The Emersonian Myth of Knowledge in the New World

From his position as acknowledged sage of the northern states, Emerson articulated a philosophy that offered a good deal of support, direct and hortatory as well as subtle and implicit, for the destruction of knowledge. The statements and insights about knowledge that are sprinkled liberally throughout his works comprise a new American knowledge-myth; they not only suggest to his countrymen and -women procedures for destroying certain kinds of knowledge and repudiating certain ways of knowing, but they legitimize the whole endeavor as well, sanctioning it in nearly sacred terms. His thought is not really consistent on the subjects of knowledge and perception, however (actually it is consistent on only a relatively few subjects), so his knowledge myths are multiple. Overall he seems paradoxical—a Platonist with a passion for the particular, an absolutist with a relativistic imagination; nonetheless he proposes some ideas with intriguing potential for writers with deeper and more self-aware minds.

Whatever the tendency of his thought in other areas, epistemologically Emerson is anticonservative. First of all, nationalistically his was the strongest voice, providing the climax of a radical movement for a nonimitative national literature.* "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," he insists, and encourages a new-world breakaway. But nationalism is only one aspect of his conception that knowledge needs to be up-to-date, continually newly created: "Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this."**In "The American Scholar" he avows respect for the knowledge embodied in the books of past ages, and throughout his essays he draws freely and frequently on the wisdom of the past—on Plato and Pythagoras, Shakespeare and Swedenborg—but the dominant message of his myth of new knowledge is its newness.

In many of his formulations this rage for newness is part of an even more radical motif: an unwillingness to accept any sort of cultural mediation between the individual knower and the thing known. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" (7) he asks in Nature, and in "The Poet" asserts that "every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison" (463) from which we need liberating. Language too is a prison: "The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.... The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry" (457). Thus Emerson, like a number of other writers of his day, claimed a special appreciation for vividly up-to-the-minute language:

The language of the street is always strong. What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed.

Even rationality itself could be a prison, Emerson sometimes asserted. He maintains in "The Over-Soul" that the highest and deepest questions are not even posed by the understanding (393), and in "The Poet" he explains how the best use of the intellect is in the abandonment of its controlled rationality:

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him.... The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind'; not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life. (459)

Striving for disengagement from tradition and from the ideas, language, and rationality that culture interposed, the knower, according to Emerson's new-world myth, needed to establish personal experience as the basis of knowing. Only through immersion in the immediacy, the multifariousness, the spontaneity of firsthand experience could a person hope to know the world in its essential otherness. Along this line of thought, Emerson seems to have felt that our traditional conceptually oriented perception was unable to get beyond conventions and stereotypes and into new insights; the flux of experiences, however, could evade or overwhelm our categories and surprise us with new revelation. "I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think," he says. "I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance" (491–492). In that famous exhortation "The American Scholar," using himself as the implied model knower, he advocates the plunge into multifarious otherness in these terms:

The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. (60)

I expect that the implicit metaphor of western expansion, of...