![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman’s poetry challenges how rhetorical scholars are accustomed to studying democracy. Adopting an ontology similar to, and a vocabulary inspired by, the Bhagavad Gita, Whitman roots democracy squarely in concerns of soteriology, metaphysics, spiritual practice, and the care of the self. By recovering what I call Whitman’s “kosmic rhetoric,” my goal in this essay is to inspire rhetorical scholars to discuss, debate, and reconsider several of our most deeply held assumptions about democratic politics, including anti-foundationalism and the mechanics of dissent.
Acknowledgements
Jeremy David Engels is the Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute, and Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences, at Penn State University. He would like to thank Nathan Stormer and Brad Vivian for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. In addition, he would like to thank Lisa Flores for serving as proxy editor for this piece, and the two anonymous reviewers for the suggestions and challenges they posed during the review process.
Notes
* The editor would like to thank Lisa Flores for carrying out the editorial work on this essay due to a conflict of interest.
1. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass (1891–92), in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 213. From this point forward, all references to Whitman’s published works will refer to this collection.
2. These frames are not mutually exclusive. Anti-foundationalists value dissent, and most dissent-oriented scholars in rhetoric reject ultimate foundations. Nor are these frames exhaustive – there are of course myriad ways to study democracy, including, in rhetorical studies, the psychoanalytic reading of politics as perversion or melancholic (here I take the work of Joshua Gunn, Christian Lundberg, and Barbara Biesecker as both exemplary and emblematic), and the focus on public reason in the traditions of Rawls and Habermas. There is a good case can be made, I believe, that the two frames I detail here are the most common. For a helpful discussion of many possible approaches to democracy, see David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
3. Though Dewey has become famous for his anti-foundationalism – which is expounded memorably in Chapter 3 of Part 1 of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and in a number of Rorty’s interviews collected in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) – it was, of course, Charles Sanders Pierce’s “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877): 1–15, that laid down the basic anti-foundational principle that uncertainty is an existential, and not merely a cognitive, condition. For examples of the Deweyian anti-foundationalist frame in rhetorical studies, see Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 189–211; Robert Asen, “Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 4 (2017): 329–49; William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Robert Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007); Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010); Scott R. Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds., Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
4. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” (1939), in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Anne Boydston (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), Vol. 14, 227.
5. Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” 191.
6. Robert L. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 49, 46. For examples of the democracy as dissent framework, see Kendall R. Phillips, “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere,” Communication Monographs 63, no. 3 (1996): 231–48; Kendall R. Phillips, “The Event of Dissension: Reconsidering the Possibilities of Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 60–71; Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). Scholars writing in this tradition are often inspired not by John Dewey but instead by Jacques Ranciere, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Michel Foucault. A significant theoretical touchstone in the democracy as dissent framework is Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31–45.
7. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111.
8. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 184.
9. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 949. In his poem “Starting from Paumanok,” Whitman observes similarly,
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion, Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur; (Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion, Nor land nor man or woman without religion.). (180)
10. Jeremy Engels, “Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 131–54.
11. On Dewey’s rhetoric of “democratic faith,” see Jeremy Engels, “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War,” in Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, ed. Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 87–105.
12. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 937.
13. By, as it were, taking religion on the road and seeing what difference it really makes to individuals living their lives. As Whitman writes in “Song of the Open Road,” “Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,/They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents” (301).
14. For a discussion of Tocqueville’s understanding of the relationship between Christianity and democracy, see Hugh Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
15. Whitman tended to equate religion with metaphysics, and his own metaphysics followed the Gita closely.
The culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics, including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the mind of man has brought up here – and always will. Here, at least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. (Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 984–85)
For a careful comparison of Whitman’s metaphysics with the Bhagavad Gita, see V. K. Chari, Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964). William James believed that Advaita Vedanta was one of the chief sources of Whitman’s visionary poetry. Whitman, he contended, captured and expressed the “cosmic emotion” and “ontological wonder” characteristic of the Bhagavad Gita. The twentieth-century literary critic Malcolm Cowley observed that “most of Whitman’s doctrines, though by no means all of them, belong to the mainstream of Indian philosophy,” and contemporary author Philip Goldberg describes Whitman as “the bhakti bard.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 256; Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction,” in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1986), xii; Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation – How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 41. Whitman indeed mentioned the Bhagavad Gita’s Arjuna and Krishna as precursors to his own verses, which were inspired by “the far-darting beams of the spirit” from India whose soul “soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas” (Whitman, “Passage to India,” 531, 539).
