Q minus A

[apologies that this is rough & tumble & hardly refined.  still getting started.  : )]
I've finally gotten through Emerson's "Self-Reliance."  The familiar messages are against conformity, against imitation, anti-society but pro-Man.  cf "Self-reliance is [conformity's] aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." [I'm including this quote because it's explicitly anti-label/type/"identity"] The lecture is largely in the imperative and kind of jumps around to the same message (variations on a theme).  It was an essay that turned me off on a number of fronts but also really intrigued me as being sort of a kindred spirit to certain thoughts that I'm having.  Namely, he is so aphoristic and despite his claims that class and societal virtues like a continental education and travel arent' worth a sniff, he's so so so elitist.  So it's really soaring language about destinies and being true-- but there's this (obvi) radical individualism and political libertarianism that is quite frankly really off-putting ("are these my poor?").  He critiques society as being a "joint-stock company" in which everyone puts aside his own interests for the collective one-- so what seems to be a critique of capitalist-style publicness is SO darn capitalist (every man for himself)-- neoliberallike, even.  So okay, having the "do I like him or not?" stuff out of the way, he is making a lot of interesting claims for what makes one who one is, and how that "identity" interfaces with societal categories or "communities of opinion"; part of his commitment to radical individualism is a rejection of the notion that one must decide or act consistently over time (i.e. that one's actions/decisions would fit into a coherent pattern or type).  Rather, he says, we should aspire to "neutrality,"confronting the situation anew each time and frankly think, intuit, and perceive, making the "necessary" choice without any external influence shaping our action/decision (it's a fantasy, oh yes).  So rules, duty, custom, precedence, etc. are all enemies to the man who wants to be a man.  Temporally, this is a modus operandi that is located firmly in the present: something like "take every moment as it comes"-- he likens memory to a dead corpse we carry around with us, yeesh.  He's saying this about memory insofar as it encumbers our present conduct. [note: his account is self-consciously shocking, I think, in asking us to sever all ties that may encumber our being ourself-- including familial ties.  kind of buddhist this way]

But okay, right, the desire to cast off behavior that is performed according to a template, by saying we must be radically what we are (and we are what we are), his thought has a special affinity to attempts to get away from personhood understood through identity categories.  The transcendentalism comes in with the paradoxical belief that in being radically myself, I am like everyone--in that everyone enacts and is the presence of the divine on earth.  Secularized, one might liken this to a conceptualization of everyone as life worth protecting (one of the axioms of, say, human rights).  [there are a lot of problems with the human rights paradigm but that's another post].

So yeah, this vision of idiosyncratic "identity" is what I want to add to my repertoire of ways to think about people.  One of the metaphors he uses is the rose-- a rose is a rose, and another rose isn't better at being a rose than the first.  It's a desire to evacuate value from being oneself.  And for humans, it actually, I would argue, wants to close the gap between being and potentiality; it is very much possible to be all that you can be by being WHAT you are; that is, it's not a beyond-one's-reach telos where you need to "live up to" your "best" self.  It's about immanence, ironically enough, rather than striving/self-cultivation, as a lot of the classical ethics are.  Be true ("authentic"), not good.  This is of course a singularly American desire, esp when he's scorning European aesthetic judgments-- don't try to be as refined as Europe, America.  Be America.  Do you.

Or something.

Posted by margaretlouise at 9:46 AM  

Labels: 19th century, american renaissance, democracy, education, life, society, transcendentalism