Emerson's Gnostic Democracy

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Eric. G. Wilson. Emersons Gnostic Democracy. Esoterica 6(2004): 1-15.

In 1991, Allen Ginsberg, still stoked by Blakes sunflower, told thefollowing story to a graduate class of which I was a member.(1)During the sixties, he was asked by a leftist organization toorganize an anti-war parade that would feature the usual forms ofprotest: didactic banners and chants. Weary of such oppositionalpolitical practices, Ginsberg suggested a third way.(2) Instead ofsimply reversing the ideas of the government, and thus rebellingin terms determined by the status quo, why not, he asked, plan aparade in which children would carry flags decorated not withslogans but flowers and fruits? The political organization rejected

this seemingly whimsical notion. However, as Ginsberg, studiedin Blake, well knew, perhaps the most potent political behaviorsare not matters of corporeal warfare, angry masses pressingideas. The most powerful political acts can be events ofspiritualwarfare: people awakening to the unseen possibilities of concretepresences. Ginsberg realized that a republic could be, precisely, arepublica realm of life in which the thing, the res, is the primaryconcern of the people, thepublicus.

Spiritual rebellion grows from attention to a particular

presence. Corporeal attack relies on faith in abstract ideology.These apparent contradictions can be resolved in a vision of thething. If things are not temporal copies of eternal forms or hunksof matter pushed around by mechanical force but numinousevents proffering heterogeneous possibilities, then attention tothese sites releases one from stale heavens and iron laws andthrows one into unrealized horizons, invisible abysses. Likewise, ifideological positions are not meditations on evanescent currentsor excursions into abysmal voids but ciphers of impalpablesystems, then faith in such political views divorces one from the

hums of ungraspable particulars and marries one to predictableformsthe same ideas, the same bodies, the same ruts.

In this context, political agendas of radical and conservativeare equally oppressive. The conservative wishes to corralchanging energies into prefabricated abstractions: traditionalvalues. The radical defines his system in opposition to stabilitiesof the right and thus both supports his enemy and severs himself


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from concrete potentials.(3) The only way out of this impasse ofwarring abstractions is to embrace a third term beyond theconflict. This tertium quid is the unbridled particular, at once asite for the most traditional and the most radical: the originalenergy of the ancient universe, the disruptive power of the

unpredictable present.

This politics of the thing is problematical. It relies on theidea that one can escape abstraction and the notion that one cantranscend political bias. In our contemporary intellectuallandscape, in which everyone is always already inscribed indiscourse that preemptively conceptualizes and politicizes allparticular experiences, these speculations concerning the thingsound especially troubling. However, figures like Ginsberg, Blakehis teacher, and Emerson, who inflects Blake toward Ginsberg by

way of Whitman, suggest that a true democracyin which eachbeing enjoys the widest range of possibilities for action andthoughtemerges precisely from attention to particulars. Thoughbased on an abstract theory of the thing, this concrete scrutinymight briefly liberate from abstraction. Though defined politicallyas the transcendence of ideology, this focus on the immediatecould emancipate from political opposition. This theory ispotentially gnostic: an attempt to transcend the hylic measuresof the demiurge, to reveal the pneumatic sublimities of originalthings.(4)

In this essay, I explore Emersons politics of the thing, a gnosticdemocracy, to illuminate the possibilities and problems of hisideal republic as well as to emancipate him from reductiveinterpretive oppositions. A recent collection of essays, TheEmerson Dilemma (2001), explores tensions between Emersonthe transcendentalist and Emerson the reformerbetween theself-reliant contemplative and the communal activist, the idealisthaunting the palaces of thought and the pragmatist abolishinginjustice.(5) Though this collection ably examines the relationship

between these two Emersonian currents, it fails to address thethird term I have been sketchingEmersons sense of concreteevents. In excluding Emersons sensitivity to the particularinpresenting him as either a conservative contemplative or aradical reformerthis collection supports a bifurcation that hasplagued Emerson studies for years, one that overlooks a majorelement of his political vision.(6)


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Before turning to Emerson, I should borrow a lexicon from Blake,the visionary of the paradoxical interplay between concreteperception and gnostic liberation. Long before his spirit recited

Ah, Sunflower! to the young Ginsberg, Blake in his marginaliato The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798) intoned, ToGeneralize is to be an Idiot To Particularize is Alone Distinction ofMerit.(7) General Knowledge does not exist, while Singular &Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime.(8) Thesedistinctions reverse traditional expectations. Ideasgenerally theessentials of knowledgebecome delusions. Immediateperceptionsflashes usually corralled into conceptsare nowrevelations of the real. Theories are ignoble reductions. Directapprehensions of particulars open into the sublime: the infinite.

(9)

Setting aside for the moment the fact that Blakesstatements are themselves abstract theories, let us pause onBlakes statement on the sublime. Unlike Burke, who maintainedthat the sublime grows from terrifying empirical experiences, andunlike Kant, who held that the sublime emerges from the mindstranscendence of forms to the formless,(10) Blake, taking amiddle way, believes that the sublime arises from a sensualscrutiny so intense that it penetrates to an unbounded energy at

the heart of distinct forms. As Blake intones in The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell (1793), If the doors of perception werecleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. Thiscleansing requires enhanced sensation: the whole creation willappear infinite only through an improvement of sensualenjoyment. Favoring the abstract over the concrete, one seesall things only thro the narrow chinks of his cavern.(11)Practicing immediate perception, one apprehends infinity in agrain of sand, and in a bird, an unseen world of delight.

