The Thoreauvian Saunterer

Tolstoy Reading

Tolstoy read both Emerson and Thoreau and admired them immensely. He included excerpts of their writings in his Wise Thoughts for Every Day, a book that may serve as a kind of Tolstoyan lectionary.

Emerson and Thoreau

In a single line, Harold Bloom cogently summarizes the relationship between these two founding figures of American cultural particularity:

"Almost all post-Emersonian writers of real eminence in American literature are either passionately devoted to [Emerson] or moved to negate him, rather ambiguously in the stances of Hawthorne and Melville, but fiercely in the case of Poe and most southerners after him. (Emerson shrugged off Poe as "the jingle man".) At every lunch that I happily shared with the poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren, he would denounce Emerson as the devil. Warren was anything but dogmatic, whether on literary or spiritual matters, but he blamed Emerson for the murderous John Brown - whose violent crusade against slavery sparked the Civil war - and for most of what was destructive in American culture. C. Vann Woodward, a historian of extraordinary distinction, told me many times that Emerson could not be forgiven for the essay "History", which never ceases to give me joy with its opening sentence: "There is no history, only biography." On the other side, there is the testimony of Whitman, celebrating Emerson as the explorer who led us all to "the shores of America". Thoreau and Emily Dickinson can be said to evade Emerson, but only after absorbing him, while Robert Frost was the most exuberant of all affirmers of Emerson. There are too many to cite: no single sage in English literature, not Dr Johnson nor Coleridge, is as inescapable as Emerson goes on being for American poets and storytellers" [emphasis added].

Well Worth Re-Visiting

Harold Bloom on Open Source Radio (2005):

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Part Five.

Part Six.

George Herbert Mead

Entry from the Encyclopedia of Marxism:

Mead, George Herbert (1863-1931)

American pragmatist social psychologist, founder of Symbolic Interactionism.

Mead studied at Oberlin College and Harvard University; 1891-94 taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan; 1894 -1931 at the University of Chicago.

Mead’s main contribution to social psychology was his attempt to show how self-consciousness arises through interaction with others. He thought that spoken language played a central role in this development. Through language, the child can take the role of other persons and guide his behaviour in terms of the effect his contemplated behaviour will have upon others. Mead indicated this idea in the relation between the “I” which is the subject of action and the “me” which is constituted by the reaction of others.

Mead was influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity and the idea of “emergence”, holding that a thing’s properties emerged as objective properties, but only under specific conditions.

Mead’s works were published only after his death, when his students edited four volumes from stenographic recordings and notes on his lectures and from unpublished papers: The Philosophy of the Present (1932); Mind, Self, and Society (1934); Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936); and The Philosophy of the Act (1938).

Site: http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/m/e.htm#mead-george-herbert

The Most Dramatic and Difficult Trial of All

"However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the 'simplest' acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading--the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their 'absences of works'" --Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 15-16.

The most dramatic and difficult trial of all is the [re-]discovery of reading and writing as modes of production. Producing what? The world and the self (the public and the private) as constituted by language. The deep irony of this productive activity is that the private self, insofar as it is constituted by language, makes itself available for public scrutiny. Public and private are not antonyms: privacy is, in actuality, a form of limited publicity. To the extent that it exists, it exists in the form of a secret. But every secret is potentially sharable. So privacy is a fragile thing: provisional in nature and always at risk of public exposure.

To "disclose" the self is to articulate it; to articulate the self is to invent it. When John Adams declared, "Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write," he invited his audience to the most dramatic and difficult trial of all: the self-invention that ensues when one accepts language's challenge to "go public."

And Let Us Never Forget Our Debts To Harold Bloom

Ranting Against Cant - The Atlantic

Reading Religion With Nietzsche

Nietzsche was, and remains, one of the most profound of modern religious thinkers. It appears that it was only with great effort of will that he was able to tear himself away from religious belief; once he had done so, he could never return to his former naivete or--pace Paul Ricoeur--find his way to a "second naivete." At the same time, however, the pull of religion was ever present:

"Dangerous game. Whoever allows room in himself again for religious feeling these days must also allow it to grow: he cannot do otherwise. Then his nature gradually changes: it favors that which is dependent on or near to the religious element; the whole range of his judgment and feeling is befogged, overcast with religious shadows. Feeling cannot stand still: be on your guard" (Human, All Too Human, 121).

Unlike Richard Rorty, Nietzsche was not at all "religiously unmusical." He had the "ear" for it, and it was that very "ear" that made him, in the end, more effective than Rorty as a religious critic.

"Change of roles. As soon as a religion comes to prevail, it has as its enemies all those who would have been its first disciples" (Human, All Too Human, 118).