16. The Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 240 (3.14).
17. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 943.
18. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 989.
19. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 210.
20. On mid-nineteenth century understandings of rhetoric, see Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: W. Morrow, 1990); Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Dorothy C. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); and Keith, Democracy as Discussion.
21. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 9. Whitman repeats this passage, with slight variation, in his later poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 475.
22. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 78.
23. Michel Foucault made “the art of living” and “the care of the self” the focus of his final lectures at the Collège de France – for a summary statement of his project that also captures many of my own motivations for focusing on the art of living, see Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2017), 25–45. Though in these lectures Foucault positions rhetoric as an art of living (30), he will suggest in later lectures that rhetoric is fundamentally opposed to the care of the self and parrhesia – see Jeremy David Engels, The Art of Gratitude (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 39–40.
24. Pierre Hadot gestures toward this understanding of rhetoric in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 91–92. See also Davidson, “Introduction,” in Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 21.
25. Foucault observes that in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, rhetoric “teaches [how] to be a public man” – Subjectivity and Truth, 30. Susan Jarrett is right to critique Foucault for reading women out of his history of the care of the self – see Susan C. Jarratt, “Untimely Historiography? Foucault’s ‘Greco-Latin’ Trip,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 220–33.
26. Rhetoric’s demand that we change who we are is clear in Plato’s Phaedrus – see Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
27. When speaking of “spirituality” here, I follow Foucault, who distinguishes philosophy from spirituality in the following terms:
We will call “philosophy” the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth. If we call this “philosophy,” then I think we could call “spirituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call “spirituality” then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth.
He continues,
Spirituality postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right. Spirituality postulates that the subject as such does not have right of access to the truth and is not capable of having access to the truth. It postulates that the truth is not given to the subject by a simple act of knowledge (connaissance), which would be founded and justified simply by the fact that he is the subject and because he possesses this or that structure of subjectivity. It postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play. For as he is, the subject is not capable of truth … It follows that from this point of view there can be no truth without a conversion or a transformation of the subject.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gross, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 15.
28. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 952.
29. Whitman’s vision of democracy may seem exotic today, but his rhetoric warrants dedicated attention due to his titanic influence on America’s democratic vistas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – in many ways, the formative period of “modern” democracy. Late nineteenth-century “religious liberals” took Whitman’s words as gospel. Many pictured him in the mold of an Indian guru and styled themselves his “disciples.” William James reported “that many person’s to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion” (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 83). On “religious liberalism” and its profound effect on American culture, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005); on the Whitman cults, see Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Schmidt, Restless Souls, 101–41.
30. Here, see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
31. Emerson made this remark to his friend Frank Sanborn after first reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, as recounted in Frank E. Sanborn, “Reminiscent of Whitman,” The Conservator, May 1897, 38. Note that Romain Rolland views Whitman (along with Emerson and Thoreau) as paving the way for the yogis to come to the United States – see Prophets of the New India, trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (London: Cassell, 1930).
32. Parul Sehgal, “In ‘Godsong,’ a New Poem that’s 2,000 Years Old,” New York Times, March 20 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/books/godsong-bhagavad-gita-amit-majmudar-review.html.
33. For the translation of “yoga” as “marriage” (or in Latin conjugium), see A. W. Schlegel, Bhagavad-Gita, id est THESPESION MELOS sive Almi Chrishnae et Arjunae Colloquium de rebus divinis, bharateae episodium. Textum recensuit, Adnotationes criticas et interpretationem Latinam adiecit (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1823). On Schlegel’s popular translation of the Gita, see Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 157–201, specifically see 191–95 for Schlegel’s translation of the word “yoga.”
34. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Olivelle, 29–30 (2.4.12). This analogy is reiterated more dramatically in The Chandogya Upanishad, 154–55 (6.13.1–3).
35. The Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1998), 66–67 (6.29–31). This is the preferred translation of many Sanskrit scholars; it does not, however, include the Sanskrit – for the Sanskrit text, and a helpful analysis of both vocabulary and grammar, I rely on The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Winthrop Sargeant, ed. Christopher Key Chapple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), and Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhagavad Gita: Home Study Course, 9 vols. (Chennai: Arsha Vidya Research and Publication Trust, 2011).
36. Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 13.
37. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 314–15.
38. Burke, “Definition of Man,” 9–10.
39. Burke, “Definition of Man,” 16–18.
40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in Emerson: Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 205; Emerson, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (1860), 966. From this point forward, all references to Emerson’s published works will refer to this collection.
41. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 23.
42. “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process” (Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Experience [1974; New York: Quill, 1999], 83).
43. Emerson, “Compensation,” in Essays: First Series (1841), 290.
44. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Essays: First Series (1841), 385–6.
45. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 385–86.
46. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 989.
47. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 989.
48. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 965.
49. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 985.
50. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 989, emphasis added.
51. For a critique of liberalism’s vision of a pre-political, pre-social self that can be isolated from the world, see Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
52. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300.
53. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1985), 116, emphasis added.
54. Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Essays: Second Series (1844), 607.
55. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 246.
56. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 192.
57. Whitman, “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances,” 275.
58. From the perspective of Advaita Vedanta, this is the flaw of German Idealism, which also exercised a profound influence on the Transcendentalists: it seeks oneness through dialectical transcendence, but dialectic, as a linguistic practice, can ever escape division. The distinction between German Idealism’s dialectic and Advaita Vedanta’s intuition is developed in Chari, Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism.
59. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 398.
60. Working from within the discourse of the care of the self, the American Transcendentalists located the seeds of social and political change in individual self-transformation. Margaret Fuller explained that the chief goal of these poet warriors was “to quicken the soul, that they may work from within outwards.” From within outwards: the Transcendentalists believed that this was the path to social justice because no meaningful political and social change was possible without individual change. “Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him,” Emerson mused (Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller [Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1983–84], Vol. 2, 108; Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 596). There was a profound split between the Transcendentalists over how best to reform the world, and whether to focus on individual spiritual change or social action seeking more systemic change – see Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
61. Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” in Essays: First Series (1841), 316.
62. Whitman, “A Song for Occupations,” 360.
63. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 960.
64. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 15, 18.
65. On the battles over the meaning of “democracy” during the nineteenth century, see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Dana D. Nelson, Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).
66. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 989, emphasis added.
67. Foucault observes that much of nineteenth-century philosophy was interested in questions of the care of the self.
The entire history of nineteenth-century philosophy can, I think, be thought of as a kind of pressure to try to rethink the structures of spiritualty within a philosophy that, since Cartesianism, or at any rate since seventeenth-century philosophy, tried to get free from these self-same structures. Hence the hostility, and what’s more the profound hostility, of all the “classical” type of philosophers – all those who invoke the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, etcetera – towards the philosophy of the nineteenth century that poses, at least implicitly, the very old question of spirituality and which, without saying so, rediscovers the care of the self. (Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 28, and note that he reiterates this point on p. 251)
68. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15.
69. Swami Prabhavananda, The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta (Los Angeles: Vedanta Society, 1992), 22.
70. Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
71. To be thrown into the world is to learn to measure our words, our thoughts, and even our self-worth, against doxa, which is made rhetorically productive, in part, through god terms. Foucault calls this process “veridiction” – see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 27–50; Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, 11–13, 221, 237–39.
72. On salvation and the care of the self, see Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 182–84.
73. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 81–109.
74. Soteriology is often bound up with metaphysical concerns about the true nature of being and goodness, especially in Indian philosophy. As Mircea Eliade observes, “In India metaphysical knowledge always has a soteriological purpose” (Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009], 13). David Gordon White observes similarly that,
as is the case with every major Indian philosophical school and religious system, these fields of inquiry – ontology (the nature of being), epistemology (what it means to know), psychology (the workings of the mind), cosmology (the shape of the universe), and soteriology (being saved) – are intertwined. (David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014], 18–19)
75. Whitman, “A Song for Occupations,” 360, 362.
76. I could cite a number of authors who make this point; it was a bedrock belief of late nineteenth-century existentialism and pragmatism, of Nietzsche, James, and Hocking, and it was affirmed by the writers I discuss in this essay, Emerson and Whitman. For two contemporary affirmations of the philosophical and rhetorical importance of orientation, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life.
77. William James, “What Makes A Life Significant,” in William James, Writings 1878–1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1992), 878.
78. William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), xii. For an attempt to recover Hocking and place him at the heart of American Pragmatism, see John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).
79. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 33.
80. To take just one example, John Rawls argues that pluralistic societies must privilege the right over the good, because arguments about the good life inevitability lead to disagreement, disagreement to conflict, and conflict to violence. Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness attempts to ensure that citizens will deliberate on neutral ground by limiting the types of arguments citizens can make in public. To neutralize conflict, Rawls proposes disallowing people’s most deeply held beliefs from democratic deliberation if those ideas cannot be affirmed equally by all citizens – see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 137; John Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (1988): 251–76.
81. Here, see Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
82. Charles Taylor traces the changing conceptions of the sources of the good during the nineteenth century in A Secular Age, 299–321.
83. Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 25–27; Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 212. As Burke notes, god terms, which organize our vision of the good, are central to governance (The Rhetoric of Religion, 91, 180).
84. Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 25, 26.
85. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987), 133–50.
86. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, 214.
87. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2009), 12–13, 32–33, 48–49.
88. On the contemporary proliferation of walls, see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
89. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, 15, 18.
90. On the connection between Plato’s understanding of the good and the cosmic order of the world, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 93–94.
91. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 50.
92. Brague, The Wisdom of the World, 19.
93. Brague, The Wisdom of the World, 19.
94. Brague, The Wisdom of the World, 33.
95. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: A General Survey of the Physical Phenomena of the Universe (London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1845), Vol. 1, 5, 6.
96. Here, see Griffith Dudding, “The Function of Whitman’s Imagery in ‘Song of Myself,’ 1855,” Walt Whitman Review 13 (1967): 3–11; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995).
97. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, 23.
98. Bhakti yoga is the focus of book 12 of the Bhagavad Gita. We must be careful here to distinguish the Bhagavad Gita’s “intellectual bhakti,” which stresses mental concentration, yoga, and meditation, from later Indian traditions of “emotional bhakti” characteristic of the bhakti poets, who, starting with the Tamil alvars and nayanmars several centuries after the Gita’s composition, celebrated the agony and ecstasy of a life totally abandoned to love of Vishnu and his many avatars, including Krishna. Friedhelm Hardy makes the useful distinction between “intellectual bhakti” and “emotional bhakti” in Viraha Bhakti: The Early History of Krishna Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). On the development of Vaishnavism and the emotional bhakti traditions in South India, see June McDaniel, The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
99. Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 50–78.
100. For summary statements of New Thought, see Henry Wood, The New Thought Simplified: How to Gain Harmony and Health (Boston: Lee &Shepard, 1903).
101. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 391–92.
102. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 386.
103. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 390. On the paradoxes and challenges of Emerson’s vision of “the impersonal,” see Sharon Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. To me, there are strong echoes of Emerson’s “impersonal” in what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the incorporeal” – see The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
104. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 244–45.
105. Whitman imagines a truly universal community unbounded by any borders, and, while this vision is beautiful, philosophers argue that it is difficult to sustain any such rhetoric of universality, which is perpetually breaking down into more restrictive rhetorics that claim that we are divine but they are not. When such supercharged rhetoric has been yoked to claims about family or blood it has led to the worst types of violence in human history. So we must be on guard. Here, I have learned so much from the ongoing debate in French philosophy between Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida about the viability of community as a democratic ethic – for a starting point, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conner, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Hollander, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2006). For an insightful meditation on the rhetoric of solidarity, see Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).
106. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 31, 79, 87.
107. Whitman, “The Sleepers,” 549.
108. Danielle S. Allen explores the stakes of the metaphors we use to represent the demos – arguing emphatically for a metaphor of “wholeness” over the more common metaphor of “oneness” – in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13–20.
109. Here, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003); Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
110. Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 480.
111. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 44.
112. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 83.
113. I describe the history of the debt of gratitude in Engels, The Art of Gratitude.
114. Robert A. Emmons, Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 29.
115. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, eds., The Psychology of Gratitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), viii.
116. Engels, The Art of Gratitude.
117. See Engels, The Art of Gratitude. The emotions most closely associated with mystical traditions, and how these emotions are handled rhetorically, are also the topic of future research I would like to undertake in the coming years.
118. Heidegger emphasizes this point in his reading of Aristotle: see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 126; Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 80–83.
119. Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
120. Generally following Spinoza’s discussion of the “affections” in his Ethics. Here, see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 48–51, 122–30; Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), esp. 235–54. I have found the following works by rhetorical scholars on “affect” to be especially helpful: Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25; Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Brian L. Ott, Hamilton Bean, and Kellie Marin, “On the Aesthetic Production of Atmospheres: The Rhetorical Workings of Biopower at The CELL,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (2016): 346–62; Anne Teresa Demo, “Hacking Agency: Apps, Autism, and Neurodiversity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 277–300.
