Some Reflections on the American Scholar

As anyone who has learned to be cosmopolitan will object, the notion of an American scholar is antiquated. A false relic from a mythic past. For Emerson, the question was one brimming with possibility. But no longer for us. This is what those whom society deems wise—the academics, the activists, the thinktank psychiatrists, the intelligence …

I

“There is a deepness in America,” the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel wrote in 1964, “something really that strives for the eternal.”1 When hearing Marcel’s characterization of America, one invariably feels compelled to ask: Is what struck Marcel about the place still the case sixty years later? Or has it changed? Has a country that once so impressed Marcel for its spiritual depth lost its eye for great height, its wellspring run dry, having stagnated into cultural shallowness? In lieu of continuing to strive for the eternal, is the America of old gone, now instead striving for nothing?

Presumably, were such a question to fall to anyone, it is to the American scholar from whom one might look for a response. And yet, what better evinces the nature of the moment’s crisis than the fact that at a time in which it would be most fitting for the scholar to fulfill his vocation’s calling, where is he to meet the situation? Absent? Nowhere at all?

Often, it certainly can appear that way. Whoever or wherever he is, the scholar (the author makes no claim to being one himself) does not speak at the University. Nor does he speak on the television. Nor does he write in legacy print. How could it possibly be otherwise? Those today who deliver college commencement speeches, give interviews on television, and pen op-eds in the corporate media are those who have resolved to languish in a milieu comprised of institutions and brands that no longer live up to their lofty rhetoric and old reputation. Pseudo-leaders, pseudo-thinkers, and pseudo-writers who have settled for the pretense of truth rather than for the thing itself. They participate in a public discourse that pays lip service to truth only but does not serve it. Look upon the legion of imposters continually paraded before us as “experts.” That those held up in the public eye as intellectual voices are so laughably unworthy of being taken seriously is more than enough to make one wonder: for all the controversy concerning the rise of censorship and the suppression of free speech, were an American scholar actually given a forum to say whatever it is that he would wish to say, would anyone be interested in listening?

II

Further, consider the case of Marcel, which proves instructive. As someone known for having habituated himself to seeking out God’s signature in all things, we can be confident that he felt the presence of God at work among those whom he met on his visit to America. Even in the early 1960s, such a presence still involved more than what an appeal to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” might imply. More than a theoretical posit or talking point, such presence involved the mood of a place that had a vital attunement to the ongoing activity of divine providence. This self-understanding that Marcel encountered explains the vibrancy he recognized in the American people and their land. He saw in them a place whose posture reflected confidence in God’s handiwork, that the nineteenth-century conception of “Manifest Destiny” was not some disingenuous rationalization intended to justify the subjugation and exploitation of whomever it perceived to be standing in its way but an acknowledgment, however otherwise flawed or naive, that America was a land of individual freedom, opportunity, and purpose, a nation justified in its belief that, even if the “American Dream” was difficult to attain, it was something genuinely worth striving for. Such assuredness was not blind hope. Nor was it baseless ideology, for it was rooted in the very landscape itself. Even today, God’s blessings are plainly manifest to those who have eyes to see. Look out on the Pacific from the shores of Carmel. View the open prairies of Montana. These are two places whose beauty stunned Marcel personally. That America was a place thought to be blessed by God is the impression that the landscape and the people understandably made on the Frenchman.

Is it unreasonable, then, to think a land as this should be capable of giving rise to thought? And not just any thought, but one uniquely its own?

III

In 1837, a century before Marcel visited America, the New England poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson examined the question in an address entitled “The American Scholar.” With an eye to measuring the state of America’s overall spirit, he turned his optimistic (yet critical) gaze upon the nation’s fledgling intellectual efforts. If it truly was the land of liberty, why then, asks Emerson, was the average American “timid, imitative, and tame,” while the attitude among its educated class remained “indolent, complaisant”?2 Why had the American scholar, the resident of a “New World,” still not leapt from under the shadow of Old Europe? Why, wondered Emerson, did the American intellectual remain in thrall to the “courtly muses of Europe,”3 yoked to ideas unsuited to his native soil? Was there even an American scholar? Nearly two hundred years after Emerson first put this question to his Harvard audience, it remains an open one. What, indeed, is the state of the American scholar—is there one?

One could be forgiven for answering “no,” of course. To begin with, one might simply deny that it makes any sense to inquire into the current condition of the American scholar, given the fact that there is no agreed upon understanding of what precisely constitutes one. In any case, there are plenty of reasons for concluding that the American scholar is dead, according to any number of ways such a scholar might be defined.

If Emerson’s own personal vision of the scholar did eventually materialize concretely at some point in the nation’s history (in Thoreau perhaps), it proved to be an ephemeral manifestation, its figuration having long since evaporated after only briefly appearing. What would it mean to be an American scholar? At present, even asking the question is sure to elicit smug laughs, which further suggests that such scholars, wherever they are, are in short supply. Laboring beneath an influence so immense that we do not even notice its weight, everything that passes for intelligence and insight from the “expert” class—the television presenters, the celebrities, the professors, the governmental officials—encourages us to shrug our shoulders at the question, and to carry on with “research” and “studies,” to keep busy with what passes for scholarship, just so long as nobody asks what it would mean—could mean—to do so as an American.

“American scholar”—the expression may not be dismissed outright as a piece of nonsense on a par with the proverbial “round square.” Still, the adjective “American” is jarring enough to render the concept suspect, if not oxymoronic. The term “American scholar” is not contradictory. But it is vestigial, so the thought goes, an outmoded conception. As anyone who has learned to be cosmopolitan will object, the notion of an American scholar is antiquated. A false relic from a mythic past. For Emerson, the question was one brimming with possibility. But no longer for us. This is what those whom society deems wise—the academics, the activists, the think-tank psychiatrists, the intelligence officers—would have us believe.

IV

Is the question of the American Scholar passe? So it may seem. Returning to Marcel, what thus to make of his bold characterization of America? Was he deluded in his appraisal? Had the depth he thought that he had experienced only been an illusion? Or, had he, in fact, truly felt “something eternal”? The question merits deeper scrutiny. For if Marcel was not mistaken, perhaps a vestige of the light he saw at the time remains burning. And no matter how faint it may be, even the tiniest ember is still something.

“Free should the scholar be—free and brave,” says Emerson.4 When today it is no longer clear what a scholar simpliciter would be, asking what specifically it would mean to be an American one can serve as a point of entry to that more general question.

Many of the attributes said to describe the scholar, after all, are commonly associated with American virtues. Independence, for one, is commonly observed to be the lifeblood of the American character. The concept of independence has a political valence. But independence here—independence of mind, that is—is an intellectual virtue. Truth awaits its perpetual renewal in us and finds its consummation only in one who refuses to rest content with merely reading what others have written or by repeating what others have said. The one who learns the truth and who comes to understanding is the individual who “thinks for himself”—in short, as Emerson puts it, the one who conforms himself to the universal in the singular to become “Man Thinking.”

Bemoaning the “sluggard instinct of the American continent”5 in his Harvard lecture, the remedy for ignorance, slavishness, and fear, says Emerson, is always near to hand: namely, in nature, in books, and in action. “First in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind,”6 it is nature, he claims, that teaches us the same perennial lesson that had struck Tertullian as well when the latter observed the seasons and the rotation between day and night: “There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning to itself.”7 Man is cosmic, a miniature creation within creation, a small whole contained within the larger one. As Emerson says, just as “the drop is a small ocean,” so “a man is related to also nature.”8 Not only is the individual the world’s fractal, but both form a bond. For if, he says, “in oneself is the law of all nature,” then “its beauty is the beauty of one’s own mind.”9 To know thyself and to observe nature—the two are selfsame.

Seeking wisdom is to align oneself with nature itself. About that, Aristotle was correct: “All men by nature desire to know.” But with books, it can go either way. Being unread is nothing to brag about if that means boasting in one’s ignorance. Yet there is an equal danger in the opposite extreme. Beware of becoming the bookworm who forgets to live! (Whether Aristotle is also correct about virtue always consisting in a “Golden Mean” between two vices is debatable; that hitting the mark, in this case, entails avoiding both excessive learning and willful ignorance seems true). Emerson, for his own part, tells us that books used properly “are for nothing but to inspire.”10

Contrary, however, to Aristotle, who held contemplation to be our highest calling, it is action, says Emerson, that is our final end: “Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.”11 Action is a movement, yet it does not require great changes of place. To act, says Emerson, is to dwell in what lies nearest. Journeys to distant lands, nostalgia for Eden, fantasies of a future Atlantis—all these dissipate us by squandering our strength. Wisdom consists in being content with where we are and what is before us. (Anecdotally, this seems true. The Parisian philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, one of the best philosophers in generations and someone who was also very holy, left France only once in his entire life. That is not to say travel is a sin. But neither should it be seen as a spiritual panacea). As Emerson writes, “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.”12 Nor is there any reason to place our aspirations in another. The scholar’s life, whatever else it entails, leaves no room for participating in a cult of personality. Great concern over fleeting matters of public controversy, political tumult—such preoccupations alienate us from what matters by deceiving us into thinking that we should trust in those we see on the television or view on the Internet more than we do ourselves as if somehow there were more to be accomplished in belonging to a virtual collective than what already is available within the halls of our heart.

