! the whole must come by his own proper growth and not by addition; by education, not by inducation. If it could be pumped into him, what prices would not be paid; money, diamonds, houses, counties for that costly power that commands and creates all these: but no, the art of arts, the power of thought, Genius, cannot be taught’ (p. 432).
3. Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History is an example of a nineteenth-century work that influenced Emerson’s own work on ‘great men’ or ‘genius,’ and especially Representative Men (Thomas Carlyle, Citation1993). Nonetheless, he distanced his account of both heroism (in his essay ‘Heroism’) and genius (in Representative Men) from Carlyle’s account and use of heroism. In the former, Plutarch, not Carlyle is the shining star in the literature of heroism. In the latter, while Emerson mimics Carlyle’s style, the introduction ‘Uses of Great Men’ distinguishes his own account of great or representative men from Carlyle’s notion of the hero, and warns against precisely the sort of hero-worship that Carlyle commends.
Emerson’s worry (which was not Carlyle’s) that we become ‘intellectual suicides’ in the face of genius, and his romantic tendency to exalt the low, ordinary and common, is reflected in his more democratic account of genius itself. So too, John Stuart Mill was drawn to Carlyle’s work on heroes, but qualified his enthusiasm in a letter thusly, ‘Hero worship, as Carlyle calls it, is doubtless a fine thing. But then it must be the worship not of a hero, but of heroes … one hero and sage is necessary to correct another’ (Thomas Carlyle, Citation1993, lxvii). Despite conceptions popularized by Bertrand Russell that the Carlylean ‘cult of the hero’ foreshadowed Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, Neitzsche could not have done more to distance the two accounts. He laments that some ‘scholarly oxen’ have accused him of following ‘the “hero worship” of that unconscious and involuntary counterfeiter, Carlyle, which I have repudiated so maliciously,’ and credits Carlyle with having ‘discovered’ the formulae of ‘romantic prostration before “genius” and “hero,” so foreign to the spirit of enlightenment’ (Thomas Carlyle, Citation1993, lxxvi). He no doubt found Emerson’s account, which weds romantic admiration with enlightenment social criticism, more palatable. For an excellent consideration of genius and its intimate connection to Emerson’s notion of democratic representation, see (Shklar, Citation1990).
4. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Citation1971, vol. 2, p. 27). For an extended consideration of the theme of imitation, innovation and exemplarity in Emerson and the Transcendentalist’s ‘bishop’ William Ellery Channing see Dumler-Winckler (Citation2017).
5. (Walls, Citation2003, pp. 62–63, p. 85) The term ‘scientist’ was not used to designate a particular kind of intellectual until William Whewell coined the term in 1833. Emerson often wrote about science in the more ancient and medieval sense of the term ‘science of the visible or the invisible world,’ rather than more narrowly as the natural or social sciences. In ‘Poetry and Imagination’ he declares that ‘Poetry is the gai science,’ and writes,
‘I count the genius of Swedenborg and Wordsworth as the agents of a reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to Nature—to the marrying of Nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and Nature had been suspected and pagan.’
I will use Emerson’s terms ‘men of science,’ and ‘natural philosopher’ throughout. The gendered implications are obvious and unfortunate. Likewise, the term genius has been most often reserved for white men. Cornel West famously exposes the entanglement of Emerson’s account of genius and race. For more on this theme see: (West, Citation1989, pp. 28–35; Fredrickson, Citation1987; Mitchell, Citation2005) Despite Emerson’s opposition to slavery and eventual activism on behalf of the abolitionist cause, he seems to have harbored racist views. West describes Emerson as a liberal or ‘mild racist’ adding that, ‘Emerson indeed is no garden-variety racist or ranting xenophobe, yet he is a racist in the American grain in that his notion of human personality is, in part, dependent on and derived from his view of the races’ (p. 28). This mild-racism, is a serious blot on his notion of genius. I think it is not, however, a fatal one. At its best, Emerson’s democratic account of genius, rooted in a theological anthropology of human equality before God, provides the resources to robustly denounce these racist views.
6. (Emerson, Citation2008) If York and Spaulding are right, Emerson’s tenth lecture of the Natural History of the Intellect lecture series is entitled ‘Genius.’ But this is a much shorter treatment of the term than that found in the early lecture. See note 1 above for more about Cavell’s treatment of genius, which while excellent is confined mainly to ‘Self-Reliance.’ West’s and Stout’s treatment of genius is broader in scope. See particularly Stout’s excellent exposition of Emerson’s essay ‘Experience’ and the final line (the inspiration for Stout’s title) ‘the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power’ (Stout, Citation2014). So too, David Bromwich rightly locates Emerson in a stream of thought about genius that flows through William Wordsworth and Charles Darwin, even if he does not provide an extended treatment of Emerson’s account (Bromwich, Citation1989, pp. 20–42).
7. The Latin term genius means ‘procreative divinity’ from generare ‘to beget.’
8. (Emerson, Citation2008, p. 70) According to York and Spaulding’s edition of Emerson’s 1871 Harvard lectures, Emerson writes, ‘Genius is not personal, it is human, the Apoethosis of Man. Socrates. Michel Angelo. Newton. Jesus. Pascal’ (p. 70).
