HS American Transcendentalism and its Aftermath

Prof. Dr. R. Smolinski

Universität Potsdam, Amerikanistik

Sommersemester 1999

Christopher Gohl

Matrikel Nummer 136683

1. Challenge and Crisis of Democracy..........................................1
2. The Issue of Democratic Religio...............................................2

III. Alexis de Tocqeville........................................................................4

III.1 The Old Aristocratic, and the New Democratic World.......5

III.2 The Age of Inequality and Brilliance: The Aristocratic
State of Mind.......................................................................6

III.3 The Age of Equality and Mediocrity: The Democratic

Sensibilities.........................................................................8

III.4 The Remedy: Aristocratic Spheres....................................10

III.5 Democrats Thinking..........................................................12

III.6 The Democratic Inclination Towards Pantheism...............13

III.7 Democratic Philosophy, Unitarianism and Natural

Religion..............................................................................15

IV. Ralph Waldo Emerson..................................................................16

IV.1 The Nature of Emersonian Beliefs....................................17

IV.2 Fate and Freedom..............................................................18

IV.3 Right and False Ways of Reliance.....................................20

IV.4 Self-Reliance: Doing As The Genius Does.......................21

IV.5 At Odds With Jacksonian Democracy...............................22

IV.6 Self-Reliance as Method of Man Thinking -
Democracy as Self-Reliance..............................................24

V. Conclusion: Two Sides and the Midan Click.................................26

Bibliography

When the days of glory are gone by, what remains? When a New Jerusalem has been fortified and unified in successful defense, then how live Jerusalemites their everyday life? - When all battles for the hopes of a New World were won, and when with the burial of her leaders the glorious American Revolution of 1776 became but a memory, the citizens of these newly United States were faced with the daily business of democracy.

Democracy lives from the people and by the people - that is her promise as well as her fate. Average people are no heroes, and their concerns seem often petty and mediocre. Outstanding "aristocratic characters" disappear from the stage of history, and in those old halls of power, where a king once weighed the advice of his proud noblemen, that pack of common people now crowds together, loud and unrefined. Where once strode the hommes de honneur, now reign the trickings of triviality.

Or so some thought of the Jacksonian Age. This great and enchanting American project had been brought on its way: to build a city upon a hill, as Cotton Mather had envisioned - and what leaders it had brought forth: captains riding the tide of history, heroes of mankind, American statesmen such as George Washington and James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. But now what? A former General - coarse, unlearned, vulgar - was stomped into the White House by a new Democratic party. Andrew Jackson embarrassed all high-flying ideas of the nobility of the office of a President of these United States, of the dignity of a leader of a New Jerusalem. To the noses of Harvard-educated Bostonians from the Saturday Club, custodians of the holy grail of the New England legacy, this man's rise to the presidency in the year 1834 smelled of the "rabble of Irish and other unwashed immigrants". Was the rule of the rabble the aim and end of history? Was this the reality of the American project? What was to be done?

Speaking of the Jacksonian Age, the historian Lewis Perry identifies a "sense that America was being made anew, and not necessarily for the better". As Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked, was the 19^th century to be "a Contrast to the Eighteenth? Is it to extinguish all the Lights of its Predecessor?" Observes Perry: "The thought that the virtues of the revolutionary patriarchs were sacrificed to the excesses of democracy has nagged at historical consciousness ever since." This new epoch woke up to "the worries that the past is out of reach, conviction is often a sham, and the noblest expressions of ideals are just routines."

Out of the landscape of a glorious revolution America stepped unto the broad and open plane of today and tomorrow and did not know what to do and where to go. "Some leaders clung to the memories of revolutionary conflict; others observed a world in the process of remaking... for those who journeyed through the era, the ineluctable fact was that nothing was the same as it once had been." Were there any immediate urges of what was to be done to secure the success of liberty and democracy, or was this already the best of all worlds? What did it mean to be a man in democratic times, and what did it mean to be an American? Sensitive souls measured their answers only against the background of the progress and endurance of human civilization. One of these souls was Ralph Waldo Emerson of Boston. Another one was the Frensh traveler of America, Alexis de Tocqueville.

Both men reflected deeply on the features of the Jacksonian age, and both felt the personal challenge of the times: freed from the bondage of aristocratic societies, man was forced to face himself alone. "To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?", asked Emerson, perceiving the "terror of life". - And Tocqueville observed: "So any revolution, to a greater or lesser extent, throws men back on themselves and opens to each man's view an almost limitless empty space."

"Where do you stand?" - The answer to this question will describe a person in relation to other things. Who we are we explain by relating ourselves back to that which is thought to be known. We rely on entities or concepts outside of ourselves to define ourselves.

