Becoming that endures or non-hubristic plasticity?

: Emersonian non-willing

perspectivism in the ecological 19th century

_________________

All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not

only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in
increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress
towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.
Marx

What is a farm if not a mute gospel?

Emerson

Introduction

A scientific study of the relation of living organisms to each other and their

surroundings, ecology is the sub-discipline of biology concerning systems that sustain

life-supporting functions on the planet (climate, water, soil, food and medicine) and it

is a discipline that considers other natural features of scientific, spiritual and historical

value. ‘Oekologie,’ Ernst Haeckel’s quotable legacy coined in 1866, was created

from the Greek root oikos, to refer to the relationship of an animal to its inorganic

environment and its organic environment. It was a new word that challenged the

latter half of the nineteenth century to integrate a modern German understanding of

natural history within a discipline already taking on new formations due to Charles

Darwin’s concept of adaptation and the evolutionary treatise. The German context

and prehistory to nineteenth century debates is integral to our understanding of Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s proto-ecological thought. Self-organized arrangements of

individuals into complex hierarchies of processes and patterns, defined by the web,

matrix, or community that maintains relations was a new paradigm in systems theory

that integrated intellectual debates concerning politics, nature and human dependency

1
on the material realm from which it had alienated itself (via technology) during

publication of the century’s cornerstone ideas of Karl Marx and Emerson. After

reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Haeckel returned to Jena, a

1
powerhouse of German Idealism, and subsequently published his ideas on

recapitulation: that phylogeny (evolutionary development of a species or other group

of organisms) and ontogeny (development of individual organisms) are intertwined.

Concerned with the degree to which influences of the environment act upon

organisms, and as an intellectual contributor to a highly charged debate on the

mechanism of forward progress of evolution, Haeckel injects the concept of biological

evolution within the developing understanding of oikos in the nineteenth century; the

resultant effect being that a cultural sense of oikos, or home, is remodelled as the

interdependent affordance for and constituent bi-product of ecological and economic

relations over time – two words with the same prefix (eco) etymologically derived

from the Greek (oikos). Emerson’s cultural perspective contains these elements as he

looks at life broadly conceived.

Marx’s reading of the actuarial capitalist imaginary outlines a sense of predation

within the original acts of enclosure of the colonial organism that despoils living

energy and engenders dispossession and uniform, homogenised citizenship. Harvey

argues that Marx’s assertion that these acts (“primitive accumulation”) are one of the

fundamental contradictions of capitalism, also conceives them as original sin that

triggered the system into being but were thus viewed as actions that would not recur

subsequently. This focus on origin is blindness for Harvey, blindness that obscures

the “organically linked, dialectically intertwined” (176) character of struggles in the

1 Between 1787 and 1806 – a century before Haeckel was in Jena – Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, von
Schlegel, and Schiller were teachers there at the university.

2
ongoing fields of reproduction and enclosure. 2 Furthermore, this sustained power-

geometry of despoliation through accumulation for short-term gain is echoed within

dialectical relations between material conditions and human well-being throughout

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it can be figured as the backdrop to the

insurrectionary agency of the oppressed and the anti-capitalist stance currently

forming localised interstices within a global framework (the internet): this devolved,

variegated politic mirrors a consciousness that finds an expression of the ontological

alternative to succession, development, progress and individualism as the one and the

multiple where life is viewed less in transition and more as becoming that endures

(Deleuze Bergsonism 37). This process centric relationism has its forbear in

Emersonian Idealism.

Emerson speaks of the rotation of thought and the resources it draws upon (lines of

philosophy and literature) reconstituted into new forms as union. In an age that can

be viewed as a moment in history in which the mind comes to see itself, “The

Transcendentalist” (1841) has Emerson using the image of shells on a beach as a

temporary white colony to evoke ideas of settlement within a metaphor of geological

change. Transcendentalism (or Idealism as it appears in 1842) reads all the progress

of the modern age, the modes of living, its new inventions and the cities ruined by war

as temporary manifestations and little stays that present “the reverse side of the

tapestry” that is life (Emerson 1: 202). Placing material events within a matrix of

insecure foundations to frame a discrete sense of dispossession (other than alienation

2 This is re-iterated by Gillian Beer in response to Marx’s letter of 18 June 1862 to Friedrich Engles on
Darwin’s recognition of markets and inventions within the struggle of the natural world: ‘What Marx
did not see was that Darwin’s theory also potentiated an alternative to current society, one in which all
organisms are bound together in “an intimate and complex manner” and “the relation of organism to
organism the most important of all relations” (Darwin 51)’. The challenge raised by ecological thought
to the basic tenets of Marxism are discussed in individual texts by Benton, Empson and Newman. An
excellent articulation of the contemporary postcolonial geopolitical context with Marxian resonance is
provided by Dawson; see also Canavan et al.

3
from ownership) and to foreground “thoughts and principles not marketable or

perishable,” (ibid) promotes an orientation to the world that is far beyond an

intellectual, abstracted, solipsistic subject: it prefigures comportment to the world that

can divine the necessity of nature to offer a new sense of individual and collective

dwelling throughout geological time3. It accelerates through the Idealist claim of the

mind-dependence of reality, as I shall clarify when I turn to the influence of Johann

Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling upon Emerson, below. This

sense understands economies of nature both in terms of a home or resting point

(temporal terminus) and in terms of thinking, as consciousness derived from

relationships with and attunement to the material and historical realm from which it

has arisen. These ideas are secured in Emerson’s prose as a means to clarify a political

and spiritual ecology of elements, units and structures that are empowered to reinvest

themselves in new forms (as with Transcendentalism being the new mould for the old

thoughts of Idealism). At the very end of this central American essay of the period –

and one central to Emerson’s thought itself 4 – the symbolic metaphor posits that

human technologies and their present material presences are elements, too, “[like the

shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony today,] forever renewed to be

forever destroyed,” (216). This statement might suggest all things solid melting into