9. In ‘American Scholar’ Emerson depicts ‘self-trust’ as a feature of both duty and virtue. In contrast to those who would pit duty against virtue, for Emerson, following a Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic strand of moral philosophy, there’s no dichotomy between the two.
10. (Cavell, Citation1991, p. 47, p. 55, p. 97; 2003, pp. 54–55, p. 93, p. 179). See these passages for other instances of Cavell’s exposition of this provocative passage, which raises interesting questions about whether Emerson’s perfectionist account of genius was meant to as Cavell puts the question, ‘take over, or mask, or say secularize, a religious responsibility.’ As Cavell notes, Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, claims this is indeed the role of perfectionism and Henry Sidgwick criticizes him for this view in ‘The Prophet of Culture’ (1991, p. 54). Both can be found in this version of the former (Matthew Arnold, Citation2006). In a similar vein, Harold Bloom speaks of ‘Self-Reliance’ as ‘the American religion [Emerson] founded,’ indeed, ‘our authentic religion, which is post-Protestant’ (Bloom, Citation2011, pp. 210–213, p. 217; 2003, p. 337, p. 339) and provides his own religious notion of genius in conversation with the Jewish notion of Kabbalah (Bloom, Citation2003, Preface, p.1). George Kateb resents the prospect that Emerson’s self-reliance may be religious, and concludes that it must not be (University, Citation2002, p. 81, 66). Mark Cladis compellingly confirms Kateb’s hunch that Emerson’s ‘radicalism is not in spite of his religion but because of it’ (Cladis, Citation2009, p. 51). A fuller exploration of this topic, will have to wait. For our purposes, I note my disagreement with Bloom’s view that ‘Emersonian genius, or the American sublime … is [emphatically] not a social doctrine, and intends no necessary good to friends and neighbors’ (2003, 340).
11. (Harvey, Citation2013, pp. 56–57) See Harvey’s wonderful analysis of the nature and extent of Emerson’s borrowing from Coleridge in Transatlantic Transcendentalism. See also Keane’s excellent book which touches on these themes (Keane, Citation2005, pp. 10–12, p. 83, pp. 189–190.) There seems to be scholarly consensus that Coleridge adopted the distinction between Reason and Understanding from Immanuel Kant, while adapting it significantly for his own philosophy. There is less consensus about whether Emerson straightforwardly adopted or also significantly adapted Coleridge’s version of the distinction for his own purposes. For Harvey’s discussion of the ways Emerson adapted Coleridge’s distinction see p.62.
The first term of each of the pairs listed above represents a spiritual power, in contrast with the second which represents a more mechanical or given stasis. According to this distinction, Harvey writes, ‘talent was a merely mechanical skill, defined as “the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others”. In contrast, genius was a “creative, and self-sufficing power” that echoed divine creative power’ (p. 56). For Coleridge this meant that ‘“To be a musician, an orator, a painter … presupposes genius”’ while ‘an excellent artizan or mechanic requires more than an average degree of talent’ (p. 57). Interestingly this distinction resembles Aristotle’s distinction between techne and phronesis and Thomas Aquinas’s between ars and prudentia. Harvey argues that because for Coleridge ‘The mechanical and the spiritual dimensions of artistic activity existed along a continuum … [his] distinctions fostered a kind of dual vision in which things could be both material and spiritual at the same time’ (p. 57).
12. (Emerson, Citation2006, vols. 12, 57). This citation, like the one in the first line of this article, is from the highly-redacted version of The Natural History of the Intellect. It may not be a direct quote from the lectures. Nonetheless, again, it reflects his treatment of this theme in other texts.
13. (Stout, Citation2014) Again, see Stout’s excellent essay, the title of which borrows from this line.
14. (Updike, Citation2012, p. 177) Updike, at least, seems to agree when he writes, ‘Totalitarian rule with its atrocities offers a warped mirror, in which we can recognize, distorted, Emerson’s favorite concepts of genius, and inspiration, and whim; the totalitarian leader is a study in self-reliance gone amok.’
15. (West, Citation1989, pp. 28–35) See West’s illuminating treatment of the connections between genius and race in Emerson’s account, particularly if one attends to English Traits in addition to the typical focus on ‘Self-Reliance’ and Representative Men. Richardson argues that Emerson’s later ‘forceful confrontational politics of emancipation have been underestimated since his death for three reasons.’ See (Richardson, Citation1996, pp. 497–498) Nonetheless, despite Emerson’s opposition to slavery and eventual activism on behalf of the abolitionist cause, West demonstrates that, ‘Emerson indeed is no garden-variety racist or ranting xenophobe, yet he is a racist in the American grain in that his notion of human personality is, in part, dependent on and derived from his view of the races’ (p. 28). Also see note 5 herein.
16. (Hook, Citation2008) Hook extends this exaltation of humanist over scientific genius well into the twentieth century.
17. (Shklar, Citation1990) Again, see Shklar’s, West’s and Stout’s excellent treatment of the relation between genius and democracy.