How does abstraction, seemingly attuned to spirit, lead tonarrowness and illusion? How does intense perception, ostensiblyshackled to matter, open to infinity, to eternity? For Blake,abstraction is egocentric and retrospective. Ones concepts, nomatter how putatively universal, arise from past personalexperiences. My conception of my ego is an abstractionextrapolated from a selection of past experiences that arrangethemselves into a consistent narrative. My ideas of love and


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redness and black cat and whatnot are ghostly prcis arising fromnumerous particulars of my past, mostly forgotten. Thesememorial abstractions are necessary for negotiations ofexperience; however, if one believes that the retrospective egoand its abstractions are the only realities, then one reduces the

present to a cipher of the past. He flattens the world to a doubleof his interior archives. He is doomed to undergo the sameexperiences over and over. He turns and turns and turns in whatBlake calls the same dull round.(12)

Intense perception is charitable and prospective. If onebreaks through egocentric, retrospective abstractions andimmediately apprehends a particular moment, then one does notencounter an example of ones past, a reduction of the world tothe egos double. He experiences the concrete event as a

discrete, unique pattern of a transpersonal, ungraspable energy.Scrutinizing this thing, here, nowhis beloved, or a crocushemoves from self-consciousness to other-consciousness. Hebecomes entranced by this particular isness. He gazes withincreasing intensity. Suddenly, he senses in this entity, nakedexistence, the mystery of being. The thing becomes an event: aconfluence of form and energy, other and same. This vision is ofeternity in time.

But what is eternity? It is not unending duration, time

everlasting. It is the pure present, not bound to memory andfraught with nostalgia or regret, and not bound to foresight andvexed with fear or anticipation. Not troubled by the pressures ofhistory, eternity is not tensed, not tied to finite verbs. It is infinite.Infinite does not mean boundlessly large, space unceasing.Infinity is pure presence, beyond comparison with otherpresences that have surrounded and will surround, beyondenvironmental limitation. Transcending temporal and spatialdistinctions, eternity and infinitynegations of the abstractions ofminutes and pointsare abysmal openings into a realm in which

before and after, here and there, blur into a hum of ungraspablebeing.(13)

This recondite language (ironically abstract) can be viewedin a concrete context. Blake in his annotations to Lavatars

Aphorisms on Man (1788) says: the Philosophy of Causes &Consequences misled Lavatar as it has all his cotemporaries.Each thing is its own cause & its own effect Accident is the


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omission of act in self & the hindering of act in another, This isVice but all Act [] is Virtue. Tohinder another is not an act it is the contrary it is a restraint onaction both in ourselves & in the person hinderd.(14) To expectpeople and things to conform to a determining past and a

determined future, to a limiting environment and a boundedhorizon, is to hinder themto impose upon them grids thatdeprive them of ineffable impulses and unexpected swerves. Ifone sees only those characteristics that conform to theseabstractions, then he commits vice: the reduction of self andother to stable units forever dividedcause and effect, subjectand object. In contrast, if one can break through abstractions andperceive immediately another person or thing, then oneexperiences a being that is the effects of its own causes, free ofpast and future, context and horizon. To see a being in this way

as an unrepeatable revelation of eternity and infinityis to enjoyvirtue: the unwillingness to hinder the irreducible otherness ofthat, or this; the willingness to open to how the event uniquelytorques the abiding though unknowable pressure of being.

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For Blake, Urizen, horizon and your reason, conspires againsteternity and infinity. This faculty is hungry to reduce energy toform, numinous to number. As Blake proclaims in The Book of

Urizen (1794), it most desires joy without pain and a solidwithout fluctuation.(15) Those who allow this faculty to dominatetheir perceptions maintain that the cosmos was created and isstill maintained by a rational demiurgePlatos geometer,Newtons clockmaker. For these disciples of Urizen, the real is therationalonly those events that correspond, howeverimperfectly, to prefabricated ideas of order, law, predictabilityenjoy substantial existence. Irrational and arational occurrencesare unreal, wispy denizens of some impalpable void seething withillusion, chaos, error.

The most ardent students of Urizen are, on the one hand,the priest and the king, and, on the other, the heretic and therevolutionary. Not surprisingly, the potentates of religious andpolitical orthodoxy value an organized status quo. Desiring todictate and police what is real and what is not, they attempt toplot the potentially disruptive perceptions of their subjects ontopredictable graphs. Less obviously, iconoclastic rebels are also,


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often unknowingly, students of Urizen, for they are controlled bythe bifurcations of the tyrant. Taking seriously Urizens distinctionbetween order and chaos, the rebel sides with turbulence.However, once the iconoclast topples his enemys structures, hemust impose his own prefabricated arrangements on the world.

Hence, he converts from chaos to order, and thus becomes anexemplar of the Urizen he wanted to vanquish. As Blake makesclear, when Urizen aspires to power, he creates his rebelliousopposite, Orc.(16) The two principles comprise interdependentsystems, each nourishing the other, each secretly mimicking thatwhich it appears to hate.

For Blake, the poetic genius, not the political organizer,emancipates the wounded cosmos from this vicious round oftyranny and anarchy, order and chaos, conservative and radical.

Blakes genius liberates not by conceiving and concocting utopianallegories but through intensely perceiving and painting theminute pulses of the sensual world. The priest and the hereticalike, regardless of their political views, reduce the sun to ratio,the lowest common denominator of all recorded perceptionstoa coin in the sky. Hence, they do not really see the sun at all butan abstraction that keeps vital rays at a safe distance. The poet,unhindered by the politics of the agora, gazes though his eye atthe strangely illuminated horizon and witnesses the sun explodeinto angels intoning Holy Holy Holy.(17) He thus experiences

the sun as a numinous revelation of imaginative possibilities.Disclosing such visions in his works, he transcends the round ofcompeting abstractions. He shocks his readers with theirreducible weirdness of things. He frees them from a temporal,closed universe, its horizons darkened by the mundane shells ofmemory. He opens them to an eternal, infinite cosmos, fieldsresilient to retrospection.

Without tracing formally the actual Gnostic influences onBlake (or Emerson), we can understand how Blakes politics of

the particular suggests a gnostic democracy.(18) The Gnostictradition of the ancient world was not, recall, a homogeneousmovement devoted to anti-materialist dualism.(19) Thoughheresiologistslike Irenaeus and Epiphaniuswanted to reduce aheterogeneous field of visionaries to a horde of apostates, thefact remains: a major current enlivening certain Gnostic sects ofAlexandria and Rome in the early centuries of the Common Era


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had nothing to do with crass dualism and everything to do withperceptionseeing, not fasting, as liberation.