The advent of democracy had changed the nature of secular authority, and enlightenment had changed how man perceived of divine authority. Authority was democratized, had become personal, an individual matter: and now, what was fixed? What was to be believed in? What were the larger schemes of history? In this first intellectual crisis of modern democracy, men like Emerson and Tocqueville found themselves alone in history and with the timeless questions how to relate themselves anew in this world. As Carl F. Strauch noted, "it is commonplace that toward the close of the eighteenth century the Romantic order of dynamic unfolding superseded the static order of Platonian entities. Hence, in the the new, mobile, ever-changing universe, relations assumed paramount importance, whether in nature of society." Then, if democracy made each man equally responsible, how was he response-able? Whom was he to respond to, where and how should democratic man rely, and rely back: what was to be his "religio"? This paper shall take a look at the very issue that we may call "the issue of democratic religio".

Both Emerson and Tocqueville felt, expressed and addressed that existential difficulty of living in a young democracy. Both men were also travelers, Tocqueville as a Frenshman, Emerson as a lecturer. Both were colorful writers and creative thinkers. They actually met. And each one of them found his own distinct and time-transcending answer to the questions of where to stand and how to relate.

On the subject of progress, another foreign traveler and writer of the time, Frederika Bremer, noted two tendencies in American intellectual life: one was the tendendcy "to perfect man and human nature by means of social institutions", the other one the "perfection of society through perfection of each seperate human being". Tocqueville symbolizes the first approach. He advocated collective measures as a remedy to the needs of the time: institutions, civil associations, and habits of the heart are what determine our reliances. To short-hand his approach one can say he is (among many other things) a theorist of institutional determinism. In contrast, Emerson is a representative of the second approach, a philosopher of individual self-reliance: perfection comes from finding the inner truth, living a self-reliant, authentic life ("integrety", he calls it).

Though Tocqueville and Emerson share much in their Platonian analysis of the fragmented democratic lives, the two different approaches are representative for two schools of American democracy that have formed polar opposites in public debates until today. Tocqueville's more sociological approach is shared in outstanding books such as "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman and, more recently, "Habits of the Heart" by Robert Bellah. In the tradition of Emerson stand such eminent philosophers as John Dewey and Richard Rorty. This paper aims to discuss the differences as well as the commonalities of the respective original positions.

This paper then is an inquiry in "how people relate themselves" and others in and to times of change. Just what is the relation between self and society? The basic premise is that western democracies after 1989 have much to learn from old discussions of the timeless "existential democratic condition". The structures of thought and the mechanisms in which they play out can paradigmatically be observed in Tocqueville's and Emerson's works.

First we will inquire into "the horizon and the mechanisms of ideas" of Tocqeville, then into that of Emerson. What are their perspectives on the challenges of the day, and with what vocabulary do they relate to it? Concluding the two presentations, we look at important differences in their view of ideas such as religion, institutions, Truth, and history. Differences not-withstanding, the paper will aim to identify one important common feature of both the Tocquevillian and the Emersonian approach, and that is the recipe of the "Midan click".

From one old world Alexis de Tocqueville came into the second world, the New World, and had a keen sense of their differences. Born into an aristocratic family in post-revolutionary France in 1805, he grew up within the remains of the old aristocratic world. But what interested him throughout his life was the emerging new world of democracy. He was convinced that Providence had made democracy "an irresistible fact", but felt like a traveler in it. Paradigmatic is his visit to the New World of America in 1831 and the observations on "Democracy in America" which he published in 1835 and 1840. With a strangers' clear eye he provided the old continent of Europe with an extensive analysis of the nature of modern democratic societies. John Stuart Mill called him the Montesquieu of the 19^th century and saw the work as "the beginning of a new era in the scientific study of politics". Indeed, he became the founding father of political sociology.

Tocqueville describes two states of society: the aristocratic, and the democratic society. The upsetting of European aristocratic societies through democratic revolutions was a historical fact in the present day of Tocqueville. But beyond the historical dimension, the two societies form out "two social states", each with a certain set of characteristics in their members. In essence, the democratic man relates differently to his fellows than the aristocratic man. "The links which formerly bound men together have been destroyed or altered, and new links have been formed." How are people linked to one another, and to authority? On the answer to this depend all other conclusions.

This is the Tocquevillian perspective: His horizon is providential history as he sees it played out in Europe (especially France) and in America. Providence has just ushered in the democratic age the decisive feature of which is the "equality" of people. Gone are the inequality and bondage of aristocratic societies with the fixed aristocratic stations they provided; now, where all people are free and equal, they are also lonely. The opposing demands of liberty and of equality are storms on a levelled playing field, tossing people around and wearing them out with the strains of the "democratic condition". History is that strange competition of those universal ideas, liberty and equality, and the human condition is determined by the preconditions of equality and liberty. Tocqueville's theory concerns the mechanisms and effects of those precondition on people and their particular sentiments.

His much abbreviated argument is that human nature reacts differently to the aristocratic or to the democratic set of links. Tocqueville holds that it is necessary and good for a democratic people to hold on to some residues of aristocracy, chief among them religion. Aristocratic spheres can and should be retained. Whoever knows how to dwell in these spheres assumes an aristocratic state of mind. In the Tocquevillian dialectic between liberty and equality, these spheres of aristocratic patterns of reliance take on an important role as the safeguard of liberty and independence.

"Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link."

