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Abstract
This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called ‘Emersonian moral perfectionism.’ It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson’s essay ‘Experience,’ in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility and responsibility into our relation to our words. But the language we speak and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and in the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specifically political senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise and acknowledgment that should meet them. The article explores ways of thinking through Emerson’s relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today.
Notes
1. See CitationEmerson, 1983b, p. 471.
2. Online at: https://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-23/books/bk-38605_1_seamus-heaney. Accessed on 19 December 2016. In Dante’s original, the first canto of the Inferno runs:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
3. Emerson, Citation1983b, p. 473.
4. Emerson, Citation1983b, p. 483.
5. Emerson, Citation1983b, p. 487.
6. ‘With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense’ (Thoreau, Citation1983, p. 180).
7. ‘Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens’ (‘Circles’, 1841, in Emerson, Citation1983d, p. 403).
8. See photographs of Agnes Martin’s work at: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Agnes+Martin+Images&view=detailv2&qpvt=Agnes+Martin+Images&id=AB61F23C4A9F30F51995793C30ED4744FF723612&selectedIndex=17&ccid=ECbBUt2 M&simid=607987746277950576&thid=OIP.M1026c152dd8c987b7233537ecf549eb8o0&ajaxhist=0. Accessed 19 December 2016.
9. With digitization, this reaches toward new levels of idealization, free, so it seems, from the accidents of particular materializations.
10. In the chapter of Walden called ‘The Beanfield,’ Thoreau writes: ‘As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nature who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day’ (Thoreau, Citation1983, p. 204). The line helps to dispel any sense of the nature to which Thoreau has been thought to withdraw as idyllic. It is marked by human kind. For a more sinister, more contemporary evocation of a similar thought, consider Paul Celan’s poem ‘Todtnauberg,’ which records a walk he took with Heidegger where the path they follow is implied to be covering over the killing-fields (see Standish, Citation2017).
11. ‘Montaigne, or, the Skeptic’ is one of seven lectures in Emerson’s Representative Men (Emerson, Citation1983e).
12. ‘Tuberculosis’ is the name for a disease of the lungs whose symptoms are a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss, but this name was not used until the twentieth century. Prior to that time the condition was referred to as ‘consumption’ (or ‘phthisis’ from the Greek), and this continued in common usage.
13. Both papers appear in revised form in Cavell (Citation2005).
14. For further discussion, see Standish (Citation2016) and Cavell and Standish (Citation2012) (especially pp. 8–10 and nn. 12–16).
15. The Band Wagon opens with an auction of memorabilia—the top-hat, gloves, and cane—belonging to the faded song-and-dance man played by Astaire, and then, through the huddle of reporters and red carpet that await Ava Gardner, as well as the mechanized flattery of the machines in the arcade, proceeds gently to satirize the exaggerated forms of praise, and the insignia of success, that American culture has done so much to promote.
16. Hannah Arendt is also criticized, especially for her ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (Arendt, Citation1959).
17. See also Gregg Crane’s astute and thought-provoking discussion in ‘Ellison’s Constitutional Faith’ (Crane, Citation2005).
18. See Branka Arsić’s excellent book On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Citation2010).