121. Here, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
122. Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” 362.
123. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 110.
124. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 207.
125. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 188.
126. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Stoler Miller, 35 (2.39).
127. Here, see Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment – and Your Life (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2012); Thich Nhat Hanh, The Mindfulness Survival Kit: Five Essential Practices (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2014); Matthieu Ricard, The Art of Meditation (London: Atlantic Books, 2010); on the deep connection between contemporary yoga practice and mindfulness, see Rebecca Pacheco, Do Your Om Thing: Bending Yoga Tradition to Fit Your Modern Life (New York: Harper Wave, 2016).
128. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra, ed. Peter Levitt (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988), 3–4.
129. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), 93; the 1891–92 edition makes slight amendments to this passage (“A Song for Occupations,” 358).
130. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 211. For one of the clearest and most provocative accounts of Whitman’s vision of democracy as an art of mobilizing for a common good, see John Marsh, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), esp. 179–224.
131. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 203.
132. Schmidt, Restless Souls, 153.
133. Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga (London: Continuum, 2008).
134. See Rolland, Prophets of the New India; David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
135. V. K. Chari, “Whitman in India,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 307.
136. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes, 1905), 8, 68.
137. The Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Stoler Miller, 98 (11.8). Whitman’s visionary 1856 poem “Salut au Monde!” (originally called “Poem of Salutation”) reads, to me, like Whitman’s own divine eye vision of the kosmos. Comparing with Book 11 of the Gita would be an interesting project.
138. “Democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself” (Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 148). The fact that democracy draws people together into associations, or “public bodies,” is what has long frightened demophobes, including the founders of the United States – see Jeremy Engels, “The Trouble with ‘Public Bodies’: On the Anti-democratic Rhetoric of The Federalist,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 3 (2015): 505–38.
139. Allen, Talking to Strangers.
140. Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” 193; Asen, “Neoliberalism, The Public Sphere, and a Public Good,” 335–36.
141. Here, see Engels, “The Trouble with ‘Public Bodies.’”
142. As Catherine Palczewski demonstrates, many rhetorical scholars unconsciously conceptualize argument as a type of war. By analyzing the metaphors often used to describe arguments, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that a conceptualization of “argument-is-war” is ingrained in Western culture, noting that arguers believe they have “something to win and something to lose, territory to establish and territory to defend.” Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Introduction” to a special issue “Argumentation and Feminisms,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (Spring 1996): 164–66; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 62; for a helpful discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and violence, see Megan Foley, “Peitho and Bia: The Force of Language,” Symploke 20, nos. 1–2 (2012): 173–81.
143. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41.
144. For a brilliant and eye-opening conversation about the “rhetoric of evil,” see the special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (2003). For a critique of the rhetoric of evil written from the perspective of Deweyian anti-foundationalism, see Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
145. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 47–48.
146. Robert L. Ivie, “Evil Enemy versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 25, no. 3 (2003): 181–200. Ivie follows Chantal Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism” on this point. “What is at stake” in explorations of political identify formation, Mouffe argues, “is devising ways in which antagonism can be transformed into agonism,” thereby refiguring the relationships between us and them and promoting peace by transforming the antagonisms of enemyship into the agonisms of rhetoric. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 55–56. On rhetoric and agonism, see Debra Hawhee, “Agonism and Aretê,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 3 (2002): 185–207.
147. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” 54.
148. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” 56.
149. Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” 180. According to William James, Whitman recognizes no evil, and “he is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it” (James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 84).
150. Norman Fischer, Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002), 3.
151. Peter Simonson, “A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman’s ‘Poem of Many in One,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, no. 3 (2003): 353–75.
152. Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 296.
153. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 949.
154. Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 479.
155. Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 473. Peter Simonson discusses the centrality of metaphor to Whitman’s rhetoric in “A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy.”
156. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 205.
157. For a reconsideration of the victimage ritual as central to American politics, see Jeremy Engels, “The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 303–25.
158. See Jeremy Engels, The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).
159. On neoliberalism’s attack on human life, see Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Perez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). In her book, Somers uses the term “fundamentalist capitalism” rather than “neoliberalism.”
160. Jeremy Engels, “Friend or Foe?: Naming the Enemy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (2009): 37–64.
161. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2015); Paul Elliot Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 229–50.