1Taking place in the midst of the nineteenth century, the period commonly referred to as the American Renaissance was characterized by a profusion of political, social, and institutional transformations that played a decisive role in shaping the fundamentals of the American nation. In parallel, these metamorphoses were accompanied by a surge of creativity on the literary and philosophical planes which brought the singularity of the American character into prominence for the first time in its history. This profuse environment provided fertile ground for the development of a great number of intellectual traditions in North America – not least among them that of Transcendentalism. As the essay will argue, American Transcendentalism – and more particularly its Emersonian branch – accommodated a modulation of a singular nature, largely overlooked by past criticism: a modulation, ontological in character and buried at the core of Emersonianism, which had a significant impact for the rise of existentialist thinking in the United States.
2A handful of cultural critics and philosophers – amongst them Dennis Sölch, Harold Fromm, and William Spanos – have endeavored to trace the European genealogy of the radical ideas pushed forward by the American Transcendentalists in the nineteenth century by drawing its main representatives together with the early thinkers of Existentialism, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche. As Fromm declared in “Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson’s Evolutionary Existentialism,” “[a]lthough [Emerson] is indeed a co-father of existentialism with Kierkegaard, for some reason he has not generally been acknowledged as such” (2004: 85). Although partly de-historicized, Fromm’s comparative reading of Emerson and Kierkegaard drew attention to the intriguing affinity between the intricate conceptions of the self held by the American Transcendentalists, and their numerous implications on the philosophical and ontological planes. In an edited collection published two decades later, Sölch observed that “existentialist thinking, to a considerable extent, was anticipated in American philosophy, especially in the writings of one of the early founding fathers of the pragmatist tradition, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson” (2021: 32). Both Fromm and Sölch pointed out a series of singular analogies on several levels between two significant intellectual traditions which are nonetheless built on radically divergent philosophical grounds and native of two different continents; paving the way for in-depth studies of a comparative nature on the interrelations between two influential movements of thought in the West that contributed to shape national and cultural identities.
3These interconnections have been further investigated by a number of scholars in American Transcendentalism, from Dieter Thomä to Aryan Mohseni and from Joseph Urbas to David M. Robinson. In “Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism” (2008), Robinson has convincingly argued that the common denominator between the thought of Emerson and the proto-Existentialism of Nietzsche resides, above all, in a “shared insistence on the push for a new self, a perpetual work of self-overcoming in which the settled self is surmounted by its own rebirth or reconfiguration. This nomadic self also suggests a larger capacity for sympathy, a recognition of self in other selves, that carries important moral implications” (ibid.: 11). Robinson discerned a correlation of an ontological nature between Emersonianism and early expressions of existentialist thinking in Europe, taking over from Fromm’s attempt to delineate the focal points between the thought of Emerson and that of Kierkegaard. For Fromm (2004: 80), “[l]ike Emerson, Kierkegaard writes at the inception of a movement later to be identified as existentialism, a product of Romantic subjectivity that rejects hypostatization of the past in favor of the authenticity of the ongoing moments of ‘being’ that constitute ‘becoming,’ of living in the creative power of the present moment out of which you make an intelligible.” Fromm laid the stress on the sovereign role played by a subjectivity conceived in vastly Romantic terms by both thinkers: a subjectivity where the self is framed in a specific temporal modality that both Existentialism and Emersonianism shared to a great extent. In fact, what these critics have contributed to chart, from Robinson to Fromm and to Sölch, is a passageway that leads from an idealism versing in pragmatism toward a transcendental ontology with clear existentialist reverberations; a junction that reactivates the scholarly debates surrounding the transcontinental movements of philosophy and their impact on European and American culture.