Certainly some Gnostics, like Marcion and the anonymous author ofThe SecretBook According to John, focused on the corruptions of the cosmos crafted by an evil

demiurge. In hisAntitheses, a work no longer extant but described by Tertullian, Marcionargued that the God of the Old Testament is not the same as the God of the New. ForMarcion, the Old Testament deity is inferior to the New Testament one. The former is

poor creator, able to craft our botched material cosmos, and a petty tyrant, fixated on

rigid codes of justice. The latter is transcendently spiritual, beyond the trappings of the

material universe, as well as a font of mercy, indifferent to the laws of the fallen world.(20) The anonymous author ofThe Secret Book according to John dramatizes Marcions

theory of two gods. For John, the origin of everything is not the Jehovah but a radically

transcendent power, an immeasurable, unfathomable, unlimited, invisible voida vast nothing. Out of this mystery emanates several thoughts, or androgynous aeons,

each of which is a unique manifestation of its source. This source and its polarized

outflows comprise thepleroma, the first fullness. However, one of these aeons, Sophia,disrupts the harmony, causing division, discord, and descent. This error produces the

monstrous Ialtobaoth, who is exiled to an inferior material realm outside of thepleroma.

He stupidly believes he is the first and only god and proceeds to produce a cosmos poorlymodeled on thepleroma. This universe is our own: material instead of spiritual,

hierarchical instead of polarized, ruled by a dictator instead of a supple power.(21)

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While these two accounts characterize the pervasivedualism in the Gnostic tradition, other, more psychologically

sophisticated Gnostics, such as Valentinus and Thomas, meditateless on the evils of matter and more on the emancipatorypossibilities of sight.(22) In the Gospel of Truth, Valentinussuggests that inert matter is not a substance but a psychologicalcondition.(23) In the beginning the abysmal plenitude itself, theunknowable deity, spawned from its own depths some primalerror, the first ignorance. The instant ignorance emerged, matterappeared in the form of a dense fog. From this miasma grew themore fixed materials of forgetfulness and fear. Eventually, aworld coalesced from these states, our own universe ruled by

inflexible envy and hard strife, the last precipitates of the initialmist. As long as the subjects of this cosmos are ruled byignoranceas long as they believe that the universe of thetyrannical demiurge and his viceroys, the priest and the king, isrealthey suffer in this dark prison. However, when thesedenizens cast off psychological fear and desire, then strife andenvy, fear and forgetfulness, and ignorance, all fade away, and


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what is left a nimble, springing abyss of energy and light: theorigin of being, the spark of life.(24) In a similar way, in ThomassGospel, Jesus claims that most men are intoxicated by imagesthat cover the light at the core of all things. Only by becoming apasserby, by not dwelling on these images, can one penetrate

to the light. This light, coeval with the primal abyss and Jesusown eternal presence, is immanent, coursing under the clumsyexteriors with which men clothe and control the cosmos: Split apiece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find methere.(25)

For Blake, and Emerson, Thomass wood and stone wouldbe tantamount to the abstract images that grow from egocentricfear and desirethe fear of the disturbing blooms of theunknown, the desire to reduce the world to predictable bits of

discrete stuff. These abstractionsproducts of the primal error,the first ignorancestick men and women into self-imposedprisons and divorce them from the mercurial streams of ineffablelight. Redemption comes only in passing through these rigidconcepts and facing events denuded of ideological trappings. Thenaked particular erupts into nothing yet seen: an unexpectedinflection of the nothing that is everywhere. Beholding this thing,here, nowa ravishing grackle fading to purplethe observer isfreed from the ideas that comprise his past, fraught withnostalgia or regret, and the theories that constitute his future,

nervous with anticipation or dread. He is shocked by the presenta glimmer of untensed energy beyond secondsand by thepresencea formless luminosity unhindered by points. Hisenduring ideologies become constraining illusions. His immediateperceptions turn vital currents.

These meditations on the political life of the thing suggest twoproblems and two points that I should note before turning toEmerson proper. First of all, this theory of the thing is itself anabstraction and thus part of a system of expectations that could

easily divorce one from immediate perception. If I approach aneventa crocus, say, or a man sewingand expect it to bloominto eternal glimmers and infinite currents, then I am necessarilyimposing onto this instant a set of general suppositions that blindme to unique resonances. Even though Blake in gazing at the sunavoids empiricist ratio, he still seems to rely on the concepts ofChristianityangels intoning over the holy. How, then, is this


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theory of the concrete perception distinct from other abstractionsthat preclude immediate witness? Blakes theory, thoughnecessarily abstract, separates itself from other abstract theoriesin this way: its only reason for being is to undercut abstracttheories. It is a self-erasing proposition, a map to be discarded

once the destination appears over the horizon. Hence, even if it isdifficult to escape abstractions once and for all, at least thisvision of the particular questions the power and reality ofabstractions and thus possibly opens an uncanny space wherethe long repressed thing can return.

But what if it is impossible for humans to transcendabstractions? What if, as the Derrideans and the Foucauldiansmaintain, everyone is inscribed in a sign system that dictateswhat can be seen and said, that like a Kantian category excludes

the ding-an-sich? What if Blake envisions not the sublime sun butthe discourse of his day? If there is nothing outside the text,nothing beyond the discourses of power, then things are butmere ciphers of the human rage for order. Yet, surely somethingunhuman existed for the millions of years before the eye openedinto consciousness. The same endured for the additionalmillennia upon millennia before the tongue began to speak. Anunfamiliar current springs and dives beyond thought and word.Even if humans are incarcerated in a prison house of language,these same humans have coursing through their veins the

curious rhythms that have been thumping since the primal soupfirst felt lightning. If we are ever going to break through thisprison to the sublime indifference of nonhuman thingsand thereis good reason to believe that some, like Blake and Emerson,already havethen in the cells themselves hides the key: atheory, comprised of words and thoughts, that says that theprison, also made of languages and ideas, is only half-real, aphantom through which one might one day slide, and find on theother side palpable bloods and saps that were formerly only thesceneries of dreams.

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This theory of the thing relies on the optative mood.(26)One cannot say of it, it is true. One can only intone: this visioninspires actions that might shatter the very ideas on which thevision is based and leave one extended into a sublime realm ofdisturbing yet gorgeous possibilities. In this way, Blakes, and


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Emersons, sense of the thing weakens the rift between idealismand pragmatism. Relinquishing all abstractions is probablyimpossible. Yet, even if the desire to be free from conception isideal, it is a worthy yearning, for it qualifies existing abstractionsand makes one more attuned to the ineffable. This idealist

striving is not escapist fantasy but pragmatic labor. Refiningabstractions, one discards those ideas furthest removed fromparticular strangeness and keeps remolding those notions closestto concrete breathing.

Gathering pragmatism and idealism into a creative dialectic,the political possibilities of concrete perception also suggest acommon ground between political action and transcendentalcontemplation. The familiar argument goes: the contemplative,attuned to the eternal rhythms of the cosmos, is a quietist who

intones, all is well and all shall be well; the activist, worried aboutlocal injustices, is a reformer who ameliorates a botched world.

The sense of the thing as a site of the sublime merges these twoviews. Perceiving in the particular a unique inflection of theeternal present, of infinite presence, one contemplates theintrinsic value of each being. Inspired by this vision, one engagesin activitiesartistic, philosophicalthat open others to theimportance of the singular. These activities are political, for theyconnect the same to the different, the habitual to the strange.

Unlike Blake, who learned his vision of particular from his artisticdiscipline, Emerson gleaned his theory of the thing from hisscientific studies. Neglected in discussions of the politicalEmerson, the sciences emerging at the turn of the nineteenthcentury significantly informed how he came to apprehend therelationship between the many and the one, individual and thecollective, the bounded and the boundless. To study Emersonsidea of the political life in the contexts of his embrace of certaintrends in early nineteenth-century science is to find the thirdterm capable of bridging the ostensible gaps between

transcendentalist and reformer, idealist and pragmatist.

Recent theorists such as Katherine Hayles have cautionedagainst connecting politics and nature.(27) This admonishmentgrows out of fear that organic visions of nature, in which partsmove only in relation to a whole, translate to totalitarian states,in which the whole determines the motions of the parts. Yet, thisfear is based on a limited idea of the organic. One can see an


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organic universe as a system in which a homogeneous spiritdictates heterogeneous forms. But one can also view a livingcosmos as a tense, dynamic, unpredictable interaction betweenboundless energy and bounded form, abyss and pattern, chaosand order. In this latter case, individuals are not mere exponents

of a stable whole but non-identical eddies on tumultuous current,paralogical sites of stasis and flux. As Jean-Francois Lyotard hasargued, a politics of emancipation might correspond to thiscosmosa vision skeptical toward totalizing narratives andattuned to the strange differences of particulars.(28)

As Emerson knew, several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientistshungered for the sublime. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant not only

inaugurated a Copernican revolution in epistemology. He also contributed to a major

scientific upheaval: the removal of matter as substance. Countering the Newtonian

dogma, Kant claimed that matter is force, a field of energy in varying degrees of densityand rarefaction.(29) He was not merely speculating, but rather drawing from his 1755

Theory of the Heavens, in which he had concluded that the universe is an evolving

plenum of attractive and repulsive forces.(30) This theory was substantiated by WilliamHerschel in a 1789 paper entitled Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens, in

which he describes the heavens as a luxuriant garden ceaselessly germinating,

blooming, fading, and reviving.(31) As Joseph Priestley found in his experiments onplants, as above, so below. Describing his discovery of photosynthesis inExperiments

and Observations on Different Kinds of Air(1776), he showed that plants, like humans,

live and breathe.(32) At about the same time, Goethes scientific studies led him to

conclude in On Morphology (1823) that Nature has no system; she hasshe islife anddevelopment from an unknown center to an unknowable periphery. Emerging from an

abyss to an ungraspable end, the cosmos nonetheless thrives in polarized rhythms

centripetal and centrifugal forces at creative odds.(33) This emphasis on abysmal yetpolarized energy over mechanism extended even to geology, whose leading exponent,

Hutton, demonstrated in his Theory of the Earth (1788) that the earth is a

metamorphosing pattern of infinite durations and forces.(34)

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The most powerful instances of this vision came from the scientists of lightning,

who found the secret of matter and perhaps life itself in boundless galvanic currents. In

1807, Davy discovered chemical affinity: electricity combines certain elements while

dividing others. This revelation inspired him to conjecture in hisElements of ChemicalPhilosophy (1812) that matter is not comprised of corpuscles but rather of physical

points endowed with attraction and repulsion and therefore capable of being measured

by their chemical relations.(35) A few years later, Faraday found evidence for Davyshypotheses. Drawing from H.C. Oersteds 1820 discovery of the equation of electricity

and magnetism and from A.M. Amperes articulation of the electrodynamic law during

the same year, Faraday in 1831 discovered electromagnetic induction. As he later argued


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in a paper published in hisExperimental Researches in Electricity (1831-52), this finding

proved that electromagnetic currents fill all space.(36) He explains this theory further in

an 1844 essay entitled A Speculation Touching Electric Conduction and the Nature ofMatter: [M]atter fills all space, or, at least, all space to which gravitation extends. . . for

gravitation is a property of matter dependent on a certain force, and it is this force which

constitutes the matter. In that view matter is not merely mutually penetrable, but eachatom extends. . . throughout the whole of the solar system, yet always retaining its own

centre of force.(37) An atom, then, is not solid but a bundle of force, a discernible

pattern of infinite energy, discrete and distributed simultaneously.

Emersons studies in these sublime sciencesespecially those of Goethe, Davy,and Faradayrevealed to him that things are not isolated atoms but unique bundles of an

unbounded field.(38) Objects are not nouns but verbs, not states but events: tense

coincidences of energy and form, centrifugal and centripetal force, stream and vortex. AsEmerson proclaimed in an early lecture, The Naturalist (1834), the whole force of the

Creation is concentrated upon every point. A plant, for instance, is a pattern of vast

agencies of electricity, gravity, light, and affinity.(39) In another early talk, TheHumanity of Science (1836), Emerson maintains that each thing inflects an abysmal

power pervading nature from the deep centre to an unknown circumference (EL 2:29).

He still confirms such ideas in a late lecture, Perpetual Forces (1862): though the fruit

falls from the tree without violence, lightning fell and the storm raged, and strata weredeposited an uptorn and bent back, and Chaos moved from beneath to create and flavor

the fruit (W10:60). Between these pronouncements, Emerson in 1841, in The Method

of Nature, says that things are mixtures of order and turbulence:

The wholeness we admire in the order of the world is the result of infinite distribution.Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is perpetual

inchoation. Every nature fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is anemanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could standstill, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind,

would be crazed (CW1:124).

Singular events are curling waves on an ocean beyond sounding. This sense informs this

terse claim, from the 1841 Circles: There are no fixtures in nature. The universe isfluid and volatile. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit (1:89).

Emerson knew that he could only achieve these sublime visions through attention

to particulars. Even in the rather abstractNature of 1836, Emersons famous vision is

dependent upon intense perception. He turns into a transparent eye-ball, becomingnothing to see all, while closely registering the minutia around himthe bare common,

snow puddles, the crepuscular half-light, the cloudy sky. Attending to these details, he

escapes the egocentric abstractions that reduce the world to a double of self. Dropping hismean egotism, he realizes that his particular being, like all particular beings, is a unique

inflection of the currents of Universal being: a manifestation of an energy that is eternal

not bounded the burden of the past or the fear of the futureand infinitenotconstrained by where it has been or where it is going (N12-13). Later, in the 1841 Self-


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Reliance, Emerson turns the twilight meadow into a morning rose: Those roses under

my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they

are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it isperfect in every moment of its existence. Most men miss this instance of pure presence,

for they do not live in the present but with reverted eye lament the past, or stand on

tiptoe to foresee the future (CW1:38-9). Grasping the abstractions of memory andprediction, these men cannot be happy or strong, a state that comes only through living

with nature in the present, above time (39). Still later, in the 1844 Nominalist and

Realist, Emerson proclaims that nature resents generalizing, and insults the philosopherin every moment with a million fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as man is a

whole, so is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. . . . You are on thing but nature

is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not remain orbed in a

thought. . . . She punishes abstractionists (2:139). Static concepts fail, as Emerson adds,before particular men, who, like particular things, contain somewhat spheral and

infinite (140).

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Emerson in transcendentalist pieces like The Over Soul (1841) favored the idealover the real. In reform lectures like The Fugitive Slave Law (1851), he hailed concrete

protest over abstract theorizing. But sometimes Emerson drew from his scientific studies

to combine these two modes. Only through intense attention a particular thing or person,can one break through to the eternal present, infinite presence. Only through embracing

each thing and person as an intrinsically valuable inflection of sublime being can one

become sensitive to the value of existence.

These related ideas inform Emersons overt political statements. In Self-

Reliance, Emerson expresses skepticism toward political institutions, for they requireconformity and reductionthe conformity of a heterogeneous mixture to an ideology,

reduction of teeming particulars to two principles, us and them, good and evil. Theseforms of society, liberal or conservative, are in conspiracy against singular presences,

against the thousand-eyed present. Self-reliance is the aversion to these ideologies. It

mimics the whims of the morning rose, the flowers untimed, unspaced spontaneity,

instinct, and intuition (CW1:29-32, 37). Hence, as Emerson proclaims in his 1844Politics, the less government we have, the better. The ideal government is

befriended by the laws of things and thus organized by the universal fact of two

poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal. Reflecting these oscillating polarities,this government is not ideological but regulative: a flexible structure that fosters the

growth of the Individual, that allows creative antagonism among heterogeneous

factions without allowing one faction to overpower the others (2:126). As Emerson addsin New England Reformers, also from 1844, only non-conforming individuals, not

official governments or ideological institutions, can bring this ideal political body into

existence. While party men reduce themselves to abstract principles and thus commit

intellectual suicide, individuals, like the auroral roses they imitate, might achieve totalregeneration. Open to vital currents of each unpredictable moment and point, they reform

with each fresh word and gesture the original energy of being (2:154-5).


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Does this mean that all spontaneous actions are political? The unconscious

rhythms of nonhuman nature are obviously apolitical. However, when a human animal,

self-conscious, tries to perceive immediately the pure present and attempts to participatein the curious processes he senses, then he moves toward a political consciousness close

to that of Blake. He tries to live in such a way that he does not hinder others with his

egocentric abstractions, and he engages in activities that shatter the narcissisticconceptions of his fellow citizens. Attempting to merge his gnosis of the morning rose

and his desire to ameliorate the lives of others, Emerson works to reform aesthetically

to awaken his audiences to the political life through his art.

This does not mean that Emerson pens dogmatic political statements. On the contrary,through his notoriously cryptic, contradictory, uncanny style, he awakens his readers to

the irreducible indeterminacy of words, to the sublime strangeness of the image. Perusing

dense pieces likeNature, Self-Reliance, Experience, and Fate, one often feels asone does before a blur of colors by Pollock or a stark square of Malevich. One beholds

suchness unadorned, concreteness so immediate that it resists interpretation. One

experiences what Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space calls the poetic image, aunique reverberation of being so striking that it challenges intellectual categories. The

poetic image quivers with an unrepeatable novelty. It is an unpredictable, disarming

eruption of fresh experience that cannot be causally connected to what has come before

or what will come after.(40) Wanting his books to smell of pines and to resound withthe hum of insects (CW1:34), Emerson in his essays created aesthetic arrestings of

prefabricated abstractions. This aesthetic, profoundly non-didactic, is deeply political, a

call to release things to be what they are.

8

Take, for instance, the transparent eye-ball passage. Though this sequence mayby now seem almost a transcendentalist clich, an abstract formula of Emersons

philosophy, it is in fact perpetually irreducible to cogent interpretation. It arrests like thecrepuscular cloud, jolts like the blowing rose. Notice the first sentence of the passage:

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite

space,--all mean egotism vanishes (N12-13). Enacting in language the transformation of

ego into nothing, Emerson employs a dangling modifier. He does not provide thesubject, I, that the phrase [s]tanding on bare ground clearly modifies. The I falls

away. Yet, it immediately reappears in another form: I become a transparent eye-ball; I

am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am partor particle of God (13). How can Emersons visionary be both nothing and something,

formless and formed? Moreover, if he is a purely transparent lens, and thus unable to

reflect light (and thus blind), how can he see anything, much less everything? Either he istotally transparent and therefore both blind and clear-sighted, or he is simultaneously

transparent and opaque and hence actually capable of sight. We further ask: As a

current of the Universal Being, is this visionary a physical flow, an electromagnetic

current, or a divine power, a spiritual draft? Finally, why is the visionary part orparticle of God? If a part, is he then a synecdoche of God, a cogent pattern revealing and


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containing the whole? If a particle, is he a speck or fragment broken from a whole, and

thus separate from God?

Emersons language here is a striking particular, anuncommonly arresting disclosure of natures turbid harmonies.

Like all disarming eventsa cloud gloomy and on fire, an auroralrose quiveringthe passage reveals what is always already trueof everything else, all other things, though hidden, lurking understiff abstractions. Emersons eye-ball passage, like many of hisespecially intricate linguistic sequences, functions like a sublimeeruption, an event that stuns one to the core. Such explosionsmove beholders to consider the possibility that all matterpatterns immense energy, that all material forms are polarizedthat all things, properly, intensely seen, are unique inflections ofeternity, infinity.

In the transparent eye-ball sequence, Emerson, like Blakebefore him, demonstrates how aesthetic power can becomepolitical inspiration. He and Blake do not crudely maintain thatpolitical art relies on political dogma. Their respective aestheticdisciplines gain political power by transcending didactic politicalstatements.

Joyces Stephen Dedalus is the best guide to this paradox:the most apolitical art is the most political art. In chapter five of

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), Stephen propoundshis aesthetic theory. He claims that the aesthetic event is notkinetic, a spur to desire or loathing, but static, an arrest of fearand desire. Kinetic art is improper art because it is eitherpornographical or didactic, inciting the urge to posses, to go tosomething or the impulse to abandon, to go from something.In this way, all overtly political art is improper, for it is bothpornographicalproposing that this ideology is desirableanddidacticarguing that thatideology is deplorable. Feeding thefearing and desiring ego with comforting abstractions, politicalstatement divorces from the concrete, turns men and mollusks toghosts.(41)

In contrast, proper art disarms abstractions by brieflyarresting the fears and desires that generate didacticism andpornography in the first place. For instance, tragic pity does notevoke a desire toward a suffering object but arrests the mind inthe presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human


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sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Likewise, theterror evoked by tragedy does not induce an aversion from thefearsome event; rather, it arrests the mind in the presence ofwhatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unitesit with the secret cause. In the same way, comedy does not

encourage temporary pleasure or pain but stills the mind beforewhat is constant in human joy.(42)

9

These proper arts elevate the mind beyond fear and desire, didacticism andpornography, through their revelations of the concrete resonances. What Stephen calls the

esthetic image first strikes the mind as a luminously selfbounded and selfcontained

event arising uniquely from the immeasurable background of space and time. It shinesas this thing and nothing else. It is one whole. It possesses integrity, integritas. The mind

follows the immediate perception of the synthetic whole with an analysis of

apprehension, an attention to how the parts cohere into the whole, how the whole

gathers the parts. The image now appears as a complex, a harmony of many and one. Itmanifests consonantia. After one has immediately perceived the image as one thing and

mediately apprehended it as a consonance of whole and parts, one is finally struck by its

shimmering claritas, its radiance as this thing and nothing else, its unique whatness,quidditas. Only this image, here, now, merges parts and whole in quite this way. Only

this event, in this instant, devoid of past and future, only this place, beyond surroundings

and horizon, inflects existence, life, being, in this particular manner. The mind beholdingthis thee-fold beauty experiences the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a

spiritual state. . . [an] enchantment of the heart.(43)

Stephens radiance, emerging from a concrete experience of a particular image, is

akin to gnosisa sudden insight into the engaging mystery of this particular resonanceand no other. This aesthetic gnosis releases eventsthings and peoplefrom the tyranny

of abstraction, the prisons of ideology. Inspired by Blakes suns and grains of sand, by

Emersons bare common and his blowing rose, this vision is a momentary liberation ofevents from edicts.

Following Blakes prophets and presaging Joyces Dedalus, Emerson envisions a non-

representative government: a civic body that resembles a natural event in presenting the

unpresentable, patterning the ungraspable, and merging the irreconcilable. Though thisrepublic is ideal, it is a horizon toward which one can pragmatically pine. Political

ideologues will likely avoid as jejune a banner boasting kiwis and petunias, a sunspangled with angels, a snow puddle in the evening. Yet, the engaged artist might

cultivate in the blighted world a startling vision of a rare stalk, here, in twilight, under acloud. From this sight might spring a democracy, gnostic, liberating abysmal things from

the deceptive abstractions concocted by tyrannical demiurges.


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Spiritual History

of Ice (publisher'slink here)

10

Notes

1. Ginsberg told this story in a graduate seminar on the Beatliterature, which he taught at the Graduate Center of the CityUniversity of New York, where I was matriculated as a Ph.D.student.

2. I do not recall if it was Ginsberg who wanted to featurebanners with fruits and flowers or Bob Dylan. Regardless of theparticulars of the story, Ginsberg was certainly in favor of thisform of protest.

3. Im obviously being rather reductive hereindeed, ratherabstractin designating only two main political camps: theconservative and the radical. Clearly, not all conservatives merelyembrace the status quo and not all radicals simply rebel against

the system. Likewise, there are many nuanced positions betweenthese two extremes. In this essay, however, I have for the sake ofconcision and clarity deployed this distinction that Emersonhimself uses in The Conservative (1841): the distinctionbetween the conservative and the radical. For Emerson, this isthe archetypal conflict in the political arena, between thecentripetal pull of the conservative and the centrifugal counter-
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pull of the radical. Though no one falls purely on one side or theother and though everyone bears elements of both sides in hisperspective, these oppositions, simplified as they are, stillpossess explanatory and rhetorical power.

4. The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform,ed. T. Gregory Garvey (London and Athens: Univ. of GeorgiaPress, 2001). The essays in this fine collection explore, as T.Gregory Garvey says, the relationship between Emersonsunderstanding of genius and practical power as a means ofintegrating the substantial body of scholarship that explainsEmersons transcendentalism with recent scholarship that hasbegun to recover his advocacy of abolitionism and other socialreform movements. At the heart of the connection between theessays in this volume is the authors desire to understand how

Emersons reform activism emerges out of his transcendentalismand how the transcendentalism that he developed early in hiscareer shaped his involvement in reform movements during laterperiods (xi). In my mind, the only problem with this otherwiseexcellent connection is that it does not address how Emersonsinterest in the thing, informed by his embrace of science,affected his political vision.

5. This is a point that will become clear later, but it is worth mentioning now: throughout

this piece, I use gnostic as a generic term to designate a certain set of assumptions,

regardless of historical era: one, the origin of the cosmos is not a harmonious One or anorderly Jehovah but an ungraspable abyss containing all oppositions; two, this abyss doesnot manifest itself in the world as good as opposed to evil or matter opposed to spirit but

rather in pairs of mutually interdependent contraries; three, each being in this cosmos is a

pattern of this abyssnot a unit of fallen matter separated from eternal harmony or Godand thus a coincidence of opposites, a microcosm of the macrocosm; four, this abysmal

energy can be revealed and channeled by certain arts. I use the related term Gnostic as

a more specific term to signify the historical phenomenon known as Gnosticism, whichlargely took place in Alexandria and Rome in the second and third centuries A.D. The

Gnostic vision of course shares many elements with the gnostic one. Still, Gnostic is

more interested in revising Judaism and Christianity than is the gnostic. Likewise, the

Gnostic tends to be more averse to matter than the gnostic, and thus more hierarchical,more willing to say that matter is evil and spirit is good.

6. There have of course been excellent studies of Emersonspolitical vision. None, however, has attend to how Emersonsseemingly apolitical sense of the thingemerging from hispassion for natural scienceinforms his idea of the political. Forme, the most profound and provocative meditations on


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Emersons politics are Stanley Cavells Emersons ConstitutionalAmending, in Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson,

Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 12-41; and GeorgeKatebs Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, CA: SagePublications, 1995). Cavell in this essay discusses the ways in

which Emersons aversive philosophical style turns away fromreductive concepts and thus enacts the difficulty of being freeofendlessly facing the vital skepticism that accompanies onwardthinking. In a similar fashion, Kateb argues that Emersonsmental self-relianceas opposed to manual, physical, orpractical self-relianceis a powerful political act, for itunselfishly studies the very root of the democratic vision: theability to experience plurality, conflict, and debate withoutgrasping hard to one view that violently excludes all others. Notsurprisingly, not all critics have been so well-disposed toward

Emersons political thinking. Maurice Gonnaud in hisAn UneasySolitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph WaldoEmerson, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald (Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1987) (first published in French in 1964) explores thecontradictions plaguing Emersons supposed liberalism, hisconstant oscillations between revolution and reaction, especiallyon the question of slavery. Quentin Anderson in his elegant TheImperial Self(New York: Knopf, 1971) suggests that Emerson, inhis desire to transcend culture, was politically anemic, an overlyabstract thinker with no attachment to the everyday (48-51).

More recently, Christopher Newfield in The Emerson Effect:Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago and London:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) disparages Emersons ostensiblecelebration of democratic freedom as a ruse for his realconcern: to preach submission to preestablished and unequalconditions (2). This wide variety of responseand these are onlya few among many responses to Emersons politicssuggest thatnone of them is sufficient. However, if, as Kateb urges, Emersonis the American Shakespeare, then he seems to posses thequality that Keats found in the Bard: Negative Capability, an

aptitude for being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, withoutany irritable reaching after fact & reason. Certainly Emersonprobably inhabited each of these positions at particular times,and never settled once and for all on any one of them. Given thispluralism, it appears that Cavell and Kateb are closer toEmersons spirit than Gannauld, Anderson, and Newfield. I hopein this essay to inflect Cavells and Katebs senses of Emerson


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through Emersons interest in the political possibilities of thething.

11

7. William Blake, TheComplete Poetry and Prose of WilliamBlake, ed. David V. Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom (Berkeley andLos Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 641.

8. Blake, 647.

9. My remarks on Blakes senses of the concrete are largelyinformed by Northrop Fryes still brilliant study Fearful Symmetry:

A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947),3-30.

10. Edmund Burke inA Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of OurIdeas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), defines thesublime thus: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas ofpain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible,or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manneranalogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it isproductive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable offeeling. Kant in Critique of Judgment(1790) encounters thisempirical sense of the sublime by claiming that [s]ublimity. . .

does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind,insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior tonature within, and therefore also to nature without us.