3 Such (in)stability from openness leads one to ask about insecure foundations: “are these the shadow
of the substance [from which we all are, or the] perpetual creation of the process of thought?” (204) –
substance and thought need not be reconciled for Emerson, more the two married: an easy task for the
capacity of the imagination that can hold the idea of “some new infinitude” (214). Nb. Emerson’s
lecture cites Kant’s transcendental forms: “important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not
come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind
itself” (1: 207-6).
4 The lecture represents the concrete manifestation of a shift in focus from an understanding of
Transcendentalism as philosophy or religion and as the study of the relations of man with God and
Nature, to an interest in society and reform, to man’s relations with others and his community, to an
emphasis on the structure of society and how this gives rise to subjecthood (see Editor’s notes,
Emerson 1: 141-2). In the ‘Introductory Lecture’ of December 2, 1841, read at the Masonic Temple in
Boston, of the same series as ‘The Transcendentalist’ Emerson speaks of ‘The Times’ as ‘the present
aspect of our social state [which] have their root in an invisible spiritual reality[; they] are the
masquerades of the eterneties… The Times [are…] the receptacle in which the Past leaves it history;
the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the future.’ (167)

4
air, but it is an instance of Emersonian rhetorical gusto that evokes continual growth

from a resource figured as a shared and open destiny; it enables (at least) the idea of

non-opposition between material and ideal in the experiencing subject viewing the

world via language that draws from a concrete example in nature. Emerson’s “fuller

union with the surrounding system” (ibid) is the cumulative point in the century’s first

half; it is a gathering of a tradition that is composed not only of an attention to the

empirical natural world but one that appropriates the redress of radical poetics based

on the contemplation of the infinite and of the nothingness that comes to being. It is

also the spiritual fashion of the poetic forebear to the scientific modelling of

ecological relations. By this I mean both the existential position that finds earth as the

resource from which we emerge and to which we return, and the metaphysical sense

that being depends on nothingness or absence: existence preceding essence via

openness as a pocket or affordance for life in the world, and identity via fluidity and

elasticity – or emergent and ephemeral states (partly due to niche formation) – in

consciousness from which and in which Being and becoming are visible and are one

and the same. It is a new version of Idealism or mind appearing to itself.

German Romanticism and Aesthetic Theory

One of the most compelling analyses of German Idealism and its legacy for ecological

thought is evident in Kate Rigby’s thesis concerning the failure of Romantic poetics --

the effacement within presencing written in the Romantic quest for the ineffable as

that which slips human frameworks. Central to Rigby’s argument is her use of

Hegelian aesthetic theory as a platform for an ecocritical account of the legacy. In his

lectures, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel recognized that:

5
 [T]he beauty of art is one of the means which dissolve and reduce to unity the...
opposition and contradiction between the abstractly self-concealed spirit and
nature –- both the nature of external phenomena and that of inner subjective
feeling and emotion. (Hegel 56)

The content of art, a principle of oneness, is read by its association with the Idea,

which for Hegel, is the absolute (transcendent) God/Spirit made manifest in man’s

actions.

Hegel asserts that Romantic art fails to live up to the aesthetic ideal because its

spiritual content outstrips its material means and thus always indicates something

beyond itself that art cannot attain (Hegel 427-38; Rigby, Topographies 112). Rigby

follows Hegel and Andrew Bowie (Schelling; Aesthetics) in outlining the

development in German Romanticism from Friedrich von Schiller to Friedrich von

Schlegel and on into Schelling. Hegel’s conception of unity aims at overcoming

Kant’s intuitive understanding as subjective not absolute -- the particular determined

from within written as purposiveness (zweckmässigkeit). Hegel’s idea that the

principle of art is the unity that achieves absolute standpoint is indebted to Schiller. It

is a principle most especially formulated in Schelling’s philosophy of art within his

System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) that propelled Idealism into the nineteenth

century. However, In Schiller, Rigby reads a post-modern aesthetic that would

accomplish “the realization of the ideal” (Topographies 99) in its sublation of the

naïve and sentimental and its production of the divine, in effect realizing that which

nature by itself cannot do. This could provide post-Romantic ground for nature’s

dependency upon man; however, it is Rigby’s emphasis on Schelling as an important

historical case for ecocriticism that will act as my temporary focal point while I

amplify man’s entrance into companionship with nature, his co-creative impulse born

6
from a contingent consciousness of unity, rather than isolate nature’s dependency on

the mind of man. Schelling’s influence on Emerson is the most profound of all

Idealist thinkers upon Transcendentalists. The idea of the Absolute as the union of

the ideal and the real, the world-soul and nature as the work of God, have strong

parallels in Emerson’s contemporary (Welleck 51, 54). My contention is that

Emerson’s sense of poiesis, which requires redemption to enhance relations, does not

replicate this dimension and posit the other as remote (a la Rigby’s Romanticism) but

that it enters into this dimension, which is really Schelling’s point, too, in his exegesis

of subjectivity as both grounded in nature and as its expression.5

The Romantic is both anti-systematic and oriented critically toward the limits of

knowledge. As a form of self-limitation, the Frühromantik developed non-

foundational systems that respected rationality but retained a gap between theoretical

knowledge and truth. The avant-garde of Jena and the rise of the journal Athenaeum

(1798-1800) extended Fichte’s pioneering concept of the world as negative projection