4Indeed, such an investigation introduces the subject of the very existence of an American form of Existentialism – one that is native to North America, shaped by the homegrown cultural and philosophical traditions that developed there since at least the nineteenth century. For Walter Kaufmann (1976: 91), “American philosophy may turn out to be comparable to Roman philosophy: mainly derivative.” Kaufmann implied that the emergence of ideas of an existentialist nature in the US derived principally from the transcontinental movement of Western philosophy in the twentieth century – a set of philosophical trends imported from Europe. Nevertheless, this view partly undermines the aptitude of the American nation for producing new forms of thought that are truly autonomous: a nation politically independent for more than two centuries and boasting a thriving intellectual life that radiates from a plethora of homegrown movements and domestic traditions.
- 1 See Mailer 1957, and McElroy 1963.
5In contrast, several keen observers of the trivia of American social life – not least among them Norman Mailer – have shed light on a profusion of idiosyncratic motifs in the literature and culture of twentieth-century America that resonate singularly with the existentialist outlook. Tapping into a range of vastly different methods, their works have shown how American culture has assimilated, in varying degrees, a number of distinctly existentialist ideas and attitudes that reverberated with the preoccupations of the French philosophers of the period while remaining emblematic of the American spirit.1 This point is also argued by George Cotkin in Existential America (2003), for whom “American existentialism should be seen as more than a case study in the diffusion of European ideas” (ibid.: 9): a stance admitting that the presence of an existentialist sensibility in the US cannot be regarded, simply, as a European import, but rather as the product of an inclusive compound of philosophical and cultural influences with both transatlantic and domestic origins.
6In Existentialism in American Literature (1983), Ruby Chatterji emphasizes the significant role played by the American Transcendentalists in the making of the philosophical and intellectual rationale of the nation, drawing attention to the untimely circulation of a variety of themes and postures in nineteenth-century America that veered toward the existential:
To some extent the American concern with the self as manifested by the Transcendentalists – notably Whitman and Thoreau – the search for an indigenous as well as individual identity, and William James’s idea of the individual consciousness as an “unfinished continuum” incapable of arriving at objectivity, provide a fertile soil for existentialist ideas. (Ibid.: 160-1)
7Here, Chatterji pinpoints a crucial intersection between American Transcendentalism and existentialist thinking in America; considering the presence of existentialist ideas in the US, in fact, as a by-product of its homegrown traditions rather than as an import from the Old World – going a step further than Cotkin in this regard. This approach allows to distinguish a multiplicity of lines of convergence between various movements and traditions intrinsic to the American culture; an approach instrumental in detecting a variant of Existentialism which is endemic to the US and inseparable from its own cultural and philosophical legacies.
8Building from Fromm’s, Robinson’s, and Sölch’s attempts to trace the existential lineage of Emersonianism, this essay will adopt a transcontinental approach, which it will combine with the domestic perspective – as signposted by Chatterji – in order to elucidate the nature of the distinct ontological modulation ingrained in the Romantic culture of nineteenth-century America: a modulation which anticipates an American variant of Existentialism, closely related to its own cultural legacies. For this purpose, the demonstration will turn to the existentialist theory of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a major thinker of the movement, whose principles will be repositioned within an Emersonian environment. Sartre shared with Emerson a preoccupation for radical forms of subjectivity which have the capacity to unlock self-fulfilment; a search for ontological states of a higher nature through which the individual may express the highest degree of his or her subjectivity by channeling the most singular self in the here-and-now, in relation with the conditions of the very moment. For Sartre, self-expression impregnates self-fulfilment – a distinctive feature of his brand of Existentialism; higher forms of being in the here-and-now have the capacity to simultaneously regenerate the self and establish its authority and potency in the immediate present – the ultimate ontological and temporal horizon of Sartre, which is also that of Emerson. While Emerson predated Sartre by over a hundred years, the examination of their key points of convergence will enable the rudiments of a transcendental ontology to come to the fore. It will be envisaged as the precursor of an Existentialism that is distinctly American and established in the ontological premise of Emersonianism – a form of Existentialism shaped by the cultural and philosophical background of mid-nineteenth-century America, simultaneously rehabilitating the central role that Emerson played in the emergence of existentialist thinking in the US. Therefore, Emerson’s essays “Nature” (1836/2003), “Self-reliance” (1841/2003), and “History” (1841/2003), amongst others, will be re-examined through the concepts of nothingness, commitment, and authenticity as coined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943/2007) and in Existentialism & Humanism (1946/2007); existentialist concepts that will be used, primarily, as a method of investigation.