One needn’t be an Emerson or Thoreau to see that the small things of creation all around us can be our teachers. If we only listen and look, the murmuring brook and the swaying willows have far more to teach us about being human than anything the news has to say. Watching the bumblebee flying about her business at the rose flower helps us organize our own by sharpening our perception of what tasks are worthy of our time and rejecting those that are not. Observing the flower petals shimmer in the sunlight as they float gently through the breeze, carrying them down to earth, cleanses our inner cup, leaving us with that peace only purity knows. Nature’s splendor (even its silence) communicates more profoundly to us than the chatter and the strife of human tongues. It is better to spend an afternoon on a walk outside than staring at a screen. And when we on occasion do stop to take an interest in the common conversation (the newest story, that latest fad, that huge scandal, that current event), we must be careful not to entrust ourselves to a spectacle that will divert us from the road to Zion. Emerson himself was not a traditional Christian, but he nevertheless comes close to putting his finger on distraction’s spiritual danger when he writes, “Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half as if all depended on this particular up and down.”13 The spectacle (and idle talk) depersonalizes. It obscures the noble. Effaces the sacred. Demeans the dignity of everyone by falsely suggesting that our attention’s calling resides in anything besides what we are each able to accomplish through being alone before God.

Is this to propose individualism? Yes. But not atomization. And certainly not narcissism. The individual’s preeminence, so understood, is not a matter of selfishness or egoism. It implies no disregard for others. Far from it! In point of fact, only by accepting the individual’s supremacy in light of our human equality (as Emerson would say, “it is one soul which animates all men”14) is genuine community achievable. If a worthwhile cooperative undertaking is to come to fruition, its flourishing demands that the inviolable sanctity of the individual not be transgressed. As Emerson puts it, “Every thing that tends to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to the true union as well as greatness.”15 Nonconformism, self-reliance, originality—here again is that spirit of American independence. Staunch individualism, but not lawlessness. An individualism that is free from the vicissitudes and pressures of the crowd, and hence one that enacts freedom—true independence that is subject to the law of nature and so God.

(Here is a parenthetical, but not a simple aside. At the present moment, the exercise of such individual agency is the essential form of resistance to a transhumanist future, a dystopia in which each of us would live under a medical and surveillance corporate tyranny whereby all of human life will no longer be worth living, for it will have ceased to be human. Charles Spurgeon, despite otherwise falling into grave theological error due to his Calvinism, once quite perceptively asked the rhetorical question of why anyone who loves the truth would expect honor from a world that had crucified the Lord. His point was that one should not. In a world that literally murdered the Truth, one should expect to be vilified for loving the truth. This is why, with experience, one is no longer surprised to discover that what the world accepts and defends as an obvious, unquestionable truth turns out to be a lie. Jesus Christ, Lord of Truth, the “Conspiracy Theorist” par excellence, for it, is he who tells us with authority that the world indeed is evil and that those in power are themselves liars, like their father, the “father of lies.”)

V

Emerson’s views on the American scholar are illuminating. At the same time, relying too heavily on his thoughts runs the risk of succumbing to the mimicry he himself rightly cautions us against. As a useful point of contrast, consider instead F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose contribution to American letters unequivocally challenges the legacy of Emersonian optimism. During the period between the First War and the looming Great Depression, Fitzgerald’s early novels describe how the American pursuit of happiness was shattered. In Fitzgerald’s estimation, the American Dream had been exposed as just that—a dream, a fantasy. After all the carnage in Europe, followed by the empty decadence at home and soon-to-be poverty, the hope of ever retrieving the nation’s former innocence was gone. What remains is nostalgia for a time when the future had once seemed bright.

In his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald tells the story of Princeton student Amory Blaine. It is a story of paradise lost—of losing one’s initial youthful optimism. Blaine’s quest to find himself becomes a series of failed romances that steadily embitters him. Here, it is worth recalling that the novel as a literary genre has its origins in a distinctively modern mode of self-consciousness. And Fitzgerald’s Blaine typifies it. Amory’s behavior exemplifies the growing narcissism and hedonism bred by twentieth-century commercialized and industrialized America. In steady succession, Beatrice, Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, and Eleanor turn out to be instruments for Blaine’s own misguided attempt to achieve wholeness, either through her accepting some image of himself that is merely an image or else by his possessing an idealized projection of her. The whole game is an exercise in idolatry, even if Fitzgerald, the atheist, does not see it that way himself. Amory seeks what he imagines will be happiness in a fantasy—or, more exactly, the pursuit of happiness itself is the fantasy. What is Fitzgerald’s lesson for the reader? In short, when reality inevitably intrudes to pop our little bubble of illusion, tragedy is the only logical outcome. Blaine’s personal initiation into disillusionment is not meant to be idiosyncratic. Fitzergarld thinks he has captured something universal. At the novel’s end, by which point Blaine finds himself homeless, destitute, and disillusioned, he remarks to himself ironically, “I know thyself, but that is all—.”16 In Fitzgerald’s telling, Amory’s journey of self-discovery, from “romantic egotist” to “educated personage,” ends in existential lament. If Fitzgerald is to be believed, disillusionment is not a pathology. It is lucidity.

The most exemplary illustration of Fitzgerald’s use of eros as a governing figure for the American Dream is found in The Great Gatsby’s account of Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. Climbing the social ladder, for Gatsby, is simply a necessary means in order to satisfy the requisite social status for becoming a viable suitor for her. Like Amory Blaine, Gatsby is driven by romantic yearning. But the resulting self-transformation brought about in the course of trying to win Daisy’s affection only leaves him empty, and when he abruptly dies so close to attaining his desire of possessing her, the entire quest is shown to have always been so ephemeral, and so flitting, even if nobody, least of all Gatsby himself, wanted to admit it. Daisy moves on with Tom, and that is the end of it. The story’s narrator, Nick Carraway, recounts with astonishment how hardly anybody seems to miss Gatsby when he is gone. It is as if the man had never existed. This fundamental solitude of the human condition is something that Gatsby’s own father fails to appreciate even after witnessing the aftermath of his son’s murder. In denial over the fact that Gatsby’s death has shown the Roaring 20’s notion of the American Dream to be illusory, the bereaved father chooses to cling to the very same delusion that had animated his son’s life. To Carraway, he says of his son, “Jimmy was bound to get ahead.”17 Fitzgerald, of course, intends for us to disagree. Beneath the glamorous veneer of Gatsby’s materialistic lifestyle had been a hidden life of pain and desperation.

Gatsby’s discontent is not merely the consequence of a rift originating from some untraversable gap lying between his desires and a social world incapable of satisfying them. There is a fracture in his consciousness, a split in his psyche, inasmuch as he is haunted by the specter of another, an idealized image of what he desires to be but cannot, a self-image that is sure to lead him nowhere if he pursues the path it takes him down—what makes Gatsby tragic, for Fitzgerald, is that there is no destination for his journey of self-discovery. For everything about the world of West and East Eggs Gatsby inhabited, including above all the people is appearance. If, in just a hundred years, the American consciousness could shift so drastically from Emerson’s hope to Fitzgerald’s pessimism, it is because materialistic modern America forces those trying to “make it” to live a lie. City life is prone to produce deflated husks, empty shells, ghosts who float disconnected from their surroundings, struggling to find fulfillment and satisfaction in a form of social recognition in which such approval is, in fact impossible.

Although one might take Fitzgerald’s work as a deconstruction of the myth of individualism, that would be too hasty. The problem is not with individualism per se but with a pernicious species of it that seeks attainment in carnal things outside oneself. To return to Marcel, is it happenstance that when the French philosopher recounts that which in America evokes the eternal, he does not mention the concrete sprawl of Los Angeles or the steel skyscrapers of Chicago? It is America’s natural beauty, the oceans and the mountains, the prairies and the deserts, through which God spoke to him. A healthy, robust American individualism finds its freedom in what God alone bestows, not the spoils of social climbing.

The futility of seeking affirmation from others in a society fundamentally unequipped for providing it is the theme of Ralph Ellison’s existentialist classic, Invisible Man. The narrator is socially invisible because he is black, and thus a second-class citizen in his own country, somebody marginalized and ignored by his white neighbors. Nobody properly recognizes his individual human dignity. Ellison’s novel, however, is not another banal critique of racial injustice in America, for it is more deeply an analysis of how the scourge of social alienation afflicts everyone. The obvious, repulsive hypocrisy at the time of America’s lip-service to “justice for all” serves to highlight the underlying deceit at work in all human society. The callous and self-absorbed people who use Gatsby, for instance, when he is alive but then fail to pay him a single thought after he is dead, are as unwilling to recognize the inner dignity of their fellow whites as they are black men. The problem is not that the others whom Ellison’s protagonist encounters are racist. The problem is that they are inhuman, manifesting in their prejudice.

