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In the “Light Out of the East”: Emerson on Self, Subjectivity, and Creativity

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jspecphil.26.1.0025

1527-9383

Susan Dunston,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

In "Experience" Emerson announces his readiness "to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West" (CW 3:41). Whatever personal manifest destiny the passage expresses, it arises from Emerson's deep affinity for Eastern philosophy. The inscription in Emerson's notebook "Orientalist" is "Ex oriente lux," or "Light out of the east" (1993, 39), and, as Ronald Bosco notes in his introduction to the notebook, Emerson believed that the light of the East "has the power both to nourish otherwise impoverished individuals and nations and to transmute … the crime of materialism into wisdom" (1993, 14). His west is far to the east in "the sunbright Mecca of the desert," not Huckleberry Finn's territory, the pioneer's prairie, or the miner's rocky west, and unlike miners, settlers, land speculators, governments, and most Western philosophers, he does "not make" or stake a claim; he "arrive[s] there, and behold[s] what was there already" (CW 3:41). Emerson's approach to the west entails the death or disappearance of "all mean egotism" (CW 1:10) and the open flexibility of a Zen practitioner's mind. The grand sense of entitlement and the mission of proliferation that sent most European Americans west are quite foreign to Emerson's acknowledgment and receptivity. All a miner knows is by penetration into the earth; all Emerson knows "is reception" (CW 3:48). "I am and I have," he writes, "but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything," as countless westward-bound adventurers have fancied, "I found I did not" (CW 3:48).The attentive, appreciative reception Emerson practices is the strategy used by the Taoist sage, the Sufi mystic, and the Zen meditator, and the delight he consequently experiences, clapping his "hands in infantine joy" and filled "with the love of the new beauty" (CW 3:41), is the good humor of Chuang Tzu, the ecstasy of Attar and Rumi, the satori of the Zen practitioner. The reception and delight are not complacent, unproductive spectatorship, nor do they signal an erasure of the subject/self. They are the condition and result of the creative work that constitutes the unfolding of human experience and insight. As Emerson knew all too well by the time of "Experience," we must be receptive to what is rather than to what we would prefer, what would be convenient, what we assume, or the fraction of reality that our selective attention happens to register. The "life of truth is cold, and … mournful," he writes in "Experience" (CW 3:46), because truth is experienced (received) rather than chosen (begotten). Living in the light of truth requires acknowledging the world's indelible inscription rather than forcibly inscribing or scarring the earth with our ambitions. The world's inscription comes as a "series of surprises" (CW 2:189) unforeseen and sometimes very painful. Remaining "fearlessly available to experience whatever life presents" (Klein 1995, 202) is the challenge Emerson meets in "Experience." Holding to this cold and mournful life of truth, just as ninth-century Chinese poet-hermit Han Shan (who also believed that crass materialism is criminal) kept to Cold Mountain, underwrites the only creative expansion Emerson finds sustainable and ethical, both individually and nationally. For Emerson "expansions" must be "organic" and mutual because "the mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose" (CW 4:46); seer and seen arise mutually.In the light of the East, Emerson developed a distinctly American version of creative and ethical self-expansion that is both predictive of and a precursor to contemporary American interest in Eastern philosophy. Though clearly attracted to the Eastern philosophical ideas he encountered, he kept to his "own orbit" and wrote his "own books" (CW 1:56). His insights about self, subjectivity, and creativity arose in the context of his personal experience and the American behaviors and commitments that deeply troubled him. His response is a theory-practice of creative expansion born of the silence, stillness, and mindfulness necessary to cultivate wisdom and to transmute consumerism into thoughtful, respectful exchanges. It is a highly relevant part of our philosophical inheritance that we have yet to put into practice fully. In his well-known work on Emerson's "Experience," Stanley Cavell challenges us to put philosophical insight (what Emerson calls "genius") "into practice" and bring it "to earth," saying that "America has deprived us of the reasons" not to and that "the very promise of it drives you mad, as with the death of a child" (1989, 95).Many Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, have