In aristocratic ages, "law (and) custom (hold people) on one place". They are "distinguished, by birth, standing or profession". The bonds hold them "firmly together": "In aristocratic ages each man is always bound by close ties to many of his fellow citizens...". Their respective stations in the long chain of links are fixed over generations, mainly through the respected person of the father. It is an age of inequality, one of clear and permanent limits, formalities and immbolitiy, but also one of mediation of authority:

This stability of the social place affords people a resting in themselves. They are not interested in gaining another social position, nor have they to fear the loss of it. That affords them "leisure time (and) taste" for ideas of greatness and strength, "time to think". Divine majesty, respect, nobility, benevolence, goodwill determine the social relations. The links between people themselves expressed certain ideas accepted by all - the relations of people with one another had an authority all of their own, and could be traced back at last to a legitimizing divine order:

Clearly, one side was privileged:

So it should not surprise anyone that "in aristocracies, men often have something of greatness and strength which is all their own":

When Tocqueville speaks of aristocratic ages and their social state, he usually refers to the realm of nobility, not to the "ignorant crowd". The most important features of the aristocratic social state to him are those which afford people the permanent and fixed resting place "above the crowd", lending them distinction, and time for "slow, deep thought", or "the calm for the profound researches for the intellect".

However, the most important aspect of that fixed position is that people are drawn out of themselves. They are led beyond themselves:

It is an idea of tremendous importance to Tocqueville that people quite literally transcend their own self. People ought to come together, take a public interest, get in contact, help one another - lest they "be shut up in the solitude if (their) own heart(s)."

"Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link." - "Equality puts men side by side without a common link to hold them firm."

Equality is the overriding characteristic of democratic ages. It is the decisive feature of the democratic condition. Where each man is as free as the other, he looses his distinction, and becomes weak:

The quest for distinction through money fits the democratic focus on material things, on interests of democratic people in the realm of senses, in the physical, material world. Satisfaction of the desires for wealth and power, gain, and worldly goods, is supposedly leading to happiness:

Indeed, equality is "a social state in which neither law nor custom holds anyone on one place, and that is a great further stimulus to this restlessness of temper." But living in a "continual activity" means dullness and mediocrity of mind. There is no place for great ideas:

Equality, then, has very negative effects: it " isolates and weakens men", because for one, they are leading an unstable life. Secondly, as one consequence of their independence, they also become lonelier:

Democratic man turns "all his feelings (...) in on himself" and "finds his beliefs within himself", which will have consequences for his thinking about the world, for their philosophizing.

Thirdly, "the long arm of government reaches each particular man among the crowd seperately to bend him to obedience to the common laws...". So he is more vulnerable as a citizen.

It is no charming image of democracy that Tocqueville paints. Characteristic for the Tocquevillian democratic sensibilities that people form out are the feeling of weakness, of loneliness, that restless searching for material happiness, mediocrity of mind, insecurity about one's identity, and loss of historical perspective. For all the negative side effects, Tocqueville yet accepted the historical progress of equality as providential in nature. He did see that the former servitude of the crowd was ended, and though society became less "brilliant" because "almost all extremes are softened and blunted", he resigned himself to sighing:

Tocqueville also offers one remedy to the democratic age: keep some spheres aristocratic in structure. Keep some spheres where institutions of aristocratic nature provide for fixed relations, for a time of rest above the crowd, a place that distinguishes us and leaves space for deeper thought, and for true, concrete human commitment that draws us out and beyond ourselves.

There are several resources against that democratic weaknesses. One is the feeling of pride, a common sentiment among democratic people. People strive to be different, necessitating inequality at last:

In the end though, this leads to the restlessness described above.

A second resource to draw people out of themselves is to form civil associations and start taking interest in the common public affairs:

Finally, there are "the aristocratic institutions" that help people to assume an aristocratic state of mind. Aristocratic institutions for Tocqueville are those which give the individual a home "beyond and above man's lot", a feeling of belonging to a superior group, a stability outside the vast democratic entity with its constant restlessness. It is, in a sense, the consciousness of distinction and particularity, as opposed to the unmediated experience of oneself as one insignificant and weak member among many others in the democratic mass of people.

Examples of such aristocratic residues that Tocqueville advises democratic people to be kept are the family, property (especially estates), the legal profession, and, especially, religion.

Religion, for Tocqueville, was "the most precious heritage from aristocratic times":

In other words, religion prevents people from the materialistic self-occupation with themselves, and provides a landscape for the mind that reaches beyond the daily horizon of democratic self-interest. It is here where great ideas and abstract principles have their origin.

Even more important, religion is an institution with another important function: it provides men with dogmatic beliefs. Dogmatic beliefs are common ideas and bind a body social together, and religious dogmatic beliefs are the most important ones:

Tocqueville's understanding of religion not as limitation but as pre-condtion of freedom is expressed most beautifully in his statement: "It is true that any man accepting any opinion on trust from another puts his mind in bondage. But it is a salutary bondage, which allows him to make good use of freedom."