Truth resides in the inner man, which explains what makes it so damaging for a society to ignore and violate it. Ellison, like Fitzgerald, reminds us that in a narcissistic culture whose regime is one of selfish desire, everyone sees only himself—everybody, without exception, is an invisible nobody. In the novel’s first lines, the narrator states, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”18 Never understood by others, he is diminished in the eyes of the shallow gazes failing to see him. Toward the conclusion, he says, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free”19—here, Ellison’s Invisible Man voices an aspiration that just as well could have been uttered by Gatsby as he stared under the moon across the lake to the green light on Daisy’s dock. Black or white, rich or poor, man or woman, existence is a struggle.

VI

Emerson’s optimistic transcendentalism, Fitzgerald’s paradoxically pessimistic idealism, and Ellison’s resolute individualistic existentialism—their differences notwithstanding- are characteristic expressions of the American soul. They are exercises in what the American poet Walt Whitman termed “American personalism.” Though it is a school too rich and diverse to be defined simplistically, personalism as a philosophy holds that it is the person who is the ultimate value and reality. The American spirit, thus, is the personalist spirit, for it maintains that everyone has equal dignity and absolute value. It does not, with an evil eye, skim along the surface of things but penetrates down to their depths. And just as the German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar noted that “Without the biblical background personalism is inconceivable,”20 so too for America’s deepness. Individualism does not require a denial of tradition. Far from downplaying or denying the vital influences that have shaped it, whether it be the legacy of religious tolerance and civil liberty we take from Bayle and Locke or the separation of powers from Montesquieu, such Americanism embraces that heritage as proof of man’s universal dignity. Americanism, then, is simply the affirmation that the only true humanism is the one acknowledging the sacredness of each individual human being bearing the image of God.

If, then, philosophical personalism in all its varieties exalts the everyman, American personalism does so precisely because it knows every man has been called to glory in Jesus Christ. America is the “New World” that allowed for a geographical, political, economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual space in which it finally became clear that the entire world itself is passing away, each of our lives being temporary flickers able humbly to contribute (or not) to God’s eternal order. Accordingly, when people today condemn figures from America’s past for their alleged wrongs and failings, it must be emphasized that the ideals of America itself remain worthy of our esteem, even if the individuals and institutions responsible for living up to them are failing now more than ever before. Human hypocrisy and wickedness are no reasons to dispense with the Christian spirit by which the past conduct of others is judged to be bad. Pressing the nation further headlong into a condition that inverts the Christian ethos will only lead to darkness far exceeding what this revolutionary spirit claims to oppose (“Racism,” “Fascism,” “Disinformation,” etc.). Those who know this and continue to do all they can to bring it about, nevertheless, are not political revolutionaries seeking social justice or equity. Come to kill, steal, and destroy, they are of the spirit of the antichrist.

To conclude where we began, what then is the American scholar? Is there any such thing? In another essay entitled “Self-reliance,” dedicated to examining that most American of virtues, Emerson writes, “We are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”21 Emerson here invokes the power of the eternal that so impressed Marcel. Naturally, when one speaks in reverence of the eternal of which Marcel himself spoke, there is bound to follow handwringing and scoffing from those who have their minds set on lower things. But so what? Say whatever else one will of it now, America was said to be a “City upon a Hill.” No place in this world is utopia, so, as ever, America must remain a waystation for those who await New Jerusalem. May the work of its scholars shine a bit of light during that vigil.

 

Notes

1 Gabriel Marcel, “Some Reflections on Existentialism,” Philosophy Today 8, no. 4 (1964): 248.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Mary Oliver (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 59.

3 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 59.

4 Emerson, 54.

5 Emerson, 43.

6 Emerson, 44.

7 Emerson, 45.

8 Emerson, 58.

9 Emerson, 59.

10 Emerson, 47.

11 Emerson, 51.

12 Emerson, 57.

13 Emerson, 54.

14 Emerson, 56.

15 Emerson, 58.

16 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 285.

17 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 138.

18 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 15.

19 Ellison, Invisible Man, 225.

20 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” in Communio: International Catholic Review 13 (1986): 18–26.

21 Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Mary Oliver (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 133.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “On the Concept of Person.” Translated by Peter Verhalen. Communio: International Catholic Review 13 (1986): 18–26.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1994.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 43-59. Edited by Mary Oliver. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 132-153. Edited by Mary Oliver. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.

Marcel, Gabriel. “Some Reflections on Existentialism.” Philosophy Today 8, no. 4 (1964): 248-257.

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