9Operating at the interstices between being and nonbeing, existentialist theory pivots on an existential quest for ultimate selfhood, viewed as contingent on the circumstances of socio-historical reality and set against the horizon of one’s own mortality. This doomed horizon, which is that of one’s own demise, is conceived as perpetually internalized by the subject. Redefined as an awareness of death, it acts, paradoxically, as the goad to action, giving rise to an impetus that strives to fulfil the highest potentiality for being – a being conceived in situ, in interaction with one’s immediate environment. Kaufmann outlines this paradox in the following terms: “Unquestionably, the acceptance of the fact that I must die (my running ahead to my death in thought) may forcibly remind me of the limited amount of time at my disposal, […] and thus become a powerful incentive to make the most of my Being here and now” (1976: 201). It is precisely this reaction, consisting in “mak[ing] the most of my Being here and now,” that enables the subject to reach the highest expression of his or her being – which the existentialists termed authenticity.
10In twentieth-century existentialist thinking, and in Sartrean Existentialism in particular, authentic being is the outcome of an ontological operation through which the subject may channel the most singular expression of his or her innermost self, in the present moment. “Every man,” Sartre claimed in Existentialism & Humanism, “without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man” (1946/2007: 38). Existentialist authenticity is rooted in a fundamental paradox: one in which the awareness of one’s own mortality generates a volition that strives to defeat the menace of imminent nullification. As Sartre put it in Being and Nothingness, “death haunts me at the very heart of each of my projects as their inevitable reverse side. But precisely because this ‘reverse’ is to be assumed not as my possibility but as the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities, it does not penetrate me” (1943/2007: 568). Sartrean authenticity may thus be conceived as the end product of the interplay between nothingness and engagement; two key concepts whose ontological features and sociohistorical implications call for a brief examination.
11For Sartre, nothingness is devised as a corollary of the reflexive quality of consciousness – a consciousness that takes itself as the object of study, at the same time projecting its own collapse: “Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being. […] My consciousness […] constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility” (ibid.: 70). Nothingness, for Sartre, derives from the capacity of consciousness to negate its own existence: amounting, strictly speaking, to a consciousness of death – of one’s own death. As Davis Dunbar McElroy elucidates in his Essay in Existential Criticism,
with every apprehension of being, man also apprehends the possibility or “threat” of non-being. […] This threat of non-being puts man in a state of basal anxiety. Man is anxious because he is agonizingly aware of the threat of annihilation to his precious individuality, a threat from which there is no final and positive escape except death, the thing he most fears. (McElroy 1963: 5)
12Existential nothingness typifies the menace of one’s own nullification: a menace that emanates from a consciousness which, as it reflects upon itself, simultaneously conceives of its own disintegration.