With a distant oberserver's view Tocqueville did not hesitate to assess the effects of the democratic condition on philosophy. Flatly out declaring that "the Americans have no school of philosophy peculiar to themselves, and they pay very little attention to the rival European schools", he concedes that "is is noticeable that the people of the United States almost all have a uniform method and rules for the conduct of intellectual inquiries. So, though they have not taken the trouble to define the rules, they have a philosophical method shared by all." The general characteristic of that method is that "in most mental operations each American relies on indiviudual effort and judgement... America is the one (country) in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed."

The premises of the philosophical approach are the democratic conditions leading man to introspection: for one, detachment of democratic man from "his ancestors' conceptions"; secondly, lack of conceptions typical for a class because of lack of class, and thirdly lack of interest in the minds of a fellow citizen because of their similiarity: "they do not recognize any signs of incontestable greatness or superiority in any of their fellows." Consequently, "each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world", indeed forms a mental habit of relying on himself alone.

Several principal characteristics for the American philosophical method can be identified. Among them are "to escape from imposed systems" such as the yoke of habit, family maxims or class prejudices, to treat tradition as valuable für information only, to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, focus on the results rather than on means, and "looking through forms to the basis of things", which is "truth". The method here described "was discovered when men were beginning to grow more equal and more like each other" and is thus "democratic".

This philosophical method is complementary to the ways in which people view religious and secular authority. Tocqueville is quick to point out that religion and the morals derived from it has been spared the nagging force of the know-no-respect democratic philosophical method for historical reasons: "But Christianity itself is an establisehd and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend." Philosophy and religion do respect their respective domains. Tocqueville endorses the American respect of Christianity (which for him is the synonym of religion) and recommends that some beliefs be kept as dogmas, because they tie people together as the most important of all "leading ideas".

On a secular level, other leading ideas are often interpreted and expressed through "public opinion", which itself is the only "intellectual (meaning: secular, C.G.) authority to which they submit." Democratic people "find it hard to place intellectual authority beyond and outside humanity". - "That the majority can be mistaken once, no one denies; but they think in the long run it will be right."

For a variety of reasons, "Americans show more aptitude and taste for general ideas" than others. A society that learns a many particular truths everyday "is naturally led to entertain" more general ideas: "One cannot see a multitude of particular facts without at last discovering the link that connects them." Since all people are equal they are also similar, and truth observed on oneself can be applied to everyone else: and it becomes "the blind passion of the human spirit to discover common rules for everything, to include a great number of objects under the same formula, and to explain a group of facts by one sole cause."

Methods and means, finally, play a role in the content of ideas that are attractive for a democratic mind. For example, Tocqueville observes that Americans believe "that everything in the world can be explained and that nothing passes beyond the limits of intelligence", leading also to believe in the doctrine of human perfectibility at the end of the path of enlightenment.

Tocqueville observes a philosophical inclination towards pantheism, the belief that "includ[es] God and the universe in one great whole." Pantheism, considering "all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him", is a seduction to the democratic mind, Tocqueville argues: the plurality of the democratic experience is reduced to one single cause, which is the principle of the general idea carried to its extreme. It is an easy explanation that bothers not with details, "fosters pride and soothes the laziness of their minds," and "the concept of unity becomes an obsession."

Tocqueville's angry argument on equality and philosophy should be noted with caution. First of all, he makes the same observations on equality and religion in his chapter on "Religion and Democratic Instincts":

Here, Tocqueville makes no effort of criticism of the concept of unity. He instead launches a historical observation on the development of Christianity that only reveals that he is arguing in favor of Catholic religion and its kind of equality and Creator. The only difference between Catholicism so defined as compared to pantheism is that here, God here is the Creator whereas there, it is an "immense Being" and in any case not a catholic one.

It is likely that Tocqueville feared that democratic philosophy could become a rival of religion. He, who maintains that American democracy is so successful because of a strict seperation of religion from secular (intellectual) life, spends no more than one single page of discussion on the danger of the pantheistic tear-down of that seperation, and the democratic inclination towards it. Why he resigned himself to such quick an argument in Democracy in America makes one wonder whether Tocqueville feared the consequences of playing out the setup he described.

What is interesting here and in preparation to Emerson is that in letters to his friend Beaumont, he speaks of Unitarianism in much the same way as pantheism and admits to being very puzzled by it. Unitarianism also was the subject of his discussion with former president John Quincy Adams. Tocqueville was struck by two features of Unitarianism: for one, Unitarians "deny the Trinity and recognize only one God, there are some who see in Jesus Christ only an angel, others a prophet, others, lastly, a philosopher like Socrates." Hence: "They are pure Deists", are a sect which is only Christian in name... they speak of the Bible because they do not wish to shock public opinion... to deeply." Secondly, and important for our argument here, he saw Unitarianism as "the last link that seperates Christianity from natural religion". Unitarianism, with its belief in man's inherent perfectibility rather than his depravity, was as close to pantheism as one could get. Then, how close are democratic philosophy and "natural religion"?

What distinguished Unitarianism from pantheism was that it was the work of reason and logic, "of men whose habits are intellectual and scientific". In contrast to a lazy democratic philosophical pantheism, it was an entirely philosophical faith, and quite on the other end of Tocqueville's own faith, catholicism, a faith he subsumes under the title "authority", and the specific faith which features qualify Tocqueville's view of all "religion".

