Throughout this course, we have placed in conversation two great American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  This conversation was with one another as well as with the present struggle against racism, and its placement was not at all arbitrary or artificial, as the two men enjoyed a mutual respect and more in common intellectually and politically than is generally known.  Yet, this was not the only basis for the association we observed between the two: the primary connection was specifically with respect to the essentially and vitally American identity of each.  This foundation, of course, is amply justified as a matter of historical common knowledge: neither can be understood outside of the context of the United States, nor can the States themselves, or in more current language America itself, be understood without regular reference to them.  Further, we undertook this course of study in our own context which, just as surely, was inscribed in a fundamentally American situation, irrespective of where each participant was located at the time; the racial reckoning currently sweeping the country has a history of struggle that is distinctly American, such that it would be insensible to neglect the specific history at play while seeking to apply insights penned even centuries earlier.  Yet, it is also possible that this conceptual intertwining of otherwise universally relevant  writings with a specifically, almost exclusively, American domain exacts an unintended toll on us, even as we seek to understand how the experiences of both men tie in with a liberation struggle that today remains underway.  

 

None of this is to say, of course, that we were entirely inattentive to the internationalism of Emerson and Douglass; time spent by the latter in Britain is sufficient to counter that.  Despite such substantive acknowledgements, however, the prominent centering of America is, left relatively on its own, as limiting in some ways as it is unquestionably and ceaselessly informative in others.  Inn particular, notwithstanding their mutual respect and those similarities that have been most fruitful to investigate, it would be a mistake to stop here, to assume that in every meaningful way, Emerson and Douglass should be placed first and foremost in relation to each other.  This is the case for two reasons.  Primarily, these authors have differences that are best magnified when oriented differently, with the assistance of frameworks other than those they themselves had a key hand in developing, namely Marxism and the contemporary anti-racist movement for abolition.  Secondarily and relatedly, it is also worth scrutinizing our conviction that Emerson and Douglass are the best of America, at least in such a way as to tie hope for the future to the character of America that both championed in their time as best they could.  But a lot has changed since then, and to say that developments have not vindicated their optimistic thesis of attaining America’s ideal type would be to understate the matter considerably.  

 

Before proceeding to anything speculative or even actionable, it is worth briefly qualifying what this essay will do, including the hows and whys.  Why, for instance, are Marxism and abolition my frameworks of choice?  Again, the reasoning is multi-pronged.  Regarding the concept and history of America, each brings something new to the table: Marxism, on one hand, is unapologetically internationalist, while abolition on the other frequently manifests a contempt for the America, simultaneously different from and the same as the America  mourned by Emerson and Douglass.  The other reason is that there are clear connections among all of these intellectual strands; Douglass is revered by Marxists, and he and Emerson both were among the abolitionists of their day.  But there is something missing here, a connection to be strengthened: what of the potential relays between Emerson and Marxism?  An exploration of such relays, including similarities and differences, will constitute the main body of this essay, in which an approximate sameness of Douglass to Marx will be presupposed. Moving on from this, it would be irresponsible to forget that Douglass, for all of his similarities to either Emerson or Marx, is nothing if not his own man, with a particularly penetrating critique for example of the notion of American democracy.  The paper will then, in keeping with the motivation of this course, conclude with what we can take from this analysis in the struggle against oppression.  It would be dishonest to paper over that my own sympathies are with Marx, but it would be an error to dismiss not only Douglass, but Emerson, too.  In that spirit, I move on to some of Emerson’s most insightful thoughts.  

 

Throughout the semester, one specially Emersonion theme was that men are “bundles of social relations” or, as Marx and Engels put it in their jointly-written Theses on Feuerbach, the “human essence” is the “ensemble of the social relations.”  Perhaps slightly different things are meant by the terms “bundle” and “ensemble.”  Emerson, as we will later see, frames things more often in terms of the individual than do Marx and Engels, and the latter two have a more definite, class-based  schema for how human societies are divided up than does Emerson.  Yet, to a first approximation, there is a nontrivial similarity between these respective conceptions of the sum total of the social relations at play; both parties understand, in one way or another, that our history is made for us in part, and that we also play a part in the making of that history.  But even this is not all: all three further understand that humanity does not exist apart from nature; as Engels writes in his essay on The Part Played By Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man, “in nature nothing takes place in isolation.”  Such a simple statement, it is crucial to realize, is actually a very profound one.  This is so much the case that Emerson, who likely had no communication whatever with Engels, clearly understood the same principle of universal interconnectedness; in his suggestion that geology is best studied after earthquakes, he is also saying that human societies too are best examined in the wake of convulsions alike to those that rearrange rock layers, in both cases much to the benefit of human inspection.  This is more than just a formal analogy: quite literally, social revolutions take place on the very same ground that, just like politics, can hardly be called calm.  But the similarities of human beings with our environments, and the endless interrelations at every conceivable level, have additional intellectual consequences.  