13Crucially, as the individual becomes aware of the potentiality of his or her imminent demise, the necessity to neutralize this threat to the self becomes more and more pressing. This reaction, which is existential by and of itself, exemplifies the incentive toward action that characterizes the Sartrean position of engagement. According to Sartre (1946/2007: 14), “although his personal fate is simply to perish, [man] can triumph over it by inventing ‘purposes,’ ‘projects,’ which will themselves confer meaning both upon himself and upon the world of objects – all meaningless otherwise and in themselves.” This statement – a keystone of Sartrean Existentialism – has been widely commented and applied to a variety of contexts. As Naomi Zack writes in “Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith”:
At any rate, there is an existential return to the here and now after the realization of death’s inevitability and readiness, which, assuming that one does nothing except wait for death, would seem to entail a fresh commitment to one’s life, or a realignment of one’s fundamental attitude towards one’s life. The new upsurge (be it spontaneous or artificial) or the deliberate change in attitude, means that one […] has more energy as an agent […] there is very likely more freedom as an agent, and a higher value placed on freedom so that limitations on agency become less tolerable. (Zack 1997: 103)
14Most importantly, the existentialist formulation of engagement has repercussions on the historical plane, where it may be grasped as a form of commitment to social and political reality. Arising from a movement of consciousness that seeks to defeat nothingness, Sartrean engagement has roots in phenomenology: it embodies a volition that strives to make an impact in the here-and-now by inscribing the innermost self onto the fabric of the real. In this sense, engagement possesses a twofold character for Sartre: ontological in essence, it is also inherently political – striving to create the most favorable conditions in sociohistorical reality for the authentic self to thrive. Ultimately, Sartrean engagement is as self-affirmative as it is regenerative for the self: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is” (1946/2007: 47). It implies that actions have a distinct ontological purpose for Sartre: they constitute the prevailing source for selfhood. This reciprocity in the process – a commitment to the real which, in turn, is capable of regenerating the self – is inherent to the Sartrean formulation of engagement; it constitutes an essential feature of authenticity in existentialist theory.
15As seen, Sartrean Existentialism pivots on the quest for existential authenticity, which finds expression through the ontological interactions between the consciousness of death and the urge for action – between nothingness and commitment. Likewise, in Emersonianism, a form of utmost being may also be reached through the interplay between self-negation and types of engagement which have further ontological repercussions, as the next paragraphs will show; transactions of a singular character that have the potential to accomplish a form of being which is transcendental in essence, and which may be conceived as fundamentally authentic in the Romantic environment of Emersonianism.
- 2 Conceived as such, the pantheistic frame of American Transcendentalism radically antagonizes the un (...)
16Emerson conceives human beings as predicated by the creative spirit of nature, which he referred to as the “universal soul” (1841b/2003: 149). In his metaphysical model, men and women are devised as part of a greater community which is spiritual in essence, and which exemplifies a universal principle of creation. According to Emerson, each and every individual has the capacity to embody this creative principle, which is apprehended as divine in nature – a declination of the godhead which one may contribute to realize by way of his or her own actions: “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same” (ibid.). As Fromm (2004: 78) points out, “[f]or Emerson, human beings participate in the monistic unity of creation (which he calls, for short, the Oversoul) that runs the same through planets, rocks, plants, animals, and the consciousness of humanity. This creator spiritus is larger and more inclusive than any particular incarnations.” The main implication of these precepts is that, in Emersonianism, divinity is conceived in pantheist fashion as a spiritual essence, dynamic and creative, which permeates all aspects of material reality, including being itself.2 “Emerson’s god,” Fromm observes, “is an immanent god, an indwelling property personhood and physical nature, not located in some worldly realm” (ibid.: 74). While the divine is devised by Emerson as both transcendent and immanent, its creative principle is conceived, primarily, as foreign to the self in the first place:
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. (Emerson 1836/2003: 36)
17And yet, while nature is devised as extraneous by origin, the individual must attempt to integrate it and synthesize its essence; an operation which – in accordance with Emerson’s theological precepts – paves the way for reaching a higher form of being, devised as transcendental in essence.
18In Sartrean theory, the original split between the self and the highest potentiality for being is a function of nothingness; it exemplifies a primordial negation of the self which acts, paradoxically, as an incentive for action, thus providing an opportunity for the individual to reach existential authenticity. As Sartre (1943/2007: 70) concludes: “For that reason [nothingness] must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a Not that the slave first apprehends the master.” Here, the ontological conceptions of the Sartrean Not and the Emersonian not-me remain different in their nature. For Sartre, nothingness is strictly phenomenological: it is an effect of “consciousness [which], instead of directing its negation outward, turns it towards itself” (ibid.: 71). Whereas in Emersonianism, the not-me is, first and foremost, spiritual: while nature acts as an impetus for ontological regeneration and creativity, its expression within the individual is the office of a spiritual force that permeates the self, implying that the not-me is grounded elsewhere; a not-me which, in the first place, must be accessed by the individual not through the hyperrational operations of a self-reflective consciousness, but more intuitively through the power of spirit. Nonetheless, the modus operandi of the Emersonian not-me parallels that of the Sartrean Not: in Emersonianism as well as in Sartrean theory, the potentiality for authentic being is predicated, de facto, by a fundamental negation, albeit of a different kind – implied by nature and by nothingness respectively. In both models, this negation is meant to be transcended in order to enable the fulfilment of the deepest and higher self – an operation which, in both instances, exemplifies a self-transcending impulse that acts as a goad to action. This is what prompted Sartre to declare that “death by being revealed to us as it really is frees us wholly from its so-called constraint” (ibid.: 566); a statement which may be viewed as the counterpart to Emerson’s pronouncement according to which “[w]ho hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent” (1841b/2003: 149).
19While the primordial negation upon which the transcendental operations of Emersonianism and those of Sartrean Existentialism hinge is of a fundamentally different nature, in both models this negation is established, paradoxically, as the motive for action, itself conceived as the instrument for emancipation. Converging on the unshakable fear of death that characterizes the human condition, Sartrean nothingness elicits an ontological reaction – that of engagement, or commitment – which, in principle, regenerates the self and reaffirms its legitimacy in history. While such acts of commitment initiate an ontological process which is conducive to forms of existential authenticity, they are also regenerative, enabling the individual to redefine the contents of his or her selfhood: for Sartre in Existentialism & Humanism, “there is no reality except in action” (1946/2007: 47). Meanwhile, in Emersonianism it is nature that must be transcended on the site of the self by way of spirit; a transaction, ontological in character, through which the individual may reach authenticity by means of his or her actions and embody a transcendental form of being. As Emerson (1841a/2003: 227) put it, “the life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.” While the expansion of this “self-evolving circle” is dependent upon self-realization, it also implies a form of self-objectification, since action is predicated by spirit; diverging, in this regard, from the Sartrean model, in which the subject-status of the self is maintained throughout the act of engagement, itself preceded by the reflexive operations of consciousness.
20Beyond this structural divergence, the imperative for self-realization in Sartrean Existentialism singularly echoes Emerson’s exhortation to fulfill one’s innermost ideas emanating from the deeper self, wholly and without constraints. “Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold in great proportions,” Emerson wrote in “Nature” (1836/2003: 81). This existential impetus relies on what David Bowers identifies as
the belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization, and that self-realization, in turn, depends upon the harmonious reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies: first, the expansive or self-transcending impulse of the self, its desire to embrace the whole world in the experience of a single moment and to know and become one with that world; and second, the contracting or self-asserting impulse of the individual, his desire to withdraw, to remain unique and separate, and to be responsible only for himself. (Bowers 1973: 17)
- 3 This distinctive type of engagement will be referred to as Emersonian engagement, and contrasted wi (...)
21The merger described here – an amalgamation of the transcending impulse of the deeper self with the integrative forces of subjectivity – is nothing less than the coalescence of the not-me with the me: a junction which exemplifies the demiurgic interplay of the creative essence of nature within the individual. Deep-rooted in self-reliance, this operation mobilizes a specific type of engagement: one shaped by the precepts of Emersonian Transcendentalism whose ontological function reverberates with that of Sartre in its impetus toward action and self-creation.3 For it is nature, in the Emersonian model, which is thought to contain the creative principle that actualizes it. In a similar fashion, it is through a resolute engagement with the conditions of the real – interpreted as a series of actions performed in the here-and-now – that the individual may achieve the realization of his or her innermost and deepest self in historical reality; a self-realization that mirrors the ontological process at the origin of Sartrean authenticity – achieved via an act of commitment to the here-and-now.