In an effort to reconstruct Tocqueville's views on the development of religion, one can argue that democratic conditions seem to hasten the advent of the unification of philosophy and religion into one form of natural religion like pantheism (surely something Tocqueville was not too keen to point out to his fellow Frensh Catholics). Democratic philosophy strives to ground the plurality of the democratic condition in concepts taken from the religious sphere with its aristocratic structures: unity, as in One Last Cause; fixed (hierarchical) relations, which can be recognized, categorized and traced back from specific form to underlying idea; and clear moral consequences determined by the set-up of the universe. In short, democratic philosophy "democratizes" and secularizes faith and access to the Truth, and there is hardly a need for (catholic priestly) mediation, but a pantheistic focus on Nature as the location of divine revelation.

Alexis de Tocqueville the Catholic from the Old World showed no great sympathy towards that development. In contrast, the New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson spent his life building the very temple of such democratic philosophy.

Much about Emerson has already been said above. He shared Tocqueville's analysis of the democratic condition, especially on the loneliness of democratic man. And as Tocqueville predicted, he reacted in the fashion of a democratic philosopher. He was concerned with an individual, self-reliant, unmediated and authentic connection to God, whom he called the Oversoul, and whom one could find in the experience of Nature. Emerson had been a Unitarian priest and indeed viewed Jesus as a philosopher. He believed in the perfectibility of man and despised scoietal habits and institutions. He was deeply influenced by the pantheistic movements from Europe that Tocqueville had referred to (the Transcendentalism of Kant and the the German idealism starting with Goethe, both merging in the thoughts of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte). And he also believed in the determinism - he called it "fate" - that played out through the setup of the universe and the current of time.

Tocqueville's perspective casts a bright light on Emerson. Surely, taking a Tocquevillian perspective on a historic American figure as was Ralph Waldo Emerson presupposes that the social, political and intellectual world of democratic America put its stamp on Emerson. That assumption can be challenged on the grounds that in his work, Emerson aimed to transcend the particular circumstances of his time. The spheres he sent his mind to explore were inhabited by timeless ideas and eternal great men. Should one not meet him there, instead of in the passing circumstances of Concord, Massachussetts?

The answer is "No": Emerson observed of his great men that they were not only representative but participants of their time, and took pains in his portraits of them to describe their situation. He himself was also concerned with issues of his time and place (slavery and abolition, or the duty of an American Scholar). It is therefore entirely consistent with Emerson to research the time and place that spoke through him.

Yet, Tocqueville's observations do not do justice to Emerson. They illuminate much about him, but they don't do justice to the majesty of Emersonian thought. His was a "mind on fire", and Unitarianism lacked that fire. He resigned from his ministry in 18VVV because he thought it too cold and logical. And though Tocqueville had predicted that pantheism did away with the individual in favour of the species, Emerson was an intellectual founding father of individualism in the United States.

To illustrate Tocqueville's intellectual perspective on his time, we referred to his origins as a Frensh nobleman. To demonstrate Emersons approach we will take a stroll through the nature of his beliefs about the world out there. The following argument shall here be abbreviated: Between the antagonistic and polar forces of fate and liberty, man facing an existential situation seeks to find his place and destiny as an organ of divine activity. This is the Emersonian set-up, the fundamental human situation. The mechanisms that then come into play concern the reliances and attachments of the self in the face of fate and freedom. To find the pre-destined place and thus harmony, man must have no false attachments that hinder him to seek and find his place, but he must be a Man Thinking, a self-reliant man receptive to the plurality and polarity of existence. If he embraces his individual condition and lets his life be an expression of it, he does like a genius, and a harmonic social order will follow.

With one central quote we can lay out most of the issues here discussed:

Fate and liberty, these polar opposites; the polar truths; reconciliation, harmony, individuality, private solutions, and a method of reflection: the following discussion shall weave them together. Now, what is the human condition?

"Whatever limits us, we call Fate". Fate are the "laws of the world" with their "irresistible dictation". Great men and great people have always known that "'whatever is fated, that will take place'", as Emerson quotes the Greek Tragedy. Fate plays out: Natural desasters wipe out whole tribes of men as a frost kills crickets; our bodily design, "the scale of races, of temperaments; ... sex, ... climate", heritage, they all add up to a "mountain of Fate". Emerson even speculates that our political dispositions are physiologically determined, for Fate conditions: healthy and young men are progressives, conservatives "have been effeminated by position or nature... and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."

Fate is "Circumstance", and "the Circumstance is Nature", "Nature is the tyrannous circumstance", "what you may do." - "The book of Nature is the book of Fate". We are conditioned by the circumstances, and they may be cruel: "Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us." "Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals, - in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation."

"But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits", because we live in a dual world, and "power" is the other side of existence. Power as "the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him", is in man. While Fate is circumstance, there is also spirit in man. Both play out in Man, who is

The thought, the spirit, the lightning ("this maker of planets") - it is a ride to man's freedom. If we are to spite the Circumstances and insist on choosing and acting, indeed: on living our lives, then we need to open "the inward eye ... to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law", to see "that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best." When we think, Emerson says, then we accept and embrace the law of universal Unity, and we live in it the way we breathe the air.