long described self as relational, interdependent, and contiguous with all; nothing is inherently separate or autonomous. Distinctions such as those between self and other, and their correlative parallels such as mind and body, are common in Western thinking but understood in Eastern traditions as distinctions in name only. At the beginning of Nature, Emerson distinguishes between the "Soul" and "the NOT ME," relegating even his "own body" to the not-me (CW 1:8), but he sees the trap in taking name as actuality. In "Self-Reliance," he warns against preferring "names" to "realities" or "customs" to "creators" (CW 2:29). The problem with customary names is our propensity to settle for them. We limit ourselves to the horizons they define, thus blinding ourselves to both reality and possibility. Emerson is not the only person who has fallen under the spell of the originary, seductive name "I" to the peculiar extent of including his own body in the "not-me." As Alan Watts notes, customarily in the West "we do not regard I, myself as identical with our whole physical organism. We regard it as something inside it" (1980, 2) and accord "I" the power to survive the death of the body."Truth" is a similarly seductive name. In contrast to I's autonomous interiority is Truth's autonomous exteriority. In the West, we take "Truth," reified, capitalized, and impersonal, to denote something "out there" on which multiple investigations converge. Even though contemporary Western science increasingly acknowledges that distinctions between, for example, mind and body, self and other, or observer and observed are convenient concepts rather than actual realities, it largely avoids the ethical ramifications of this insight in the name of an objectivity grounded in a dualistic ontology that distinguishes subject/mind from object/body. The tension between the insight of interrelatedness and the attachment to separateness also gives rise to the language of problems that we use in Western philosophy: the "mind/body problem," the "problem of other minds."The "problem" of self/other or mind/body differences disappears in Eastern monistic accounts of ontology, not by eliding difference but by resisting the urge to view it as an inherent problem of ontological significance, reconsidering difference instead as a set of experienced appearances that we imbue with nominal or conceptual significance. Watts writes, "It is completely absurd to say we came into this world" as some alien, separate novelty when "we came out of it" (1980, 6). Though we typically experience ourselves as having appeared precipitously on the scene, "all our scientific knowledge about living organisms shows us that we grow out of this world, that each of us might be called a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole" (Watts 1980, 6). Watts agrees with the "biologists [who] show us very clearly that there is no way of definitively separating a human organism from its external environment. The two are a single field of behavior" (1980, 38), but these findings have not yet transformed how we think about ourselves in relation to our environment, history, and others. Though the anchorage is loosening, neither Western science nor Western culture has undergone the paradigm shift that would unmoor us from customary commitments to mind over body/matter, self over other, separation over connection, and sterile analysis over creative synthesis.For Anne Klein, in her study of Buddhism and feminism, ontological monism "has three significant elements: the mutual pervasion or co-extensiveness of conventional and ultimate phenomena, the dependence of each on the other, and the assertion that one does not in any way contradict or cancel out the other" (1995, 152). Emerson's initial search for "an original relation to the universe" (CW 1:7) has all three of these elements. The transparent eyeball passage describes a moment of full and direct contact, pervasion, and coextensiveness without canceling out Emerson, the Boston Common, or the universe. Emerson depends on nature's beauty and tuitions "for new creation" (CW 1:16), and he realizes that "nothing is quite beautiful alone … but is beautiful in the whole" (CW 1:17) in a monistic universe of infinite variety and counterpoint. In "Compensation" he writes that "appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles," that each part "contains all the powers of nature," and that "every thing is made of one hidden stuff" (CW 2:59). At the end of "Fate" he sounds the call to "build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater are of one kind" (CW 6:26). He is smitten with the universe's endless elaboration of itself and yields to its "Unity in Variety" (CW 1:27).Emerson takes the interplay between unity and variety to be the groundsfor creativity in the self's pursuits of "genius" and "practical power" (CW 3:49): These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought: the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is necessity; the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other, distribution: one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other, definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization, pure science: and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or, executive deity. (CW 4:29–30) This swirl of pairs is brilliantly fractal, each forming a copy of the whole, a seemingly endless set of iterations moving "steadily forwards, creating a world before … [and] leaving worlds behind" (CW 2:163). I see Emerson embarking on a formulation of creativity as fully engaged in "transitions from one to the other" (CW 4:32), rather than as egoistic expression of a separate self who demands an audience or a market share.In Nature, Emerson is frequently anthropocentric, but as a locus of being and consciousness rather than as entitlement or autonomy. Insofar as "man is an analogist, and studies relations … he is placed in the centre of beings," a location that ensures that a "ray of relation passes from every other being to him" (CW 1:19). We cannot "be understood without these objects, nor these objects" without us (CW 1:19). Alan Watts makes a similar argument about the centrality of each individual: "The cosmos dances with infinite variety. But every single dance it does, that is to say you, is what the whole thing is doing" (1980, 25). The "whole thing" is not reduced to us; rather, we are expanded by our openness to the whole thing. Watts refigures Emerson's ray as a portal: "We are all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself" (1980, 106). He renews Emerson's call to reclaim humanity from a diminished state with a similar lament that "Western man … lost his place, … his position as the head of nature" (1980, 51). But for Watts, everything else is also "the head of nature" because "every creature in its turn is the head of nature" and "every point in a curved space-time continuum is the center of the universe" (1980, 51, 53), a conclusion that Emerson also draws in his poem "Each and All" (CW 9:14). A relational self at the center is an interdependent and obligated self. That his or her particulars are a portal to the universal indicates responsibility rather than singular significance. The eighth-century Buddhist scholar Shantideva framed this equanimity among subject-selves very frankly: "Since the desire for happiness / Is identical in myself and others / What is so special about me?" (quoted in Klein 1995, 98).Emerson was born into a burgeoning Western account of the mature self as autonomous, unique, and strong enough to overcome societal pressure and expectation toward heroism, whether in deeds of daring or artistic creation. Klein calls this hero "the ultimate [and gendered] expression of the Western individual" (1995, 33). But Emerson kept running into evidence that "things" are "much finer … in composition than alone," and that evidence left him "moved by strange sympathies" (1960–82, 4:405–6). Sympathetic response is "strange" in an America dominated by cultural commitments to the lone hero backlit on a desert ridge against a setting sun. That hero rarely even makes eye contact, let alone "present[s] as much transitional surface as possible" to others (CW 4:32). If any rescues are required, he will make them alone, driven to risky, death-defying behavior by his own principles. This hero is so different from Emerson, who "must be myself," free from "customs," but who frees himself only to submit wholly to "the region of absolute truth" found in "proximities" because "follow[ing]" that truth is the only thing that "will bring us out safe at last" (CW 2:42). Klein suggests that "in the West compassion is felt to be in opposition to autonomous personhood" (1995, 122), but Emerson in this single passage in "Self-Reliance" sidesteps the false dichotomy by committing to the truth of both nonconformity and community, in a practice similar to the wise compassion espoused in Buddhist ethics.Emerson's insight is that the self/subject is coextensive, coetaneous, and consanguineous, a complex, evolving web woven of the glistening strands of multiple subjectivities. The logical extension is behavior that responds to the equanimity of self and other and that acknowledges, even desires, difference rather than erases, modifies, or dominates it. Emerson's original relation to the universe calls for experiencing the other with genuine curiosity and openness rather than appropriation (or avoidance) of it as a way to assuage our own desires or fears. The "evanescence and lubricity" (CW 3:29) of all others are profoundly evident. Emerson finds a "gulf between every me and thee" (CW 3:44). But grasping at the world does not eliminate the gulf. Cavell notes that by violently clutching at the world, we are "forgetting or denying the rightful draw of our attraction, our capacity to receive the world" (1989, 88). Receiving the world entails yielding to direct contact.Western individualism calls for people to "present themselves as wholly original, self-contained, and independent intelligences" (Klein 1995, 29) whose success at individuation is measured in the products of their lives (accomplishments, ideas, and knowledge that can be marketed) rather than in the process of their lives (doing, thinking, and mindfulness). Emerson rejects this assessment. In "Self-Reliance," he complains that "the one fact the world hates" is "that the soul becomes" (CW 2:40) when, in fact, "the one thing in the world, of value, is, the active soul" (CW 1:56). The doing is what matters to Emerson, not the having done. Buddhist accounts of the self focus on structure and process instead of contents or products. The self's "lack of being fixed in its present limitations" (Klein 1995, 92) is a boon for an endless "experimenter" such as Emerson (CW 2:188). He is joyful in "Circles" because this emptiness, itself a dependent arising, is the condition of self-expansion and moral action. Emerson's claim to the "infinitude of the private man" (1960–82, 7:342) is entirely reasonable precisely "because inherent existence is absent" (Klein 1995, 135). Unconditioned emptiness in this sense is essential; impermanence is a necessary condition of growth. Nascent possibility is often regarded in the West as an infantile stage to be overcome as rapidly as possible. Even John Dewey's generous model of education, informed by Emerson's ideas, aims at productive adulthood. With almost desperate fervor, we hurry to teach children to fill in the blanks, to define themselves, to inscribe that tabula rasa, whereas "the possibility of experiencing the unconditioned is central to Buddhist theory and practice" (Klein 1995, 136). Failing to embrace unconditioned possibility as an aspect of being is a mistake Emerson does not make either emotionally or intellectually.How does one come to know or see the self's "equivalence and indifferency" (CW 2:188), let alone find refreshment there? As Watts observes, "What you are in your innermost being escapes your examination in much the same way that you cannot look directly into your eyes without using a mirror, you cannot bite your own teeth, and you cannot touch the tip of your left index finger with the tip of your left index finger" (1980, 1). How can one directly experience the protean self, empty of any autonomous, inherent identity? Emerson's answer at once echoes centuries-old Eastern answers and rings original. He sets an intention toward perfection and dives inward, using subjective introspection to arrive at an unmediated and objective awareness of subjectivity. When we "find ourselves … approaching the inner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes silence, and science conscience" we return to our possibility: "Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power" (CW 1:174). Through direct and unmediated experience of subjectivity we discover the emptiness of self that signals possibility.It is a challenging exercise in reflection. Sufi poet Attar writes, "You sigh in front of mirrors / and cloud the surface" (in Barks 1993, 57). Sifting through the ripples and distortions to clarity requires tremendous patience and discipline. It takes time and patience for words, both our own and those of "our talking America" (CW 3:47), to return to their source in silence. Of meditation (a staple of Eastern introspection), Watts says, "We must suspend our words, suspend our descriptions, and be alert to the actual happening … it is as simple as that" (1980, 129). Simple perhaps, but how frequently we have to be reminded to "stop, look, and listen" (Watts 1980, 79), and as Watts admits, "You cannot force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with an iron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone" (1995, 2). One's mind becomes clear and calm only when one stops talking to it and lets it be, which is exactly the calm "sanity" Emerson finds "in the solitude to which every man is always returning" (CW 3:49).In Nature, Emerson outlines a strategy for experiencing the "instantaneous in-streaming causing power" (CW 1:43) he felt on the bare Boston Common, which is quite similar to Watts's meditation practice and which served Emerson well even in the icy deluge of grief and paralytic skepticism precipitated by Waldo's death. He discovered by the time he wrote Nature that the truth about "his relation to the world" would be "arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility" (CW 1:39), that is, by returning to unmediated, yielding alertness "to the actual happening" (Watts 1980, 129). That self-recovery, whether practiced through meditation or any other method of mindfulness, rests in the body even as it bursts over the boundaries posed by embodiment.Though often labeled an idealist, Emerson says that "we are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic" (CW 3:135). His deference to the embodied personal and particular is clear from the beginning. In her biography of Emerson's early years, Evelyn Barish writes that he sought insight and understanding in the "accessible and sensuous—food barely taken from nature, bodies one can hear, see, touch" (1989, 245). "In the American Scholar, he" looks for answers in "the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life," for meaning in "the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body" (CW 1:67). As Emerson says quietly near the end of the otherwise exuberant essay "Circles," "So to be is the sole inlet of so to know" (CW 2:189). To rest in one's physical being is fundamental to Eastern meditation practice, which, like Emerson, aims at direct contact with reality. Subjectivity, for all that we ride its powers of transcendence and imagination, is embodied. Klein asserts what Emerson intimates: "Silent knowing yields to being, including being in the body," for the "physical and mental processes are not two halves of a whole, but two avenues of access into the fully integrated complex in which they participate…. [I]f you follow either far enough, it brings you to the other" (1995, 198, 72). "We are," as Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote, "the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours" (2004, 106).Subjectivity itself has all the transient qualities of the physical body. Experiencing the flux of one's subjectivity is unnerving: "The experience of mind and body as only a seething flow of sensations is a dismembering of the self" (Klein 1995, 67). Not only his son's sudden death but also Emerson's own "train of moods like a string of beads" (CW 3:30) plunged him into the bewildering, "innavigable sea [that] washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with" (CW 3:29). As if nature's tuitions were not devastatingly persuasive enough, his subjectivity itself reveals the great truth of impermanence to Emerson and the epistemological challenges thereby generated. He and the "surface on which we now stand" are "not fixed, but sliding" through a series of surprises, through a train of moods, ever fragmented and fragments (CW 2:186). Emerson "know[s] better than to claim any completeness" (CW 3:47), for even the "words of God" are "as fugitive as other words" (CW 2:186).This "seething flow," empty of inherent identity, coheres with Emerson's understanding of causality (specifically with respect to creativity), which has far more resonance with Eastern thought than with Western. An individual only appears to be stable, just as "nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest" (CW 2:180). Cause and change are by definition linked, but Western and Eastern accounts of personal agency differ. In the West, personal agency is the ability (and right) to cause change, to make something happen a certain way according to the individual's preferences and without compromising them. An entire set of values follows from this philosophical commitment. The value or import of personal difference is proportional to making, that is, creating, a difference. Against the backdrop of Aristotle's theory of the unmoved mover and Western monotheism's creation accounts, the story line that emerges is "A man walks into the world, has his own ideas, and re-forms the world in his own image" (in part, perhaps, to catch up with God). The trajectory is from ideal to physical, from knowing what ought to be to forcing the world (the "ordinary" [Cavell 1989, 33]) to comply, and our relationship to the physical world is analogous to God's relationship to matter as subordinate to will. The huge caveat of the narrative is that we are created creators. The unmoved mover is a default assumption in Western culture, and humans are moved unmoved movers. The unfortunate psychological consequence is our anxiety about limitation. We are arrived too late and, hence, throw ourselves into "lives of quiet desperation" (Thoreau 1960, 10) in the constant rush to catch up, to get ahead.Emerson's narrative trajectory tends to be the opposite. He says that he has had little success with "manipular attempts to realize the world of thought" (CW 3:48). In fact, he has come to "know that the world I converse with … is not the world I think" and to "observe that difference" even when he did not understand its "value and law" (CW 3:48). He therefore takes a Taoist approach of wu-wei, rather than the brute force approach of Western heroes. His approach is not a failure to know or act, nor is he technophobic. If an equivalence exists among "each and all" (CW 9:14), then privileging the well-being or the ideas about "ought" of one over those of others seems a poor choice, logically and ethically. Some of the reasons it is a poor choice are clear from an Eastern perspective. The Dalai Lama, for example, finds a fundamental contradiction in the Western story line I described: "The notion of intrinsic, independent existence is incompatible with causation" (2005, 47). There are no unmoved movers. In the context of the law of karmic causality, "an intentional act will reap certain fruits." If "a sentient being" is involved, then "karmic causation is involved" (Dalai Lama 2005, 90).Klein describes karma as "the idea that all persons experience the effects of their own good and bad actions," an idea that "implies extensive connections" not only with their own pasts "but also with a world that embodies the collective actions of innumerable living beings" (1995, 38–39). Unlike Westerners, "Tibetans live in a cosmos they co-create, and that is itself alive and … sometimes even speaks" (Klein 1995, 39). Emerson's world, too, is alive with multiple subjectivities, alternately conversing, co-creating, and "slip[ping] through" each others' "fingers" (CW 3:29). He insists that we are not latecomers to creation: there are "new lands, new men, new thoughts" (CW 1:7). Combining Watts with Emerson we could say that "each and all of us might be called a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole, part or particle" of a co-created system of infinitely varied subject-selves.As Cavell has noted, "Emerson's writing can set sensible people's teeth on edge" (2003, 231). Emerson's critics find him romantically subjective, unscientific, given to flights of fanciful language and slippery metaphors. He commits to "whim" and eschews the "foolish consistency … adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" (CW 2:30, 33). However, Emerson stresses the objective nature of the knowledge yielded through the subjective practice of introspection and self-recovery and through personal experience. Emerson's sense that universal truth is accessible through the portal of particularity ("to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius" [CW 2:27]) is almost embarrassing in a culture steeped in relativism of all hues from separatist individualism to anxiety-ridden postmodernism. But Emerson refuses to be deterred "from [the] self-trust" (CW 2:33) that has led him to a monistic understanding of self and other. He rejects any claims to an objectivity that disowns subjective experience and possibility. Buddhist teachings have long maintained that with practice, one can cultivate mindful self-study as a disciplined method by which "the mind … can be experienced [objectively] as a mere flux of thoughts, images, or feelings" (Klein 1995, 66). The Dalai Lama describes Buddhist meditative self-study as "a rigorous, focused, and disciplined use of introspection and mindfulness to probe deeply into the nature of a chosen object" and compares it with the "rigorous empirical observation" that grounds modern science (2005, 142). He explains that "any experience of consciousness … has a high degree of privacy" and "is entirely subjective" but that it leads to understanding "the indubitable reality of our subjectivity" (2005, 119), a statement that is foundationally akin to Descartes's cogito but with the opposite predication. Emerson suggests, "I am; therefore I think"—being is the inlet of knowing.We tend to reduce mind to its deliverables or products and to be unmindful of mind as being or process. We literally lose our minds in labyrinths of ideas. But "mind is not thought alone; nor is it separate from bodily energies. It is also clarity and knowing" (Klein 1995, 138). There is an additional danger in treating and trading ideas as if they were disembodied and able to freely associate themselves into "bodies of knowledge" that exist independently of particular minds (or local and urgent responsibilities). "The difference between embodying an idea and thinking it is subtle, but crucial," Klein notes (1995, 154): it is the difference between practice and theory. Emerson argues that no amount of "intellectual tasting" will "supersede muscular activity," for "life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy" (CW 3:34–35). To avoid our embodied subjectivity in the interest of a disengaged objectivity profoundly limits our understanding of reality as well as our possibilities for self-expansion. It also shrinks our behavior toward others into self-serving and shortsighted gestures.Emerson forgoes allegedly detached objectivity as a pipe dream that never trumped his desire for an original relation with the universe and direct contact with reality. The rhodora's wisdom is profound to Emerson and provides a cautionary lesson about being attached to conceptual explanations of reality at the expense of direct contact with reality: "If eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being" (CW 9:79); explanation is superfluous. The difference