-- the ‘not I’ -- by incorporating an animated force into this other; this has been

claimed as the “autopoiesis of earth” (Rigby, Topographies 102-3) and is viewed at

present within ecological literary criticsm. I argue that this model of a gap is stated in

the writings of Emerson, which serves as the basis for an American interpretation of

Idealism and as the representation of the natural offered in a non-deterministic model

of possibility and openness that cannot be subjected to schematic mapping. In this

sense it is a response to Kantianism (i.e. that we cannot escape the limits of our

humanity) and it is the beginning of early ecological thought in the nineteenth century

5 This is provided by René Welleck, “The Minor Transcendentalists and German Philosophy,” New
England Quarterly, 15.4 (1942): 652-680, and Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary
Relations between Germany, England and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton UP, 1965). See also Stanley M. Vogel German Literary Influences on American
Transcendentalists, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1955), and pt. 2 Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis
of Reason, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

7
that begins with an open spirit to nature’s emergent qualities. In terms of subjectivity

and agency within these larger models of union, it is a legacy that finds the

ecophenomenological perspective as one that is limited. This limit is configured in

twofold: first the external world is seen as an obstacle to the completion of the ego;

second, as an implication of the first, the modern step toward intersubjectivity in

Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Thought (1790) claims self-consciousness as a social

phenomenon: other rational subjects, peers in a shared environment, are a necessary

condition of every subject’s self-awareness; the self is called rather than interpolated

into freedom via aufforderung – the ‘Not I’ limiting its freedom due to respect for

other’s freedom i.e. setting itself up only through the other in terms of free practical

activity.

The ‘Not I’ – which I am reading as an ecological limit and interface for

democratic interdependency – is that which makes us strange to ourselves as we

contemplate the incomplete world through contemplation of the self: this ‘self’-

reflection can be harnessed emotively outwith will and desire for its dynamic is

essentially one of humility before a larger other of which one is a part but is neither

dissolved within nor completely effaced by the other – difference remains. In

Romantic terms, it can be read as a neutral subjective stance accepting the limits of

human techne to underwrite, configure, or make full sense or harness the presence of

the world, which only works to make distinction between human and world.

Consciousness, therefore, is viewed as an extension of limited surface oppositions; it

is the transcendence of the everyday mood, where mind and matter, material and

spiritual are reconciled in a future-oriented transcendental historical subjectivity.

This is not Idealism as conceived before Fichte, but is mind experiencing itself

through itself as an individual manifestation of the absolute mind. I aim to clarify this

8
as a prerequisite for a particular ecological consciousness where a sense of phusis

(Greek: kruptesthai) – emergent nature over physical nature with an emphasis on

event ontology over substance ontology with no determination at all (Guignon) – or

the unfolding word, is synonymous with this absolute mind. For Rigby, Schelling’s

vision of art as expressed in “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature”

(1807) attempts to restore connections to the divine via methods beyond the artist’s

intentionality; this is important for ecological ethics that wish to articulate human

agency in all its forms from the human appropriation of natural resources to the subtle

cultural footprint of human actions and thought over time. This aesthetic is evaluated

as enabling a continuity of mind and nature with the recognition of the limits of

knowledge, in turn eluding human reductionism and complementing the elevation of a

sense of continual striving by moral consciousness (Fichte) as denoted by the present

continuous.

The American Emersonian Temporal Incarnation

For Emerson, the sense of the non-contingent soul (resonant with Absolute Idealism)

is one bound-up in the idea of the circular reciprocation of being thrown and being

projected into the possible: it is heightened contingency. It is possible to see this

impulse toward imminence distilled within Emerson’s symbolic metaphor of

dispossession, the colony of shells at the end of The Transcendentalist essay. To be

projected into the possible (perhaps via disconnection or lose ties with the past), as

Michel Haar identifies, locates a totality “in as much as the subject and the object are

indissociable within it” (“Attunement” 162), which is precisely what Shelling is

9
attempting to model in his pantheistic Identatphilosophie where the absolute is not

spirit (a la Hegel) but is the identity of subject and object.

Reading the New England outlook as one that viewed language as an organising

force within the theology of the disinherited helps to understand the paradoxes and

oppositional logic within Puritan thought. Calvinism’s promise that signs of the

divine exist on different planes to the corporeal crystallized America’s “embattled

opposition” to (European) centres of worldly experience (Manning 1) and delineates a

way of conceiving the American attitude to the outside and to the other.

Consequently this leads to the notion of the division between God, man, nature, and

man located within consciousness of sin. This appeared first to Puritans as a

structuring principle and the justification for the sentence of reprobation and the

arbitrary nature of grace for the elect. The influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

upon Emerson where reason and understanding are differentiated in terms of faith

(inward vision) and reason (rationalism), respectively, translates into thought as the

possibility of perception with an emphasis “upon [a] beneficent, all-pervasive, and

self-regulatory moral law” (Milder 103).6

This moral law is deduced and inferred through nature, both biologically and

metaphorically by Emerson. The ‘wider self’ as a subject transported by this moral

law qualifies Emerson’s solipsistic man as law unto himself (James Varieties 405) and

connects the ‘I’ to Schelling’s totality. The location of an individual self as the site of

human ethics raises a series of problems for Geoffrey Hill as I shall show. 7 The

6 For Fichte, God is identical with moral world order. Emerson’s reading of Coleridge’s Aids to
Reflection (1825) and Thomas Carlyle’s “State of German Literature” (1827) is central here (Milder
103); so too Carlyle’s “Sign of the Times” (1829) and Sartor Resartus (1833-34). Also see Sanja
Sostaric, “Coleridge and Emerson: A Complex Affinity” (Dissertation.com, 2003); Marx (170-179) cf.
p. 76 n. 26.
7 I read a certain level of correspondence between James and Emerson. Bense articulates the
distinction between James and Emerson, most especially the human capacity to see absolute truth and