What is the Unity, and what is the law? There is an "immense intelligence", "the common origin of all things", "the common cause" behind it all, inaccessible by intellectual inquiry but known to us through intuition (very much in the spirit of Kant's transcendentalism). Christians called it God, but to Emerson it is the Oversoul, something that transcends the practice of any particular Christian sect. All our souls are part of that oversoul: rays of that sun we are, streamlets of that one eternal Source, sparkling drops of that mighty timeless Fountain, and the variety of our existence can be resolved into the everblessed One, in that unity of all. Man is (but or not but) a divine idea. We are the "organs of divine activity", of that "deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go".

In Emerson's thought there is such a paradox as "human fatedness to freedom", as Stanley Cavell has called it. Freedom can and will be achieved in and from the lap of fate wherein we lie. Indeed, it nurtures us:

We feed off its eternal principles, and if we turn ourselves into organs of the divine activity, we embody them and become wholly ourselves, wholly who we are and are meant to be, wholly individual men. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Hence: you yourself and the triumph of principles must become One. Man must relate, must rely on the underlying principles. This, he does by the way of self-reliance.

Freedom can be achieved through self-reliance in action, and even more so in thought: "So far as a man thinks, he is free... The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom." Emerson, as a Man Thinking, was a free man. Freedom comes from acceptance of our state of "existential indebtedness", as George Kateb has called it. Self-reliance means to be attentive to one's own position and role in the grand large spectacle of life. To find one's own individual way means to avoid false reliance: conformity to tradition and societal laws, and to be independent of conventions. Find your inner power, the "Aboriginal Self" in each one of us, and be hallowed by getting in touch with the Oversoul, by opening yourself up to the "self-operating force of moral law", as Perry Miller has called it:

Too often, we have false reliances, observed Emerson: reliances on government, on property, on opinions of others, on habits, on tradition. We are "parlour soldiers", "city dolls", "timorous, desponding whimperers, afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other", we are "postponing life". America, in the view of the enlightened Emerson, was a "mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America", a world of "trade, entertainment and gossip", a "masquerade" with its "tambourines, laughter and shouting". Clearly men rely on everything else but themselves. The division of labor had "Man metamorphosed into a thing, into many things". Society is deceiving, is "smooth mediocrity, squalid contentment", is appearances: "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE."

How then do we realize that relation to the eternal ONE? In a very Platonian line, he asks that we "say to them, o father, o mother, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Hence forward I am the truth's." It does take a strong mind to think for oneself, and not to give in to societal pressure, and to trust only oneself. A man who is a genius gives us the examples: "we owe the genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and pedlars". When we do like a genius, then "let us astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within."

And where do we put ourselves "in communication with the internal ocean"? There is no better place than nature, which "in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf." And if a man seeks his essence, then let him do so in nature among the unchanged essences. Let him have "intercourse with heaven and earth", and let him retain the "spirit of infancy", where "the sun illuminates [not] only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child." - "But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will seperate him and vulgar things."

Detaching ourselves then from false reliance on false appearances, we are advised to leave behind society with her conformity, leave behind all terrors that keep us from self-trust: the reverence for our past, the actors' word, the "corpse of memory", in short: "enjoy an original relation to the universe", "beh[o]ld God and nature face to face", "have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of [the foregoing generations]". Then, do not be afraid of inconsistency: because "to be great is to be misunderstood". One needs to insist on oneself ("Never imitate!") "I must be myself", to live in my own truth, "be doctrine, society, law to yourself", because "a true man is the centre of all things!"

Nay, Emerson is above all cheap egotism or egoism. He is opposed to enlightened conceptions of instrumental rationality, cold reason, materialism, economic gain, and maximizing one's interests. All of these conceptions deny the transcendent reality that is the horizon of Emersons thought ("'Tis the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us.") If there is any recklessness at all about him, it is the recklessness of a genius: "Genius is a character of illimitable freedom", and: "To Genius everything is permitted, and not only that, but it enters into all other men's labor."

IV.5 At Odds With Jacksonian Democracy
How reconciled himself Emerson the genius with the performance of

pettiness and mediocrity that the Jacksonian democracy symbolized? That is the question Perry Miller asked in his "Emersonian Genius and the American Democracy." Emerson, a member of the distinguished Boston Saturday Club, despised Jacksonianism. He thought American presidents notoriously "unfit" to hold the presidency of the United States. To his friend Thomas Carlyle he reported Andrew Jackson in 1835 to be "a most unfit person" for the presidency. Emerson would have fully agreed with Tocqueville who wrote in January 1832 after meeting with the President that Jackson remained "a man of violent character and middling capacities; nothing in the whole of his career indicated him to have the qualities for governing a free people; moreover, a majority of the enlightened classes in the Union have always been against him." Emerson later thought just about that of the presidents Pierce and Polk, and later even of Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot refine Mr. Lincoln's taste, extend his horizon, or clear his judgement; he will not walk dignifiedly through the traditional part of the President of America, but will pop out his head at each railroad station and make a little speech, and get into an argument with Squire A. and Judge B..."