 

No doubt, there are awkward implications of the interconnectedness described above.  If, after all, everything is connected and interrelated, where does one distinct thing end and the next begin?  When Emerson writes in his essay On Quotation and Originality that “the originals are not original,” he is pointing out that being inventive or novel does not mean ignoring and purging from your creative work all reference points that are not wholly your own.  Not only is this impossible, Emerson contends, but any attempt to do this actually impoverishes what would otherwise have been a potentially intriguing synthesis, since even old things reiterated can be molded into something compelling when consolidated in a particular way.  Or as Leon Trotsky writes in his article on The Social Roots and the Social Function of Literature, “A new class does not begin to create all of culture from the beginning,but enters into possession of the past, assorts it, touches it up,rearranges it, and builds on it further.”  

 

 Of course, we would be unwise to take for granted the assumption that because Emerson has in common with Marxism, and incidentally Douglass as well,  the understanding that everything is related to everything else, he must therefore conceive of these connections in the same fashion as they.  On the contrary, when his brother died, Emerson read through his writings, hoping to publish them to exhibit his brother’s genius.  Unfortunately for Emerson, these writings were quite disappointing, and for all his confidence in his brother, there was no brilliance in his work to be found.  Consequently, Emerson lost confidence in his ability to judge the other, and Emerson’s excess of humility and self-doubt, if anything, had the impact of preventing him from consistently identifying hierarchies of blame and responsibility.  If everything is connected, Emerson tends to think, then we are all responsible to each other in ways deeper than we can imagine, but we can only manifest this responsibility in our behavior little by little.  Emerson is therefore largely unwilling to pass judgement on the other, but Douglass and Marxists permit themselves no such political luxury or epistemic modesty. 

 

Many times during class, Professor Cadava pointed out that “Emerson can do a lot, but he can’t express black rage.”  Perhaps this is because Emerson never had to raise his hand against another in self-defense, at least not in a context in which he was enslaved.  Douglass, on the other hand, did have this deeply formative experience, leading to his eventual repudiation of July 4th as a day of celebration, an occasion appropriate for black people to celebrate in spite of what is continually done to them by the very America they should ostensibly be so grateful for.  So while it is not inappropriate to characterize Douglass as mourning America in a similar manner as Emerson, it is also the case that he has a superior foundation for rejecting the democratic myth of America, rooted as it is in his and others’ enslavement.  It is this mythbusting, of course, that makes Douglass uniquely attractive to Marxists; there is not much daylight, after all, between Douglass’s withering and devastating critique of American democracy, and Vladimir Lenin’s just as well-known and even more general reminders that when people refer to democracy, your next question should be this: democracy for which class?  Lenin and Douglass, therefore, share that they not only recognize infinite interrelations; they carry this understanding forward and realize that just because everything is connected, not everyone is equally at fault and some are most assuredly the enemy, no matter which era, which ruling class, and which part of the globe.  

 

Regularly throughout this class, Professor Cadava encouraged us to read and re-read often and deeply, reminding us that Douglass considered education to be the difference between subjugation and freedom.  We know from history that this is not entirely the case, but we also cannot ignore that the imprecision of Douglass’s perspective on this matter is certainly overshadowed by the more than a few grains of truth connected to the assertion as he himself experienced it.  Likewise, we too have the ability, and it would not hurt to think of it as a responsibility as well, to make use of our education for similar purposes as Douglass and, to a significant degree, Emerson as well.  To be sure, we live in a very different context now, one in which America has done much more damage around the world than was ever possible in the nineteenth century.  But regardless of the essence of America, if such an essence exists to begin with, there is much to draw from in the literature that we have studied.  As all of the above figures remind us, everything is connected, and this is more than a trivial cliché; it means we should not be contemptuous of the ideas of others showing up in ours, and that we can draw insights about social movement from the very motion of the tectonic plates.  But we also must remember, as even Emerson sometimes did not, that universal interconnection does not mean that matters are too complicated to evaluate.  And it is through this evaluation, comfortable or not, that we may act to continue Douglass’s, and Marx’s, life-long struggle.  

 

Works cited:

Trotsky, The Social Roots and the Social Function of Literature

Engels, Dialectics of Nature

Emerson, On Quotation and Originality

Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach