Xenocitizens

Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America

Jason Berger

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823287673
  9780823287758
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823287765
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms "xeno, " which connotes alien or stranger, and "citizen, " which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, X enocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

PART I

Illiberal Ontologies

CHAPTER 1

Emerson’s Operative Mood

Almost I fear to think how glad I am.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature

Our Ralph Waldo Emerson still has two faces. The first, representative of his early works, is portrayed in an 1849 New-York Daily Tribune cartoon of Emerson swinging on an inverted rainbow, a mood reified by F. O. Matthiessen’s claim that Emerson was a Neoplatonic optimist who epitomized the wishful longing of the “optative mood.”¹ The second, representative of his 1850s turn toward political radicalism, is seen in Emerson’s enthusiastic declaration while visiting the Charlestown Navy Yard, echoing out of time, it seems, from the lips of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, “Ah! Sometimes gunpowder smells good.”² I want to suggest that these two Emersons share the same conceptual horizon—that the disengaged transparent eyeball Emerson peddling visions of the Oversoul and the gun-toting, blood-lusting Emerson collecting donations for John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry evince an important and unacknowledged structural continuity.

The perspective I present in this chapter thus contributes to contemporary scholarship that seeks new ways of thinking about an “other Emerson.” In their collection of the same name, Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe suggest that they intend to follow the “vertiginous sense of (dis)location invoked … by Emerson” and aim to “induce a similar kind of dislocation” in their audience.³ By arguing that the explicit political engagement of Emerson’s middle period (the late 1840s through the 1860s) is a logical development of his earlier thinking rather than a marked departure from it,⁴ I hope to create a similarly productive disturbance, offering a picture of Emerson’s brand of political personhood that departs radically from Enlightenment and Romantic models of political ethics that continue to shape modern liberal-democratic assumptions about identity.

Several decades of scholarship have detailed Emerson’s embrace of religious violence in the run up to the Civil War. These studies leave relatively unexplored the question of whether this embrace involved a real turn away from Emerson’s earlier thinking on the subject. Given the predominant narratives of Emerson’s life that stress his secularizing and liberalizing trajectory—and considering his abrupt return to religious and illiberal pronouncements around slavery in the 1840s and 1850s—it is easy to conclude that there was, in fact, a significant discontinuity.⁵ This chapter, however, returns to Emerson’s early work to argue that he maintained a core commitment to a form of “religious sentiment” that offered the structural means and justifications for violent interventions within historical reality.

A reexamination of Emerson’s early thinking about the relation between the self and universal Reason reveals that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence that personhood is “operative” in form and function. Shifting our critical and conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with a religious and universal Other, or what scholars of Emerson, following Emerson’s own terminology, often term the “impersonal,” as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to specific social and historical landscapes.⁶ Indeed, in her discussion of Emerson’s conception of moods, Arsić departs from previous scholars by depicting the way exteriority and relationality (for a person is “ ‘floated’ into a mood by other persons or events”) effect a constructive “discontinuity of personal identity.”⁷ Arsić’s work has helped generate a newfound interest in thinking with and perhaps past Sharon Cameron’s foundational thesis about the role of the impersonal in Emerson’s thought. The implications of the type of “impersonal thinking” that Arsić discerns, however, have yet to be fully borne out.⁸

The continuity in Emerson’s thought regarding religious sentiment and its radical effects has been obscured by the shifting rhetorical positioning of Emerson’s writing, including its changing audience base across the antebellum years. Nevertheless, and perhaps more important, it has also been occluded by twentieth- and twenty-first century liberal critical paradigms of subjectivity and political action. As discussed in this book’s introduction, liberalism has a long and vexed history, and it informs almost all nineteenth-century sociopolitical formations. As Christopher Newfield explains, in the twentieth century, “liberalism” “has stood for a consensus about the American left’s need to assimilate its ideals to the ways of the center.”⁹ Quite obviously, this developing ideological perspective has influenced interpretive paradigms that have been used to analyze antebellum personhood as well as Emerson’s political thought. For example, in Transcendental Resistance (2010), Johannes Voelz illuminates the limitations of New Americanist perspectives that have predominated since the Cold War and generated “totalized” readings of Emerson’s politics.¹⁰ Even more directly, perhaps, Kerry Larson’s “Illiberal Emerson” (2006), offers a comprehensive overview of the manifold ways Emerson’s early thought departs from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal tenets. My chapter in many ways shares with Larson’s work the desire to “pierce through an assortment of liberal pieties and assumptions in order to make … [Emerson’s] beliefs intelligible.” It also, however, adds an important aspect of historical antagonism to Larson’s adept analysis. Throughout his essay, Larson critiques productively what he deems as contemporary liberal misreadings of Emerson’s thought (citing scholars such as George Kateb). Yet when he makes his penultimate move of counterpointing a Lockean liberal preference for self regard over forms of fanaticism with Emerson’s own brand of self-reliance, Larson portrays Emerson’s apparent inconsistency regarding the self, including his penchant for impersonality, in “holistic terms,” where radical variants are synthesized and “the impersonality of character exhibits a unity.”¹¹ I ask what happens when we abandon this grand scope for viewing the Emersonian self and argue, instead, that Emerson’s portrayal of encounters with the impersonal often relate to specific historical events and acts, including modes of political violence.

I thus hope to return the Other to Emerson: presenting a new (perhaps redeemed) form of political personhood at the heart of Emerson’s work. In the section that follows, I examine Emerson’s early conception of “religious sentiment” in order to rethink the constitutive role of the impersonal within the Emersonian self. These contexts set up my subsequent analysis of how Emerson’s early work prepares the stage for his embrace of violent political rhetoric and action in the 1850s and 1860s.

Godly Navels, Impersonal Persons, and Other Religious Sentiments

The political thought that scholars have noted in Emerson’s work during the 1850s is characterized by a new emphasis on the relation between the individual and cosmic power. The radicalism in essays such as “Fate” (1860) is anticipated in journal entries from 1857, where Emerson discussed political agency in terms of destiny. This formulation is evident in “Courage,” an essay based on an 1859 speech given shortly before John Brown’s execution, where Emerson suggests, “If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties.”¹² For Emerson, such duties could be severe, as seen in an 1863 speech at Waterville College where he asks: In the support of “universal liberty … who would not consent to die?”¹³ Oddly enough, the groundwork for this absolutist identity manifests in Emerson’s optimistic and joyous condemnations of Christianity during the early 1830s.

When the twenty-nine-year-old Emerson mounted the pulpit of the Second Church of Boston on September 9, 1832, to deliver his resignation sermon, “The Lord’s Supper,” a scathing critique of the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, he had a specific topic in mind: institutional knowledge. As the sermon reveals, what riled Emerson the most was the way the church shifted religious devotion onto the figure of Christ via the codification of a specific (and limited) form of historical memory. In looking at Emerson’s comments on religion from this period—such as his thought, in 1832, that religion “is not something … to be got [,] to be added”—it becomes clear that the problem was deeper than merely how the church was using knowledge. On a more foundational level, Emerson wrestled with the simple fact that institutional knowledge was becoming the conceptual ground on which the church operated.¹⁴

The complexity of Emerson’s critique might be further illuminated by considering it in the context of the historical transition, well underway in the nineteenth century, within the institutional relations between knowledge and power. The Unitarian church in the early nineteenth century, as well as the Harvard Divinity School that supported it, typified the way theoretical knowledge was located increasingly in the position of power.¹⁵ Established in 1636, Harvard College began as a means to educate New England’s ministry, but by the late eighteenth century, many of Boston’s clergy “saw themselves as scholars.”¹⁶ According to Barbara Packer, this move toward codified forms of knowledge developed in a “spiritual marketplace” when liberals in New England Congregationalism began using “history to establish faith,” eventually distinguishing themselves as Unitarians who believed in “progressive illumination.” Focusing on philosophers such as Locke, they found a means to confront religious enthusiasts with “tolerant, rational patience.”¹⁷ At Harvard, Lockean principles were bolstered with the work of the Cambridge Platonists, who promoted an “ontology that treated moral truths as objectively real,” as well as with the systematic integration of German Higher Criticism, which employed historical modes of inquiry to interpret scripture.¹⁸

This prevalent connection between religion and historical or theoretical knowledge clearly troubled Emerson, producing a function for knowledge that was a far cry from the province of scholar he championed throughout his career. Such anxiety is evident in Emerson’s resignation letter to the Proprietors of the Second Church, where he makes clear that his “devotion to the cause of divine truth” had not ebbed; rather, he explains, he differed on the means by which this end should be pursued.¹⁹ Nevertheless, his subsequent criticism of religion is predicated on a radical recalibration of social relations. At the close of the Lord’s Supper sermon, for instance, he boldly claims that he will “love” Jesus “as a glorified friend” and follow him only inasmuch as he “would lead us to seek our own well-being in the formation of the soul.”²⁰ In so doing, Emerson establishes a key structural tenet of his subsequent thought: the primary role of the self in relation to the realm of the soul.

Emerson’s censure of institutional devotion in his Divinity Address is well known. Yet within his critique of religious social structures he posits a realm of experience that exceeds such a system’s knowledge and “analysis,” namely “religious sentiment.”²¹ Indirectly building on the work of theologians such as Benjamin Constant and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Emerson links this affective concept, which he posits as “the essence of all religion,” with the “sentiment of virtue.” Here, such sentiment “is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws” (77). According to Emerson, the “perception of this law of laws always awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness” (79). Thus, we see a relation emerge where an individual’s “perception” of the divine Law yields a form of delight that, as in the case of Jesus’s own experience, approaches a “jubilee of sublime emotion” (81).

As Wesley T. Mott has shown, the “moral sublime” has a deep intellectual genealogy for Emerson, synthesizing European thought pertaining to “sublimity, stoicism, and sentiment.”²² What’s more, it appears in various forms in Emerson’s early days as a minister. The parameters of this conceptual landscape are illuminated in Emerson’s 1837 lecture “Religion.” As Emerson’s opening makes clear, religious sentiment exists in a liminal space between the vaunted function of Reason and everyday human perception. This is because Emerson figures Reason as the “Universal Mind,” an exterior agency located within us; consequently, “We belong to it, not it to us.”²³ The individual, therefore, exists in an “antagonistic nature” toward Reason, garnering “virtue” only when the “individual Will” adopts the “dictate of the Universal mind.” As Emerson explains in a later essay, “That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration.”²⁴ And it is precisely here where religious sentiment enters. In the pursuit and acceptance of Reason, religious sentiment is fired: “[R]eligion is the accompanying emotion, the emotion of reverence which the presence of the Universal mind always excites in the individual” (“Religion,” 84).

Although Emerson goes on to link religious sentiment to various forms of religious enthusiasms and “ravishment,” he adds an important qualification. In his view, this “shudder of awe and delight” is not a result of direct alignment with Reason, but “attends the individual’s consciousness of that divine presence.” Consequently, the “character and duration of enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual from an extasy [sic] and trance and prophetic inspiration, … to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion” (“Religion,” 90). This is perhaps why, in Nature, Emerson casts the “influx of spirit” in the future tense. No matter where one falls on the continuum of ravishment, the “axis of vision,” shaped by the realm of the Reason, remains (in various degrees) non-identical to the “axis of things,” our current perception of reality.²⁵ That is, the gap Emerson establishes at the opening of “The Divinity School Address” between the Universal mind and “imperfect apprehension” is not yet closed (77).

The space of non-identity between full Reason and current forms of perception is, in this way, foundational to Emerson’s understanding of joyous religious sentiment. But the historical and ideological elements of this schematic should be emphasized. Emerson’s criticism of the church’s manipulation of historical knowledge is also an implicit criticism of how the church is not identical to its presumed source of power. This may be why Emerson cate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Xenocitizens
• Part I: Illiberal Ontologies
• Part II: Illiberal Ecologies
• Epilogue: Care, There and Now
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author