11. Blake, 39.

12. Blake expresses this ideathat abstract Philosophical andExperimental perception reduces experience to repetitioninThere Is No Natural Religion (1788) (Blake, 2-3).

13. I am here also influenced by Frye, 45-8.

14. Blake, 601.

15. Blake, 71.

16. As Blake claims in Milton (1804), when Urizen rebels againstthe other forms of life, or ZoasLuvah (emotion), Tharmas


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(sensation), and Urthona (imagination), Urthona immediately fallsinto space and time, divides into male (Los) and female(Enitharmon), and gives birth to Orc the revolutionary (Blake, 97-8).

17. Blake gives this account of seeing the sun in his description ofhis painting,A Vision of the Last Judgment, now lost (Blake, 565-6).

18. For a good discussion of Blakes Gnostic influences, seeKathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (Princeton: Bollingen Press ofPrinceton Univ. Press, 1968), and Paul Cantor, Creature andCreator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). For Emersons relationship to thisesoteric tradition, see Harold Bloom,Agon: Towards a Theory of

Revisionism (London and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981) andArthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance(London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

19. Of course, Michael Allen Williams in Rethinking Gnosticism:An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category(Princeton, NJ:Princeton Univ. Press, 1996) argues that Gnosticism as it isusually conceivedas a cogent theological rebellion of thesecond and third centuriesdoes not really exist. He shows howthe movements traditionally housed under the concept of

Gnosticism are simply too heterogeneous to form a cogentmovement. Williams is convincing in questioning the idea thatGnosticism is a homogeneous phenomenon. However, untilanother, more accurate term emerges into the lexicon, I feelconstrained to use Gnosticism (or gnosticism [see note 5]) torefer, however loosely, to the set of ideas that I discuss in thefollowing paragraphs.

20. Tertullian,Against Marcion, The Ante-Nicene Fathers:Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, eds.

Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: W.B.Eerdmans, 1979-82), vol. 3, pages 272-285.

21. The Secret Book According to John, The Gnostic Scriptures:Ancient Wisdom for a New Age, trans. and ann. Bentley Layton(New York and London: Doubleday, 1987), 28-38.

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22. To sense immediately the heterogeneity of the Gnosticmovementranging from matter-hating dualists to monistshoping to redeem the cosmosone needs only to glance at thevaried works in The Nag Hammadi Library, gen. ed. James M.Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990) or in The Gnostic

Scriptures. For an excellent, and moving, account of theheterogeneous fecundity of the Gnostics, see Jacques Lacarriere,The Gnostics (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989).

23. Lacarriere claims that for Valentinus, the awakened man stilllives in the material world but is totally freed from the fettersand corruptions of material nature (69). Likewise, Hans Jonasstates that in the Valentinian speculation, matter would appearto be a function rather than a substance on its own, a state oraffection of the absolute being, and the solidified expression of

that state (174). As we shall see, Thomas also views matter as away of seeing more than as a stable substance. In the cases ofboth Valentinus and Thomas, matter is negative only when it isframed as a fixed abstraction; when it is freed into concreteperception, it becomes a positive pattern of the divine.

24. Valentinus, The Gospel of Truth, in Layton, 253, 257.

25. Thomas, Gospel According to Thomas, in Layton, 385, 394,387, 394.

26. I borrow this phrase from Emerson, via F.O. Matthiessen.Emerson in The Transcendentalist (1842) states that OurAmerican literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in theoptative mood. Mathiessen borrows this for the title of his firstchapter in his still magisterialAmerican Renaissance: Art andExpression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941).

27. Katherine Hayles, Introduction: Complex Dynamics inLiterature and Science, Order and Chaos: Complex Dynamics in

Literature and Science, ed. Katherine Hayles (London andChicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1991), 15.

28. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Reporton Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. ofMinnesota Press, 1985), xxiv-xxv.


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29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (New York: St. Martins, 1965), 279.

30. Kant, Theory of the Heavens. Kants Cosmogony as in HisEssay on the Retardation of the Rotation of the Earth and Natural

History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. W. Hastie, ed. Willy Ley(New York: Greenwood, 1986), 59-70.

31. Sir William Herschel, Remarks on the Construction of theHeavens, William Herschel and the Construction of the Heavens,ed. Michael A. Hoskin (New York: Norton, 1963), 115.

32. Joseph Priestley, Priestleys Writings on Philosophy, Science,and Politics, ed. and intro. John A. Passmore (New York andLondon: Collier, 1965), 140-9.

33. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Problems, Goethe: TheCollected Works: Scientific Studies, vol. 12, ed. and trans.Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988), 43-4.

34. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth.John Huttons System ofthe Earth (1785); Theory of the Earth (1788); Observations onGranite (1794), intro. Victor A. Eyles (New York:Hafner, 1973),304.

35. Sir Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy. TheCollected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, vol. 4, ed. John Davy(London: Smith, 1839-40), 39.

36. Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity.Great Books of the Western World, vol. 45, eds. Robert MaynardHutchins, et al (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 265-85.

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37. Faraday, A Speculation Touching Electrical Conduction and the Nature of Matter,

Great Books of the Western World, 855.

38. For Emersons rich and complex relationship to this science tradition, see Eric

Wilson,Emersons Sublime Science (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999),76-97.

39. I use the following abbreviations in citing Emersons works throughout the remainder

of this essay.


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CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E.Spiller, Joseph Slater, et. al., 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA,and London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press,1971- ).

EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. StephenWhicher and Robert E. Spiller, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA,and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959-72).

N Nature: A Facsimile of the First Edition, intro. JaroslavPelikan (Boston: Beacon, 1985).

W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. EdwardWaldoEmerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4).

40. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas,fore. Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xi-xiv.

41. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York:Everymans Library, 1964), 256-7.

42. Joyce, 256.

43. Joyce, 266-8.

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