10
cosmic soul operating outside the individual is read by Emerson as an illimitable

‘universal’ mind of which man is a temporal incarnation (“History”, 1841) and it

instances Emerson’s most Fichtean moment. My decision to elevate temporality, as

with my decision to foreground the subject’s entrance into companionship with nature

(a co-creative impulse, as above) enables one to view the second phenomenological

aspect of Emerson’s poetics of self and soul where the deep background power that

resists possession abolishes time and space and offers the site in which “the subject

and the object are one” (“The Over-Soul”, Emerson 2: 160). Emerson’s temporal

incarnation of the non-contingent relates to William James’ uniform religious

deliverance consisting of “uneasiness” and its “solution” (James 400). This provides

an almost Arminianist qualification to the ego, the Copernican astronomy overriding

the Ptolemaic world as mere resource for education of the private individual (Milder

111) offering man as part of the stream whose source is hidden: it is therefore

unfathomable through traditional genealogy and it remains within the process of

making. This fluidity – or protean identity – provides an ecologically sound notion of

self more than it promotes an alienated, solipsistic, detached ahistorical selfhood that

might betoken perspectives that are in discordance with ecological ethics.

Self-Sufficiency as Individualism and Alienated Majesty

Jonathan Bate reads through abstract intelligence in William Wordsworth towards an

active principle while also finding a radical humanism of a working paradise or

pastoral built through relation and involvement, as in book eight of The Prelude (1888)

the eternal (divine) within the instant in Emerson as contradiction to the Jamesian notion of order
always being in the process of making (366-367) and pluralism (375). My reading of Emerson is
closer to Bense’s reading of James.

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(Romantic 22-29). Manning reads a gulf in mindsets between Puritan and Anglican,

the “alienated” and “egocentric” pitted against “the recognition of a centre” beyond

the self (above) without a consideration of communal materialism. Post-

Transcendentalist poetics uncovers the gaps between these two positions by following

a breakdown in confidence witnessed in American post-Puritan writers, read too

hastily in retrospect as solipsism that rejects epistemology i.e. a mind that refuses to

see outside the self and takes the loss of the word of God as an inability to achieve

spiritual re-generation: a position quashed by Emily Dickinson and flatly ignored by

Wallace Stevens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. The failure to

comprehend the world and its vastness witnessed in the frontier as a penetration into

the other is one fuelled by paranoia.8 Herein the dichotomy of grace and domination -

- where the self oscillates between self-assertion and ratiocination, and with self-

abnegation before authority (Manning; Miller) -- provides an initial sketch into the

background of Transcendentalism and Emerson’s ethos of self-reliance as liberation

from alienation. This is a point that is not disclosed by Hill’s understanding of

Emerson; however, his engagement with the tenet of self-assertion is intriguing in that

it delineates history and tradition at the very centre of an individual’s communal

orientation or societal ethos as a means to foreground a diluted and democratic self.

8 Although a language system of signs may be read as analogous to a natural system, its grammar,
Rigby argues, ‘cannot be assumed to replicate the pattern of differences and connections prevailing
among things-in-themselves’ (Topographies 123). This negative stance extends into the reading of
various texts: the sublime’s ‘inexpressibility’ (156, 202); the ‘incommunicable’ vastness in Johann
Wolfgang Goethe (172); the failure of disclosure in Wordsworth (180, 252); the failure to strive to
contain nature in Hölderlin (190); the forces ‘beyond [Coleridge’s mariner’s] knowledge and control’
(208); and the limits of human ordering and control in Clare (237). While Rigby admits that her thesis
is honestly ‘inconclusive’ as to whether negative poetics of Romanticism should be extended or left
behind as tools to read contemporary poetry (219): -- , her determination is to resist the “effacement of
otherness” (260) could be read as a means to prioritise our sharing of the ambivalent, strange, and
irreducible natural world – keeping things strange as loose union (via non-relation); for Rigby it is to
embrace the Romantic resistance to severing nature from science and matter from spirit within a
redemptive ethos (261).

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The Optative Mood and Ecological Transcendentalism

The appropriation of Romanticism by the Transcendentalist movement of the

eighteen-thirties in New England developed an aesthetic model and intellectual spirit

within a very new nation. Thus when Perry Miller emphasizes that Emerson’s

philosophy “reconciles the practical with the speculative process” (250), 9 he is

speaking on the synthesis of primitive unconsciousness and civilized self-

consciousness during a period of reflection for future projects over and above

reflective, historical analysis. This is set alongside the synthesis of revelation and

reason; its effect is to localize the self vis-à-vis the non-self, whether that is a

monotheistic creator, or an integral, historical context for the nation’s identity, or a

symbolized knowledge of God i.e. nature; the latter complicates Fichte’s ‘Not I’.

Lawrence Buell emphasizes the literary quality of Unitarian sermonising and the

examination of inspiration as “distrust of structured spiritual development”

(Transcendentalism 277, 179). A world of guaranteed meaning being increasingly

brought under scrutiny while also bringing into relief the idea that knowledge is

humanly inscribed, are two attributes that inform Emerson’s new testament -- the call

for an original relation between man and environment as a means to fix disunity

within man himself (“Nature” 1836). The Romantic problematic of creator versus

free channel in the artist (poeisis as making) is given heightened linguistic and

symbolic edge in this new epistemological aesthetic (Rotella) due to an increasing

concern for critical articulations of intentionality as noted above. Scepticism

regarding the imposition and construction of meaning in Guy Rotella’s sharply

defined conceptual terrain rewrites American nature writing into a tradition of poetic

9 Anonymous [Emerson and Margaret Fuller] “The Editors to the Reader,” The Dial, 1.1 (1840): 1-4, 4;
a phrase taken from Kant’s sixteenth and final part of The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

13
thought that works across cultural materialism and Idealism, the oppositions of

secular and sacred, and the complications of subject-object relations, phenomena and

noumena, reason and intuition. It is the legacy of such thinking pressing upon and

through the grammatical, conceptual, and categorical constraints that is an overt

influence upon contemporary American poetic apparatus, which recalls the discovery

of a “double-consciousness” (Emerson “The Transcendentalist,” 1: 213) and the lives

and understanding of the soul (James). 10 I claim this line of thinking as proto-

ecological.

Ecocriticism, Apartness and Techne

I have stated how I intend to use Emerson as a figure that negotiates Idealism’s

privileging of mind; I shall move toward a contemporary reading of the problem of

Emerson’s abstracted and elevated individual, which is driven by an intriguing insight

into the German background to Emerson’s language use in terms of separation and

communion, below. Theorizing the epistemological and ethical implications of the

precedence of nature to culture is the challenge laid open in the ecocritical turn.

Ecocentricisms attempt to work beyond humanism; they lead “in the direction of a

deeper immanence, or perhaps of a certain transcendence” (Rigby, “Poets” 4) it is

claimed. Whether these are distinct projects or not is something Rigby’s analysis

10 Emerson speaks of American literature and spiritual history as ‘the optative mood’ (Collected 1:
207). The Latin optat denotes seeing; the grammatical sense designating or pertaining to a mood
expressing wish or desire (OED); Emerson’s poetic ‘I’ and his insistence on a transparent ‘eye’
modulate a resistance to this particular mood. This Transcendentalist poetic consciousness, as it were,
is able to fathom that the human in the landscape is temporarily bound to conditions as a contingent
element within a matrix of relations that exercise themselves beyond human time-frames and human
input alone; this philosophy increases in sophistication and reckoning as it is able to posit a loose sense
of the subject where an expansive and plastic subjectivity is less inclined to gather security from fixed
relations and from appropriation of the material realm but is one encouraged by a sense of exile as a
pre-requisite to dwelling (Rigby, below) which as an ethical stance decreates one sense of selfhood for
a vision of the ecological self-in-world.

14
does not measure, but offers them as paths leading to “acceptance... of our

corporeality... [and] interconnectedness [with our] earth others [Plumwood,

“Ecosocial;”]” I aim to locate this idea within nineteenth century debates.

Extending Bate’s discussion of rootlessness in his articulation of the (ecopoetic)

high Romantic across two centuries – drawn from an understanding beyond Friedrich

Hölderlin to Rainer Maria Rilke (Bate, Song 262-266) – Rigby emphasizes “ecstatic

dwelling” not as homelessness but “dislocation, dispossession, and desecration”

(Topographies 90).11 The middle concept relates to my understanding of Emerson’s

perspectivism that helps to rethink how we articulate alienation. It is a concept that

signifies neither blood nor inheritance (actuarial ownership) but responsibility and

care for a place (whether one is native or not):

It becomes apparent that some form of exile, or in Deleuzean parlance,

deterritorialisation, is intrinsic to dwelling. We must first encounter the absence
or strangeness of a place before we can begin to attune ourselves to it in
dwelling (Rigby “Poets” 11).

Attention all Fichteans: we learn that the precondition to (modern) dwelling is exile

(Haar, Song 139-140). Rigby’s text signals a theory of history as a process where

control or order of land can be undone while additionally signifying a vector of

weakened ties (or loosened points of relation) between culture and nature, people and

place. Crucial ethics are delineated here, as I shall outline.

Deleuze’s metaphysics offers a sense of the deterritorialized as that which has not

been subsumed by law and can thus enable desire to flow freely as a separate

economy to that of power. To read deterritorialization not solely in its relative sense

but accompanied by reterritorialization (signifying both historical cycles and

11 See pp. 12-13, footnote 8.

15
conjunction with its absolute) would lead to the construction of two elements. Firstly,

(positive) “immanence” -- to exist or remain within the land (Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus

176, 251, 257, 315; Philosophy 88), and secondly, to the notion of (negative)

“subjectivation” -- a process preceding the constitution of the subject. With

consonance to ecology and an emphasis on life, unlike a theory of determinate

essence this allows for the self to be read as an effect of the world, “one and the same

essential reality, the producer-product” (Anti-Oedipus 5; Plateaus 85) -- something

not alien to Emersonian co-creation – and interesting resonance with Fichte’s

consciousness looking at self while reading world (concording with the ‘Not I’). An

idea and stance that envisions power within dispossessory ethics, which leads this

outside philosophy and into pragmatic relations is an imaginative impulse that takes

us from matters of spirit and authority to either the self-in-the-world or the complex

and rhizomatic sustaining of life – for some ecological theorists these latter two issues

are not to be conflated but to be read as interdependent rather than mutually

exclusive.12

Deleuze’s notion of desire as “collective exile” (Anti-Oedipus 377) is important in

its ecologically sound notion of remaining within relationships: “a vision of oneness

made via the process of adsorption, which adheres to material contact (rather than

absorption, which is assimilation as incorporation)” (Bristow 57). I wish the reader to

recall Emerson’s deployment of the colony of shells. Deleuze explicitly recalls Fichte

and Romantic notions of progress and purposiveness (Immanence 27) while offering a

delineation of the concept of immanence as a non-dualist collapse of distinctions into

plural monism or univocal envelopment of life – I detect this in Schiller and note his

influence upon Emerson. The abstract and conceptual view on the openness of being

12
Patrick Curry, Warwick Fox, Val Plumwood, Paul Shepard.

16
embedded within networks of relations develops pantheism into a conceptual site

where the contraction of the infinite foregrounds events and process as forces against

inscribed relations. Thus, Rigby’s notion of exile as precondition to the experience of

dwelling is one that notes the historical formation of societies, their finite nature, and

their dependence upon the land that constitutes immanent identity; the reader will note

substantial resonance with Emerson’s colony. Furthermore, this fluctuating and

protean identity once harnessed as philosophical spirit affords the poetic de-

realization of things into singularities the philosophical gravity of seeing the world for

the first time with sustained (and sustainable) potential for new vision; this

phenomenological attitude reads the world within new contexts and thus registers a

neutral mind, or non-willing perspective in that it does not project stable, historical

categories of thought upon the world, neither does it promote human desire and

technologies of appropriation. As such it reads equivalence between the precondition

of the earth for human life and the precondition of exile for human settlement, which

in turn outlines the need for the world to be rediscovered rather than inherited; it

attunes to immanence as life.

For Deleuze, immanence is not related to some thing or to a subject as an act from

which arises the contemplation and then synthesis of things, but it is a plane of

consciousness “only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than

itself” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 27), a difficult point that seems to follow Fichte’s

sense of the ‘Not I’ only ever working from and towards consciousness of the ‘I’:

It is to the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and the object
that Johann Fichte, in his last philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a
life, no longer dependent on a Being or a submitted Act – it is an absolute
immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is

17
 ceaselessly posed in a life. (27)13

The Deluzian illumination of relations via emphasis on aporia (real or simulated doubt)

represents a model of thought where sustained learning through openness and

temporal reinhabitation of space displace notions of (pre)determinism and inheritance:

a model of life over history. 14 It thus provides an exciting counter statement to

misprisioned politics of soil in addition to resonating with the deconstruction of

grammatical models of origin and institutions of power.

I wish to speak of the importance of history to inheritors of Emersonian thought in

my next section. I take Geoffrey Hill’s argument seriously as a socially oriented,

institutionally focused rearticulation of what Bate has called “at homeness – upon the

earth,” but which Rigby has understood through experience of “being lost in the

world” (Bate, Song 260), that compliments Emerson’s philosophical spirit that Hill is

at odds with.

Individualism: Agency, Mediation and Rawness

Emerson’s Idealism is founded on the notion of the secular grace of personal

experience, which details how divinity is available directly to the individual i.e. that

there is no mediation within ecstatic vision. Hill is unsure of this grace for it might be

a fabricated delight; that the authenticity of the moment of vision and grace might be

delusional, merely the self-delighting fulfilment of one’s own desires:

13 It would take a more daring scholar than myself to marry this to Coleridge’s insistence on ‘life’ in
Aids to Reflection (see n. 15 below).
14 With respect to aporia, see Jacques Derrida and F.C.T. Moore, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the
Text of Philosophy” New Literary History, 6.1, (Autumn 1974): 5-74. With respect to life over history,
see Neitzsche’s third meditation: Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Trans. R.J. Hollingdale,
Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1985.

18
 [H]e retreats from it and turns instead to those religious and social values that
have been transmitted over many generations in England, and also to the
institutions that have arisen as a result of those beliefs and allegiances. (Quinn
148)

A critical qualification to the Emersonian ideology (carved out of an anti-European

and anti-traditional stance) is central to Hill’s critical and creative project: “what

animates the poetry” Justin Quinn informs us, “is the struggle of scruple against the

desire for ecstasis” (155).

The individualism inferred here, is not that of the American extreme

autobiographical and confessional line of poetry (a la John Berryman, Robert Lowell,

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) but one that clarifies what the institutional space lacks;

that the constitutional tradition, based on ideas of polity and democracy, fulfilled the

need for direct relations with others (humans, energy sources, histories and economies

over and above isolated ecstasies per individual). For Hill, this lack in our systems of

communion resonates with the lost access to God’s grace: as Quinn remarks, his

nostalgia is located in the root sense of the word i.e. the longing for the journey home

(158), thus the necessity or urgency for a poetic imperative imbricating the individual

in history to resist the valorization of the individual. But, is Emerson, by contrast,

offering an amnesic individual at a loss to any groundings of social history? Is his

secular individuated transparent self, signified by the wider self and by Emerson’s

noetic style, disintegrated to the point that matters of community and social adhesion

are lost for the emphasis on subjective will? 15 Perhaps, rather than this, the

15 Emerson’s noetic style exhibits a faculty characterized by intellectual activity i.e. an experiencing
subject, which phenomenology would not see as an abstracted isolated consciousness in the
misprisioned Husserlian temporal sense of the epoché (cessation or suspension of judgement) but as a
subject relating to acts and processes, thus in the moment of perceiving and thinking, integrated in the
events of the world; thus closer to Bense’s James. Emerson is undoubtedly influenced by the mature

19
disintegration via Emerson’s pronominal poeisis is a reconnection to the rawness of

life, more a dissolve or decreation of individuated identity into an expansive

continuum shot through with change: life “forever to be renewed to be forever

destroyed,” (1: 216).