He not only detested the persons holding presidential office but the whole style of party politics that was ushered in with Jackson's capture of the White House. "Ancient privilege was ripped away", "the Age of the Common Man" had begun "when those who had been shut out from power broke through traditional barriers", writes Lewis Perry. Political parties started using accusations to create loyalties and charged that "one's opponents were deceiving the public, acting out of 'aristocratic' greed, and destroying liberty". Perry Miller sums up Emerson's views by saying that "the Whigs had the best men, the Democrats had the best cause. The scholar, philisopher, the man of religion, will want to vote with the Democrats, 'but he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as representative of these liberalities.'" The refined Whig party died out soon enough.

"In the clutch of such reflections, Emerson was frequently on the point of making democratic naturalism signify an open, irreconcilable war between genius and democracy", observes Perry Miller, and continues: "he dallied with the solution that was always available for romantic theorists, that some great and natural genius, out of the contempt for the herd might master them... Cromwell was never out of Emerson's mind." But Emerson did not give in for two reasons: one was that a genius was not to be a hero but a "representative". The second was that in essence, democracy meant liberty and equality and thus self-reliance for all people.

Before being a hero, a genius was a "Representative Man", which is the title of Emersons collection of portraits of famous men, among them Plato, Goethe and Napoleon. Each genius expresses but one accentuated part of ourselves, and as all sides of life are to be expressed, and all together geniuses are representatives of all sides of life. Therefore, "genius is fragmentary, and so deficient on several sides." Genius is democratic: it does not surpass its constituency but represents it. And his failures are part of his record. And so Jackson and Lincoln and the other presidents could be seen as representatives still, and heros yet.

On an even more general basis, democracy embodied the principle of self-reliance: "The root and seed of democracy is the doctrine, Judge for yourself. Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of that doctrine, where it has any effect (which is rare), to insulate the partisan, to make each man a state..."

In other words: democracy, in its last consequence, holds every single man accountable and responsible. If man recognizes and accepts this democratic condition of being accountable, he will thereby accept that which is the root and seed of Emerson's guide to life: "Judge for yourself." His essence on Self-Reliance opens with the recommendation "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense". Give an "independent, genuine verdict... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

George Kateb calls Emerson's individualism, understood as realexistierende self-reliance, "democratic individuality", and his philosophical reflection "democracy of the intellect" (5). He makes an intriguing argument for Emerson as a "democratic thinker": Self-reliance, Kateb argues, becomes "an intellectual method, a method of truth". At the core of self-reliance is a proper engagement with truth. Self-reliance is our method of relating to truth, it is a philosophical method:

In variety, we recognize Unity, and in Unity, variety. Emersons "habit of mind" (R.A. Yoder) was characterized by this "thinking in polarities". He is no one to supply doctrinal conclusions: "His belief in the possibility of truth requires him, he thinks, to commit himself only for a time to a particular value, principle or idea (...), and then to a contrasting one for a time, trying at the same time to withhold a final judgement, a definite assent, whenever possible," interprets Kateb. Even though values, principles and ideas can be at odds with any other, "taken together, they are forces 'by whose antagonism we exist'". We are to oscillate between the extreme polar points, as Emerson has suggested in the intorductory quote above. Kateb calls this method of thinking "sympathetic withholding" of commitment to only one value, principle or idea. It means "the readiness to treat with sympathetic understanding ideas and values that have no sympathy for one another," and thus "to embrace as much as (...) possible". Kateb concludes: "(Emerson's) receptivity, his power of uncommitted sympathy, is democracy. Receptivity is the highest form of self-reliance."

When our minds are kept open and receptive, we avoid coming to the world "fully armed with dogma and preconceptions." Emerson's "great lesson is that some large part of the interest or fascination in the world comes from the fact that meaning or beauty or truth can be found in conflicting or incompatible ideas, principles, forces, practices." Self-reliance thus means embracing the democratic condition with its complexity, its turmoil, and human unpredictability. From Kateb we take our conclusion:

In democracy, the possibility of self-reliance, of embracing the fragmentation of existence and thereby connecting to the transcendent unity beyond, opens up to anyone. Thereby, democracy has the capacity to move history forward towards a world in which everyone is properly located, where everyone is "placed where he belongs".

We have taken the liberty here to read the Tocquevillian narrative, and the Emersonian clusters of ideas from distinct perspectives: from an individual democrat's viewpoint the Tocquevillian treatment of socio-political conditions of a young democracy; and from a political point of view the Transcendentalism of Emerson. Other perspectives will illuminate many other sparkling and brilliant ideas in the treasure of these texts. Our aim here was to inquire into the relations and reliances of democratic man.

We have read these texts - and had good reasons to do so, I hope - as if there was something we may call with all caution a "totalizing experience": man's experience on the horizon of history. Something larger is unfolding: Fate and the divine will in Emerson's case, in Tocqueville's view that providential democratic equality.

Man amidst these currents of change must seek reorientation, we have said. Who is he - how is he to relate? The Emersonian problem here was to lead a life not wasted in conformity but to find to an enriched individuality. The Tocquevillian problems were the loss of all distinction and particularity and the resulting solitude and mental mediocrity. Emerson's central question in this matter is: "What can I do to achieve individuality?" and Tocqueville's important question is: "What societal arrangements do we need to achieve distinction?" In their perspectives and answers, they differed.

For Emerson, religion is, beyond Christianity, an invitation to the self to rely the self, and indeed, to constitute an individually distinct self by relying on it. His approach is the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am", as Tocqueville had predicted (or observed?). We transcend our democratically busied selves and catch glimpses and moments of the beyond (they can merely be moments, Emerson himself insists). The knowledge of transcendent reality through instinct and intuition turns our life into something meaningful, because we tap into the undercurrent of life, hitch ourselves on to transcendent principles and are thus in harmony with the world.

For Tocqueville, religion is Christianity is ideally Catholic and is mainly worth its functions. For one, religious dogmatic ideas are the most important of all general ideas. But the "great usefulness" of religions extends to other functions: they contribute to happiness and dignity of man because the bring democratically isolated people together again, draw them away from their lonely introspection as well as from their love of material pleasure, and "lift the soul into regions far above the realm of senses" and the "daily turmoil of worldly business." As any other institution (family, property etc.), religion provides for an aristocratic sphere of fixed relations and provides the democratic self some peace and meaning.

Both Tocqueville and Emerson share one recipe: they answer to democratic sensiblities (feelings and needs) with an "aristocratic sphere of repose", as we might call it metaphorically. This aristocratic sphere forms around unquestioned or unquestionable transcendent things, be they structural fixpoints, or be it a current. In any case, they supply moments of repose and security, and open the door to true meaning and freedom (important and interrelated concepts for both writers. We could call it the "Midan touch" or the "Midan click": man in unrest, man in disorder escapes the existential condition of facing his loneliness and imperfection by re-alliance or re-attachment to an order (a divine and natural order in Emerson's case, a social arrangement - an institution as well as a "general idea" or dogma - in Tocqueville's case). In other words, with the "Midan click" we enter that home of unquestioned principles - the aristocratic sphere (in a metaphorical sense), spanned by either Truth/Oversoul (Emerson), or held up by dogma and other fixed institutions (Tocqueville).

Tocqueville's case is one of outer reliance with inner consequences. He recommends fixation through social institutions, calling for "dogma" when it comes to religion: Affix yourself to unquestioned facts (dogma, history, love of family ect), and your restlessness and solitude will cease. Emerson's case is an example of inner reliance with outer consequences: when we perform the exercises to experience authenticity, called "integrity", such as walks in the woods, journal keeping, familiarity with culture, we are getting in touch with Truth beyond. We are tapping into the currents of the oversoul, and as a consequence, things will all fall into place, and society assume its proper and harmonious order. The Midan click here comes through Truth experienced individually.

To Tocqueville, the realm of aristocratic spheres is merely an escape from the unalterable democratic condition. But to Emerson, it is a real option in human history, and an option already open for moments for the individual. Not the specific ingredients, but the "recipe of answering the existential democratic conditions" are the same.

Tocqueville, of course, rejects the Emersonian undertaking as impracticable: "Only minds singulary free from the ordinary preoccupations of life, penetrating, subtle, and trained to think, can at the cost of much time and trouble sound the depths of these truths that are so necessary." And Emerson would have answered that the reliance on habits, on institutions held high up by Tocqueville are but a mere show of sham and shadows that keep human beings forever in that Platonian cave, and hinder the progress of history towards harmony.

Two great conflict lines can be distinguished between Emerson and Tocqueville. One is their horizon of history. For Tocqueville, (providential) history is coming to that gentle close of democratic equality where the best hopes of man lie in aristocratic institutions maintained. For Emerson, human history is still perfectible through individual greatness through human authenticity. The second conflict is their personality and religious background - the aristocratic Catholic here, the democrat from New England there. Tocqueville's mind is a machine grinding problems of the democratic age, producing predictions on the social forms and structures the solutions will or should take, the distant observer of this New World. Emerson's mind is imaginative and creative, a whirlwind blowing off the dust of conventions, breaking through the crust of habits and repetitions, his spirit unfolding as his nation unfolds. He engages the individual in a comprehensive personal search for truth - a very Protestant exercise indeed.

In the end, Tocqueville and Emerson have taken a look at the issue of democratic religio from opposite directions: how does man relate himself and his particular sentiments to universal ideas? How comes he from the unsettled "democratic condition" to some "aristocratic repose"? Where does he stand between the particularities of his life and universal Truth? In postmodern times, where man and finally, woman must make more self-determined choices than ever before, it may be a treasure found again to discover that we may need reliance (Tocqueville's "salutary bondage") in order to be free. We may also learn from this inquiry here that democratic religio remains manifold between the polar opposites discussed here; that both man's critique of the other is on the mark; and that it is up to us to seek and choose religio in democratic times whereever we may. - We close with a journal entry of Ralph Waldo Emerson from the autumn of 1841: