1. “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and Human Immortality (1897, 1898; rpt. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1956), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

2. W 6: 53. For Emerson's works I use the following editions and abbreviations: CEC—The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Slater, Joseph (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964)Google Scholar. CW—The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Spiller, Robert, Ferguson, Alfred et al. , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. EL-The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Whicher, Stephen, Spiller, Robert et al. , 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1972)Google Scholar. JMN-The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Gilman, William et al. , 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982)Google Scholar. L-The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Rusk, Ralph L., 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

W-The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo, 12 vols., Centenary Edition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904).Google Scholar

3. For a discussion of the psychology that underlies Emerson's “search after power” and some further comment on the connection between Emerson and William James see my “Transcendental Failure: ‘The Palace of Spiritual Power,’” in Porte, Joel, ed., Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 121–53Google Scholar. Cf. Eric Cheyfitz's suggestion that “what constitutes identity for Emerson is power” or Laurence Holland's description of Emerson's writings as “a hymn to power,” cited in Cheyfitz, , The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 15.Google Scholar

In the recent collection in which he describes Emerson's legacy as “a metamorphic religion of power,” Harold Bloom writes, “With so fervent a vision of transcendence, there must be an implication of a radical dualism, despite Emerson's professed monistic desires, his declarations that he is a seer of unity” (Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982] pp. 162, 9.) That statement seems to me to be exactly right. Traditionally, even Emerson's most sensitive readers have taken him-as a descendant of both Plato and Jonathan Edwards-as ultimately in search of some kind of unity, an “ever blessed ONE”-ness (Emerson's phrase, CW 2: 40) of mind with nature, man with God, real with ideal; this unity, or, as Perry Miller saw it, “pantheism,” is understood to be the legacy of a Unitarian, Edwardsean, or even Augustinian tradition (see Miller's “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956], pp. 184–203).

Important recent studies of Emerson, however, show a decided change in perception. Eric Cheyfitz's The Trans-Parent attempts to record the “shifting imbalance of power” in Emerson's discourse and represents, as Julie Ellison has noted, “an encouraging shift of emphasis away from critical descriptions of fixed polarities toward the problem of why Emerson's antitheses are so unstable.” Ellison's own close reading of Emerson leads her to conclude that Emerson's “preference is clearly for antagonistic differences rather than organic integrations,” that the “oppositional tendency is one of the spiritual laws of [his] prose.” Ellison very carefully and persuasively charts the continuously reenacted pattern in which Emerson longs for or seems to come close to some kind of unity of conception or tone, or a final monistic vision of resolution, only to return to a vision of conflict or “binary opposition” where “discontinuity” and “aggression” can be reembraced and celebrated.

Ellison puts succinctly the point I wish to make here: “[Emerson's] expressions of an optimistic faith in dialectical synthesis should not be honored over his periodic recognitions of irreconcilable polarities. He alternates between hope for transcendent resolutions and skepticism toward them. When antitheses do issue in synthesis, it rarely endures for more than a paragraph; contradiction is no sooner resolved than it is repeated. Dialectic, by definition, cannot mean mere alternation, and so necessarily misdescribes prose that accumulates but does not progress. Emerson's writing can just as well be called antidialectical, for its possible unities continually break apart into antagonistic opposites.” See Ellison, Julie, “Aggressive Allegory,” in Raritan (Winter 1984): 100–15Google Scholar (quotation from page 102), and Emerson's Romantic Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 76, 87, 158, passim.Google Scholar

To emphasize Emerson as an essentially “antagonizing” mind (CW 3: 39)Google Scholar allows us, I think, better to appreciate the nineteenth-century perspective of his thought-a perspective he shares with William James and Nietzsche, as well as Darwin and Marx.

The whole question of whether William James himself would have considered Emerson or what he called the “Emersonian” state of mind as a mind intent on “reacting against something,” as I have characterized it, I intend to consider in another essay. Cushing Strout, in a provocative series of essays, suggests that the two polar temperaments of “idealist” and “materialist,” “tender-minded” and “tough-minded,” “the strenous will and the mood of ‘letting go.’” define James's own “eccentric position” as psychologist and philosopher. James, in fact, offered his theory of “pragmatism” as an attempted synthesis of the “tough” and “tenderminded” temperaments. I would argue that that same contradictory alignment of moods characterizes the work of Emerson-James's most central precursor. Strout cites Erik Erikson's general observation that “the functioning American, as the heir of a history of extreme contrasts and abrupt changes, bases his final ego identity on some tentative combination of dynamic polarities.” See Strout, Cushing, “Ego Psychology and the Historian,” History and Theory (1968): 281–97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; “William James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul,” Daedalus 97 (Summer 1968): 1062–82Google Scholar; and “The Pluralistic Identity of William James: A Psychohistorical Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience,” American Quarterly 23 (05 1971): 134–52Google Scholar.

For one of the few studies to treat at length “the image of the soldier” as “a virtual leitmotif within Emerson's writings,” see Edward Stessel's valuable “The Soldier and the Scholar: Emerson's Warring Heroes”-which came to my attention too late to take into account here-in Journal of American Studies 19 (08 1985): 165–97.Google Scholar

4. Egotism in German Philosophy (New York: Scribner's, n.d.), p. 72.Google Scholar

5. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), p. 170.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., pp. 172, 129, 92–93.

7. “Emerson the Lecturer,” in Literary Criticism of James Russell Lowell, ed. Smith, Herbert (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), p. 213.Google Scholar

8. Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 37.Google Scholar

9. See Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 191.Google Scholar

10. Cited in Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 98.Google Scholar

11. See Barzun, , Darwin, Marx, Wagner, p. 93Google Scholar. Cf. Emerson, in The Conduct of LifeGoogle Scholar: “The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war” (W 6: 71).

12. Aaron, , The Unwritten War, pp. xiii–xv, 25–30Google Scholar. Fredrickson, George's excellent The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965)Google Scholar should also be noted as an indispensable guide to “the New England mind” in the mid-nineteenth century. Fredrickson's comprehensive and discerning synthesis of the changing ways in which Northern intellectuals feared, then came to accept, promote, and value the war is the best single introduction to the issues I raise here. Fredrickson reconstructs the Northern intellectual's gradual acceptance of the war as the opportunity for an apparently lost generation of displaced, Brahmin young men-rendered obsolete and dissipated by the new American “materialism”—to regenerate and redefine themselves, to rescue themselves “from an aimless literary or scholarly existence,” and to demonstrate to society their superior value. “Warfare in India had trained several generations of British aristocrats to a stern sense of duty and obligation,” Fredrickson notes. “It was hoped that the American Civil War could do the same thing for at least one generation of American gentlemen.”

Fredrickson depicts the gradual societal acceptance of the moral value of the war and the new militarism and “strenuous life” it inspired, and suggests that Emerson's views “perfectly summed up” the general change in American thinking. Emerson's original anti-institutionalism and nonconformist ideal of “selfreliance,” Fredrickson argues, came instead to suggest the discipline of “the steady, obedient professional soldier.” Emerson embraced professional military training as, in his own words, the possible basis of “a true aristocracy of ‘the power of the Best’-best scholars, best soldiers, best engineers, best commanders, best men.” Fredrickson postulates a general transformation in Emerson's conception of “culture” from an individualistic “self-culture” to a new emphasis on institutionalism and organization.

Fredrickson's hypothesis of this shift in Emerson's thinking from one pole to another has validity, but it too easily imposes an overly general pattern on an imagination that seems always to shift between “culture” and “self-culture,” “nonconformity” and “discipline,” “war” and “unity.” I concur here again with Julie Ellison: She points out that the kind of general pattern of gradual transformation in Emerson's thought from one dichotomy to another, which Stephen Whicher postulated most influentially in his conception of Emerson's career as shifting from an allegiance to “freedom” to an acceptance of “fate,” evades “the central interpretative problem, namely, the constant tension between freedom and fate, convention and rebellion within each essay.”