However, Hill reads “existential desolation” (Hill, Collected 505) in Emerson,

rather than either fecundity or the channelling of forces beyond the self through the

self. To imbricate the human individual in history is to ensure a degree of

responsibility and engagement with civic polity that is fundamental to democracy and

is a resistance to passivity. Socially willed subjectivity oriented toward the external

world was indicated succinctly, for Hill, by the Idealist, T.H. Green. Green’s

consideration for “impulse” and “utilitarian hedonism” within the idea that these can

lead to no alternative but the world having its way, denotes Hill’s mobilization of

Green to read complexity within intentionality:

[Green’s consideration is] an example of how the anti-utilitarian, anti-hedonist,

may yet be held in the gravitational field created by those forces. As an acute
critic of impulse, Green could counter it only in terms of superior impulse “It
may very well happen that the desire which affects a man most strongly is one
which he decides on resisting.” In so doing he endorsed his opponents’
standards in the act of challenging them. (Hill, Lords 112)

Hill is keen to make this point as a remark on genius and personal style. To endorse

while laying a challenge to authority is to connect the present to history, to be in a

system, to be part of an energy-wake of the world, to embrace semantic propulsion or

inertia of words or traditions, while simultaneously stepping outside and beyond their

philosophical theology of Coleridge and the sterilized relations of thought within the noetic pentad
(prothesis, thesis, antithesis, misothesis, synthesis) in Aids to Reflection (1825): Coleridge wishes to
move away from the reductive, universal form of contemplation that is without life, and thus emphasize
experience or the experiencing of world: ‘[the universal form has] no punctum indifferens, in divinis
tetras, in omnibus aliis pentas’ The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Ed, Henry Nelson
Coleridge) vol 7, London, 22.

20
frame (i.e. the anxiety of influence). This is the interstice from which genius springs,

we are being prompted to think, as Hill nods toward the coming of Walt Whitman in

the American line of poetry; however, it is also perhaps the creation of a new niche

that affords systems-based evolution as appropriate spiritual grammar to democratic

thought; it is clearly a site in which our prejudices and performance parameters no

longer limit us in a manner that precedes our own moments of experience, i.e. that

past capacities are no longer hard-wired determinants of the present conditions of

possibility.16 The issue for Hill when read alongside Quinn’s criticism, is whether

one is in the world of God, or out of that world and thus individuated and self-

willingly purposive. Hill is careful not to disclude our histories of institutions that

secularised these ethics in the case that self-will is not of grace. Amplifying this

stance in Hill could overstate his concern with history as a path toward settlement; not

clarifying this might overlook Emerson’s ethics of comportment as non-willing

perspectivism, which can aid a fresh understanding of abandonment not settlement

that it is consonant with the notion of exile as the pre-requisite to dwelling.

Emerson is individuated and in the flux of grace (or nature); but, as Hill remarks,

he could read alienation in another way that would more clearly secure his post-

Romanticism: while insider’s are centred, outsiders can exclude power. This is

exactly what Emerson’s Idealist resistance to utilitarian homogenizing forces is setup

to do, to create and stabilize “thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable,”

(1: 202). Hill understands that Emerson is looking at how immediate perception can

“attach itself” to public obligation (Hill, Collected 493), the poetics of fraternity that

arise in Emerson’s “Experience” (1844) – and his insistence of self-willed agency in

isolation; “itself” is telling; look closely: for Hill, Emerson’s God is the archetype of

16 [perhaps Hill is ex nihilo v nobo; and Emerson is not.. (see notes)]

21
reconciliation but so too, the “arch-alienator of self from personality” (Collected 499).

Looking at this debate from the perspective of critiquing and radicalizing cultural

formations (Hill and Emerson, respectively), one can see why Hill reads Emerson’s

“alienated majesty” deriving not from “otherism” as altruism, but in the Germanic

sense, denoting both estrangement and artistic distancing (Lords 494) – as indicated

earlier this is a mute, succinct and pivotal point within the philosophy of spirit being

outlined. The latter indicated the potential for genius, uniqueness in style; the first

signifies disconnection from social worlds (civil polity, contemporary values) – and

yet this two-fold alienation holds charm for Emerson as Hill has usefully noted.

Emerson’s recognition of aporia highlights “disdain for a basic hermeneutical fact…

lines of words are remote from lines of things” (495-6). Hill’s outline of the

Romantic problem as an orbiting influence over Emerson, has been offered the

context of the distinction between self and personality in its discussion of genius; Hill

might reject any loose, broad brush that might suggest inconsistency and disunity in a

writer’s style (Hill’s secondary concern with Emerson, but his primary animator for is

inquiry) but this plasticity is in fact a flexible ego brokered by the world beyond

consciousness whether it begins with consciousness seeking itself or not; furthermore,

the words this subject creates are not the subject’s own but are deposited out there in

the world, influenced by the world and are shared by agents and interpretants in the

world. This aspect of late Idealism has been disclosed by Hill’s inquiry and by the

question of disequilibrium between individual and his (social) environment, while it

has indicated two significant strands of American post-Transcendentalism: (i) that the

critical mind is part of the world it examines; (ii) that the creative self can retain

independence from cultural personality; taken together: that the coming of the new is

born from the parameters that contingency harnesses as unfulfilled potential to move

22
beyond. It therefore resonates with ecological affordance clarified by the

phenomenological principle, that thought and experience emerge or unfold

‘themselves’ from their surrounding, defining conditions (Bachelard). Throughout his

text, Gaston Bachelard’s emphasis conjoins thought and experience via the plural,

communal pronoun, which is at the heart of Emerson’s impulse toward union, rather

than Hill’s insistence on the individual will brokering democratic fraternity by itself.

Conclusion: Plastic Unity or The Excursion into Solitude?

“Self-Reliance” (1841) to Emerson spells letting “the subject be what it may” (2: 27);

for Hill via Green, this can indicate the irresponsibility of any passive ahistorical and

non-communal or socially oriented stance that allows the world to have its way.

Emerson has clarified this as the first step to universalise deep private feelings upon

humanity and as the manifestation of realizing that imitation and envy are valueless in

comparison to self-expression, something that Hill wishes to celebrate. This model of

Idealist subjecthood is at the heart of the Transcendentalist vision of the self as

“redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the

Almighty effort,” rejecting the conspiracy of society to repress while advancing

through “Chaos and the Dark” (28). This American view finds its later expression in

Walt Whitman’s “free channel” (496) and in George Santayana as “inner attention” or

spirit that “suffuses all actual feelings and thoughts... so conceived is not an individual

but a category: it is life in so far as it reaches pure actuality in feeling or thought” (55).

The shift from isolated, elevated individual life to a concrete, phenomenological

23
category is one of the enduring aspects of the proto-ecological thought: it posits the

subject as highly charged and implicated in history while also mute.17

“Spontaneity” and “Instinct”, the essence of the aboriginal self and primary

wisdom, “Intuition”, is the deep source or “common origin” to which the

independence of solitude and self-reinforcement lead (2: 37). However, Emerson

writes that it is impossible to interpose calculations of the relations between the soul

and the divine despite these modalities, for “its presence or its absence is all we can

affirm” (37). An essential qualification to liberal freedom is the following allowance:

“prayer as a means to effect a private end, is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism

and not unity in nature and consciousness”; this unity is to be found in our (unaided)

actions (44) but it does not necessarily spell appropriation of world as a means to an

end. It proposes that freedom is not the ability to will whatever one chooses, but

because what we do affects what we are and how we can be, rather than unchecked

self-assertion freedom is an understanding of our actions within a larger fold and

through positive and democratic forms of relinquishment. This is deeply

complimentary to the political inflections within Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it

interfaces quite clearly to concerns of Fichte and Hill; I differentiate the Emersonian

positive dialectic of co-creation that dissolves the non-identity problematic from the

thoroughly Romantic notion of freedom that is challenged by later interpretations of

Emerson, for its Idealist emphasis on living wholly from within and positing the

integrity of the mind as the only sacred thing.

Our unaided actions and self-assertion cradled together by non-willing – is a

qualification to Hill’s problems with Emersonian ideology; the non-willing

17 It thus compliments Rigby’s emphasis on Romantic unfathomability and the limit of human
cognition and expression; it also supports a phenomenological extension in the work of Maurice
Merleau Ponty and his emphasis on the Listening Self as a subject open to the world (cf. the
spectatorial/ optative subject).

24
perspectivism can be understood as pro relational, matrix modelling, aware of deeply

interdependent larger economies of exchange, competition, niche formation and

sustainability: nature. That is not to say that these things are ahistorical. The epochal

destiny of absent ground, the crumbling of metaphysics and of earth, the anxiety

derived from the dispossession of the transcendental, and the desire for roots or

indigence over an attention to self-destruction are key counters that inform Emerson’s

reading of Idealism. This ecological foundation and modality of the reduced ego,

diluted anthropocentricism, and a lack of determinism has been claimed in the

twentieth century by Martin Heidegger as gelassenheit: a state of mind which permits

us simply to let things be (in their uncertainty and their mystery), a profound humility

in which the gift of being is less resolute than meditative and the call of culture

(language) enables the world (objects of representation) to show itself in its terms.

Post-script

Both Fichte and Schelling posit absolute consciousness to account for the reality of

the world of nature in their attempts to overcome Kantian dualism; both tried to find

the purpose of existence in the moral state or Christianity as they needed to discover

the absolute in some concrete content. Emerson can be read as an intellectual figure

moving towards immanence in his poetic understanding of nature where attention to

the cultural formations of the world can open out towards a critique of the events of

culture that disclose the world in the moment of apprehension both cognitive and

spiritual. I have shown in Emerson a site where Rigby’s concern for anthropolatry

(bestowing divine honours to the human) and Hill’s resistance to individual will is

visited in Fichtean terms in the nineteenth century which can lead us to contemporary

25
ideas of culture being not the inventor of systems but rather a view that can read the

process of culture as “the medium through which being as system comes to

understand itself” (Colebrook 85, original emphasis). In its most complete poetic

appraisal or “stylistic principle” -- as Buell has noted in Emerson -- it understands that

“intellectual honesty requires being faithful to those oscillations between epiphany

and blankness, to the inevitable incompletion of any ‘final’ result” (Emerson 113).

Incompletion does not spell unfathomability; it offers the barrier to a complete ego

and embodies the potential of worldliness, which is the unfulfilled material self in

Deleuze, Emerson, Marx - alive to the contingent unfolding of nature in proximity to

human intentionality.

In contemporary ecological thought, the loss of animal ancestry and the reduction

in global biodiversity challenges philosophy and science that view history as linear.

Paul Shepard reads the central theme of linear history as “the rejection of habitat”

(43), that New Testament “antiorganic and antisensuous masterpiece in abstract

thinking” (5) -- which to Emerson would belie the ecological circuitry of the world,

while to readers in this new century it indicates a continued requirement to rethink the

condition of homesickness: to sense familiarity in the word oikos and to know that it

is a state of mind available in many places when one becomes unfixed. As Robert

Pogue Harrison deftly articulated during his negotiations through the territory of New

England scholarship: “to dwell” is to “go astray”; as with Old English dwellan, it is

not to “inhabit” in a closed sense:

The substantive disagreement with Heidegger, shared by Emerson and

Thoreau, is that the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation
and settlement but abandonment (Cavell 138; cited Harrison 265).

26
Cavell’s occlusion of gelassenheit aside, this premise is clear: understanding our

rootedness in change is essential to future life, as Harrison notes on the importance of

inhabiting estrangement to remind ourselves of our limits: “we do not close ourselves

off to the alien element that inhabits our finitude.” The ecological principle is echoed

by a philosophical principle when mind is recalibrated to dispersion as best

understood in secular and fertile terms of spiritual economy; it engenders new cultural

formations when our subsequent philosophies do not ruin the lasting sources of that

fertility.

**

27
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