The system is not absent (Santayana), nor is it anchored in idealism in conjunction with the Bible, capitalism, and possessive individualism (Coleridge, Gilmore, Porter, and Newfield). It is the plastic system that incorporates ambiguity, noted by Hedge, Cavell, and Malabou, that allows Emerson to continue the cycle consisting of a series of creative misinterpretations. After the publication of Nature, and especially in the late 1830s and 1840s, Emerson gradually transformed his thought through dialogue and reading from transcendentalism, which was based on nature, to antifoundationalism,
which lacked any foundation but was open to the possibility of a more ideal future, albeit in a plastic way.
The best-known example of an essay by Emerson that succinctly expresses the character of this continuous, unfinished process is “Circles” (1841). At the beginning of the essay, Emerson declares: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end” (CW II 179). Emphasizing images of difference and repetition without end or purpose, the essay moves on to assert the following:
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.” (CW II 180; emphasis added)
The circle that marks “the life of man” starts out invisibly small and gradually expands endlessly and infinitely into larger, new circles, and the extent to which these processes proceed is taken to be determined by “the force or truth of the individual soul.” The genealogy from Kant to Coleridge through Hedge to Emerson does not simply paraphrase the texts of the predecessors, nor does it interpret them arbitrarily. Instead, it is a process of creative, plastic reading that continues to produce an openness to “the new force of the individual soul”; in other words, it is the trajectory of the ever-evolving circle.
Following the trend in recent Emerson studies that has shifted the focus of reading from rigidity to flexibility, this study foregrounds the “plasticity” of Emerson's self-formation, which is difficult to dismiss as merely flexible, both receives and gives form, and is subject to constant transformation, thereby establishing a provisional identity
each time through the “poetics of distance” that continues to regulate relations and distances with the surroundings.
In what follows, Chapter 1 discusses the essay Nature. As many critics of this essay have emphasized, Emerson's adherence to “the eye of the reason,” which has been linked to idealism and reason, and his approach to US expansionism are evident in the essay. However, the sense of passivity, which belongs to the second step in Newfield’s and Cavell’s scheme, has also already been presented as an important one in the context of “the animal eye.” Through Timothy Morton’s concept of the “poetics of ambience”
and Goethe’s account of morphology, this chapter finally considers how, in the process of passively waiting for and enduring the call from “genius,” “the animal eye” and “the plastic power of the human eye” that are linked to it play an essential role, contrary to the dominant reading of Nature.
The next two chapters mainly explore the relationship between the self and time.
Chapter 2 deals with Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance.” This chapter reads the essay alongside “Quotation and Originality,” an essay published posthumously in his later years, from the perspective of how creatively Emerson reread the strong, imperialistic self-image involved in the third step described by Newfield. Based on the latest biographical research, this chapter traces the plasticity of Emerson’s thinking on originality and reconsiders the path Emerson took in his later years, when he found originality in “the power of coordination,” by linking it to the famous metaphor of “the rose” and the “zigzag line” in “Self-Reliance.”
Chapter 3 reads “Experience” in depth. Contrary to Chapter 2, this chapter traces Emerson’s relationship with his son Waldo, who died at an early age, and reconsiders the essay as a process of becoming the child. “Experience” is also the essay that models the connection between the self and the outside world in the most abstract way.
Highlighting the scientific and biological metaphors of the “lenses” and the “embryo”
as showing cognitive change through the turn, this chapter aims to capture Emerson’s strategy of transforming the grief caused by his son’s death into “practical power” by relating the power to the scientific debates on epigenesis in his time.
The second half of the dissertation examines the relationship between the self and space. Chapter 4 consists of three sections, with each mainly centered on the essays
“Friendship,” “Love,” and Emerson’s theory of friendship in comparison to those of his contemporaries, such as Poe, Fuller, and Thoreau. In the first section of this chapter, Emerson’s essays on friendship are compared to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840).
The eyes of the narrator in Poe’s fiction metamorphose from the “glance” to “gaze.” In contrast, Emerson’s “Friendship” and “Love” are characterized by the aesthetics of glance. This aesthetics is connected to the significance of the dialogue and a poetics of distance in Emerson in the next section. The metaphor of the friend as a “beautiful enemy” as a response to Fuller’s reprimand and the trope of the “nettle” compared with the “echo” are discussed as symbols of Emerson’s poetics of distance. The last section reviews the plastic shift to a metaphor of a renewed appreciation of the “echo” in the eulogy addressed to Thoreau after Emerson’s interaction with him.
Chapter 5 highlights the relatively minor lecture “Home” and the metaphors of space in Emerson’s various writings. It discusses the rise of individualism in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century in parallel with the changes in the structure of the house at that time, and then traces Emerson’s tropes used to account for the relationship between the servant and domestic matters in the intimate sphere of the home. In contrast to “the manifest domesticity” proposed by Amy Caplan, who discusses the Beecher sisters, this chapter argues for Emerson’s awareness of the ambiguous space of the home in relation to the encounter with Fuller and her works. In
the end, this chapter shows that Emerson’s style of acknowledging the interchangeability of the “street” and “home” was inspired by his dialogue with Fuller in “the parlor” as a place to speak with others in contrast to “the study” that isolates the self from the outside world.
The Conclusion covers the “The American Scholar.” By comparing Emerson’s rhetoric of affirming the United States as “a nation of men” with the concept of
“Emerson’s moral perfectionism” developed by Cavell and others, this concluding chapter reconsiders whether Emerson’s ideas on democracy can really be thought of as unrelated to the “structure of feeling” toward “democratic authority” that Newfield criticizes. Inspired by Branka Arsić’s emphasis on “the eccentric” and the discussion of the intimate public sphere advanced by Lauren Berlant, this dissertation offers a tentative conclusion and a direction for future research in the possibility of a more inclusive, plastic utopia.
Detailed argument of each chapter will elucidate how the diverse relationships between self and others in Emerson’s works are closely intertwined with the concept of
“plasticity.” Ultimately, this doctoral dissertation aims to shed new light on Emerson’s readings of major essays on the plastic relationships constructed by self and “others”
(including one’s friends, family members, home, society, nature, and the state) on various levels in a non-linear, meandering argument that can be likened to the “zigzag line of a hundred tacks” in “Self-Reliance.” In other words, a new circle is drawn.
Chapter 1
“The Plastic Power of the Human Eye”:
“The Animal Eye” and a Poetics of Ambience in Nature
In “Speech on Affairs in Kansas” (1856), Emerson asserts that “Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant. . . . Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto of rose and lavender, —I call it bilge-water” (W XI 259). Though he considers “Manifest Destiny” to be “bilge-water,” when a ship is deemed as an analogy of the Emersonian self, “bilge-water” cannot always be completely ignored. In fact, many scholars have focused on what Jenine Abboushi Dallal calls “the intersection between U.S. expansionism and Emersonian individualism” (49).
In The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), West acutely points out: “[Emerson’s] theodicy converges with, though it is in no way identical with, what Richard Slotkin has recently analyzed as the ideological content of the myth of the frontier” (20). He digests the function of “the myth of frontier” as follows: “[n]ot only does this myth —the oldest and most central in American history
—justify opposition to the Old World aristocracy of Europe and subjugation of the New World “savages” of America, i.e., Indians, Negroes, and to some extent white women;
it also rationalizes the distinctive pattern of U. S. capitalist development” (20).1 West
1 West mainly consults Slotkin’s argument in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1986). For further details of the origin of the myth, see also Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), especially Chapter I.
argues that “Emerson’s ideas of power fits well with Slotikin’s analysis of the myth of the frontier” (20) and that “he [Emerson] deepened his mysticism, increased his faith in the nature of things, and adjusted himself (though never fully) to the expanding world dominance of the ‘imperial Saxon race’” (35). He concludes Emerson’s stance as an
“intricate interplay of rhetorically supporting American expansionism yet morally contesting its consequences for human victims” (39).
For Sacvan Bercovitch, this abstractness of Emerson’s words is deeply related to his “radical appropriation of individuality” from 1836 to 1841. In Rites of Assent (1993), Bercovitch claims that Emerson’s appropriation expresses the antistructures of the process synonymous with cultural expansion and consolidation; which are made by the Jacksonian ideologues “from the manifest destinarian John O’Sullivan to the Locofoco Robert Rantoul, apologist for minimal government” (346). Bercovitch also believes that this form of radical imagining called dissent “turns all the power of hope, mind, and imagination unleashed by free-enterprise capitalism in an apparently open, empty, and endlessly malleable New World against the tendency toward reaggregation” (346).
Emerson’s aesthetic dissent, says Bercovitch, emphasizes the element of “negation and transition, its resistance on principle to institutional controls, its open-ended, self-enclosed tropism for reform and change” (346). Dallal acknowledges the subversive potential in this open-endedness, borrowing Bercovitch’s view of Emerson’s deleted description that the character of an ideal “must not be actualized,” at the same time that Dallal criticizes Emerson’s “disembodied, tautological representations of history”
which enable “the internalization of conflict” (56-57).
These aspects of Emerson’s discourses between expansionism and individualism are notably emblematized by his metaphors of “eye,” mainly in Nature. Whether they
attack or praise Emerson’s stance, most critics have concentrated upon the “eye of the reason” and construed it as the abstract and disembodied “gaze” corresponding to “the axis of vision.” However, this paper takes up “the animal eye” which reflects another scopic regime, aesthetics of “glance,” correlating with “the axis of things.” After making a detour via the theory of vision in the nineteenth century and in Emerson’s essay “Art,” the present paper returns to examining the relationship between man and nature, keenly aware of the ecocriticism of Timothy Morton and Goethe’s idea of modern botany. Eventually, this essay stresses the aspect of mutual influence between Emerson and nature, between man and landscape in Nature against the biased reviews.