Emerson clearly became more and more preoccupied with the idea of “war” as the actual war grew nearer, and his views may have become more emphatic. But his preference for “antagonistic differences rather than organic integrations” was nothing new and did not represent a new “development” in his thinking: It characterized his thought from his early journals and Nature of 1836 to the end of his career. Because Fredrickson follows Whicher in seeing Emerson's thought as a gradual movement from one pole to another, he is insensitive to the basic preference for conflict that marked Emerson's thought from the start. Fredrickson is forced to conclude that Emerson's capacity for welcoming the war and its ensuing destruction is something of a psychological mystery. Emerson's ability to see a positive good in the losses on the battlefield can only be ascribed, Fredrickson remarks, to “reasons that are not so clear and straightforward.” See Fredrickson, , The Inner Civil War, pp. 73, 80, 155, 176–80, passimGoogle Scholar, and Ellison, , Emerson's Romantic Style, p. 76.Google Scholar

13. The Unwritten War, p. xviii.Google Scholar

14. Abrams, M. H., Natural Super naturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 354, 358.Google Scholar

15. The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 290, 298Google Scholar. See also Emerson's praise for Luther's “warlike genius”: “He achieved a spiritual revolution by spiritual arms alone” (EL 1:140, 127).Google Scholar

16. The Christian Examiner (01 and 02 1824): 102–108.Google Scholar

17. Porter, David, Emerson and Literary Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Maclear, J. F., “The Republic and the Millennium,” in Smith, Elwyn A., ed., The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), p. 183.Google Scholar

19. See Tuveson, , Redeemer Nation, p. 78.Google Scholar

20. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 168–69Google Scholar. Fredrickson notes Horace Bushnell's enthusiasm, during the war years, for Roman military drill as a model “vast and mighty schooling of authority” for a newly “disciplined” and “loyal” society in which the institutional basis of both Christianity and the federal government could be renewed (The Inner Civil War, pp. 139–40). Fredrickson's study of the postwar shift in consciousness from the stubbornly individualistic, “anti-institutional” bias of Transcendentalism and the Jacksonian era to a new emphasis on “discipline,” organization, and a newly “institutionalized” and “professionalized” medical and military service is an interesting complement to Foucault's theories. So are the ideas of Michael Paul Rogin about Jackson's own “militarism,” which I discuss later in this section. See, particularly, Fredrickson's discussion of the growth and influence of the United States Sanitary Commission and “the sanitary elite,” as Fredrickson describes them, during the war and postwar years (pp. 98–112, 211–13).

21. Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 188, 236, 74.Google Scholar

22. Discipline and Punish, pp. 102. 194.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 29.

24. Ibid., p. 193; Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 123.Google Scholar

25. Discipline and Punish, pp. 170, 155, 165.Google Scholar

26. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 136, 142Google Scholar. “Turning the army into a family,” Rogin writes, “would help avenge the loss of [Jackson's] family” (p. 142).

27. Leo Marx notes that the “submerged metaphor” that gives Emerson's apostrophes to intellectual power their unique force is often technology, or “the rhetoric of the technological sublime.” See The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 195, 230–31Google Scholar. See also Joel Porte's discussion of Emerson's use of the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century notion of “spermatic economy”-that confusion of sexual and economic energy in which Jacksonian America conducted its debates on such crucial issues as the banking controversy and religious revivalism, in Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 209–82.Google Scholar

28. The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), pp. 318–21.Google Scholar

29. See Bouchard, Donald's introduction to Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Bouchard, Donald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 23.Google Scholar

30. A Grammar of Motives (New York: Braziller, 1955), p. 330.Google Scholar

31. James, , “Ivan Turgenieff,”Google Scholar cited in Schneider, Daniel J., The Crystal Cage (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), p. 70Google Scholar. See Schneider's chapter on “Warfare and Aggression” in James, 's fiction, pp. 70–95.Google Scholar

32. Power/Knowledge, pp. 114, 123.Google Scholar

33. A Grammar of Motives, p. 328.Google Scholar

34. Yeats cited in Kermode, , The Sense of an Ending, p. 98Google Scholar; Ibid.

35. “On War and Warriors,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra vol. 1, chap. 10Google Scholar. I have made use here of Kaufman, Walter's discussion of Nietzsche's alleged glorification of war in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 386–90.Google Scholar

36. Darwin, Marx, Wagner, p. 303.Google Scholar

37. The Sense of an Ending, esp. pp. 46–47, 172–73.Google Scholar

38. War and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), pp. 29–40.Google Scholar

39. American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 368.Google Scholar

40. See Anderson, Quentin, The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 3 – 58.Google Scholar

41. Introduction to Whicher, Stephen, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. xv–xvi.Google Scholar

42. Giamatti, A. Bartlett, The University and the Public Interest (New York: Atheneum, 1981), pp. 172–76Google Scholar; I refer to Professor Wright's comments on Emerson at the Cambridge Forum (“Emerson: Enemy of American Civilization?”), 12 2, 1981.Google Scholar

43. “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness, p. 188.Google Scholar

44. Feidelson, Charles Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 98.Google Scholar

45. Letter of March 1, 1842, cited in Porte, Joel, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

46. Cf. Emerson's journal entry for June 23, 1838, the month before “The Divinity School Address”: “I hate goodness that preaches. Goodnesss that preaches undoes itself.”

47. “Emerson,” in Partial Portraits, (1888; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 25Google Scholar. Cf. Joel Porte's characterization of Emerson as the representative “venturous conservative” of the Jacksonian era. Porte discusses the paradoxical moods of “carnival and atonement” as a “curious alternation or division in American character” (Representative Man, pp. 139–40)Google Scholar. Porte's analysis of “the spermatic economy” of the age and Emerson's dual impulses toward “expansion” and “contraction,” or the “spending” and “saving” of his “vital force,” is, of course, relevant here.

48. Porte, , Representative Man, pp. 234–35.Google Scholar

49. A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 56.Google Scholar

50. Cf. Julie Ellison's discussion of “the multigeneric quality” or “openly intertexual program” of Romantic prose generally, from Friedrich Schlegal and Coleridge, to Melville, Poe, Carlyle, and Emerson. “The Romantics' efforts to evade the strictures of generic categories led them to imagine an art that, because it absorbed all sorts of discourse, was outside the bounds of any.” To help explain Emerson's alternating moods and rhetorics, Ellison cites Oscar Wilde: “What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” See “Romantic Prose and the Artistic Critic,” in Emerson's Romantic Style, pp. 228–37.Google Scholar

Ellison reads Emerson's stylistic “heterogeneity,” his “fragmentation and recycling” of diverse genres, as a model example of this larger pattern of Romantic literature. Ellison perceives it as a central technique of the analytical nineteenth century's “age of criticism” to resolve its “anxiety of influence” and aggressively put to use what would otherwise seem an intimidating and inaccessible past.

51. Freedom and Fate, p. 57.Google Scholar

52. Santayana, George, Santayana on America, ed. Lyon, Richard C. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 258–59Google Scholar; Winters, Yvor, In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1937), p. 279Google Scholar; Feidelson, Charles, Symbolism and American Literature, p. 161.Google Scholar

53. Redeemer Nation, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

54. Feidelson, , Symbolism and American Literature, p. 160.Google Scholar

55. Deleuze, Gilles, “Nomad Thought,” in Allison, David B., ed., The New Nietzsche (New York: Dell, 1977), p. 142Google Scholar; Nietzsche, , Mixed Opinions and MaximsGoogle Scholar (168), The Gen alogy of Morals (vol. 2, chap. 12), and The Will to Power (633), cited in Allison's ntroduction, pp. xi–xxviii. Recent European interest in Nietzsche's theory of language arose, of course, after it had been established that Nietzsche had been misappropriated, largely through the unscrupulous machinations of the sister who survived him, and completely deformed by the fascists. Nietzsche's theory of rhetoric, far from making him the easily assimilated instrument of a totalitarian state, questions the veracity of all language, demythologizes all discourse, and makes impossible the practice of any type of propagandizing.

56. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1907; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1968), p. 50.Google Scholar

57. “The Lapses of Uriel: Emerson's Rhetoric,” in Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 1Google Scholar. I have taken some of my examples in the following paragraph from Professor Packer's perceptive essay.

58. Whicher, Stephen, introduction to Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. xxi.Google Scholar

59. Emerson and Literary Change, p. 201.Google Scholar

60. Consciousness in Concord (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 33.Google Scholar

61. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”; see Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 386–87Google Scholar, and Foucault, 's essay on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp. 139–64Google Scholar. I am indebted to Richard Poirier's suggestive analysis of Nietzsche and Foucault in “Writing Off the Self,” Raritan (Summer 1981): 106–33.Google Scholar

62. Henry Adams (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), p. 275.Google Scholar