22While the articulation of these two forms of engagement may appear to be closely related, one of the main differences rests in their appreciation of the status of the self for the two thinkers. For Emerson, each and every individual is conceived as an offshoot of divinity, itself envisioned as ingrained in the self and viewed as immanent. As stated in “The Over-Soul”: “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence” (Emerson 1841c/2003: 206). At the closing of the essay: “I am born into the great, the universal mind. […] More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions” (ibid.: 224). The spiritual force of nature described here and conceived as antecedent to individual existence, has an impact not only on the nature of Emersonian engagement, but also on its outcome. As Olaf Hansen (1990: 83) pinpoints, “[for Emerson,] history, as it turns out, is a sediment, a reminder of the fact that something has taken place before.” Such a view antagonizes the Sartrean precept of the precedence of existence over essence: as Sartre claimed in Existentialism & Humanism “existence comes before essence – or, if you will, […] we must begin from the subjective” (1946/2007: 27). For Sartre, “[m]an will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it” (ibid.: 30). In Sartre’s perspective, the spiritual essence of nature has no reality: the source of authentic being is to be found exclusively in the reflexive capacity of consciousness. The individual exists, first and foremost, phenomenologically; attempting to write himself or herself in history through an act of consciousness that transcends being – the source of his or her freedom. This freedom does not simply mean, as Spanos pointed out,
a burdened sense of responsibility for the rest of the being of being, one devoid of transcendental guidance. It also mean[s] the dread incumbent on this fundamental condition – the absence of a God on which to rely for difficult decisions about being in the world. It meant freedom in the radical sense of word, as in Sartre’s memorable Kierkegaardian phrase “Man is condemned to be free.” (Spanos 2016: 473)
23Yet, by emphasizing the crucial necessity for an agency that is exclusively self-legislating and which claims full responsibility for its actions, Sartre overlooks the ontological implications of immanence for the subject: an immanence through which divinity coincides, in great measure, with the deeper self. In the Emersonian tradition, this deeper self is devised, as Fromm suggested in “Emerson’s Evolutionary Existentialism,” as
an ideal, somewhat Rousseauvian, connection with the roots of our being, uncorrupted by the hypostatizations of transient culture, a connection expressive of the universe’s deepest tendencies as manifested in the quasi-mystic moments of human existence – what Heidegger and Virginia Woolf were to treat as revelatory “moments of being.” (Fromm 2004: 74-5)
24In this context, divinity manifests itself as the outcome of individual self-realization rather than as an external and immaculate deity; a conception that Emerson progressed throughout his essay “History”: “Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to [the universal mind], in appropriate events” (1841b/2003: 149). That is to say, for Emerson the fulfillment of the deepest self implies an intrinsic realization of the godhead in the here-and-now, where the deepest self is envisioned as the “most primal and impersonal ‘human nature,’ a manifestation of the monistic force generating the universe rather than private lunacy or savage animality” (Fromm 2004: 74). In this sense, through the enactment of the innermost ideas within the self, the individual concomitantly realizes the most authentic form of his or her being as well as the spiritual principle of creation in historical reality.
25Conceived as such, Emersonian engagement is fundamentally two-fold in its expression, with effects on both the historical and the ahistorical planes. Bearing the stamp of idealism, it relies on a spiritual framework which is pantheistic and immanent – an immanence which, crucially, collapses linear temporality. As Aryan Mohseni observed (2021: 7), “[r]eflective of that worldview is the notion of a Universal Mind, a very Hegelian inversion of the linear temporality so favoured by British empiricists of the time, which sees each present moment as derivative of some historical endpoint that is at once ultimate and yet anterior to the present.” In Emersonianism, the temporal condition of the individual is conceived ideally in simultaneity with that of the godhead, where time is but an inexhaustible present that stretches ad infinitum: “[Man] cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time” (1841d/2003: 189). This faculty to elude the linear conception of time is the corollary of what Emerson defined in “Nature” as an “idealism [that] sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul” (ibid.: 70).
26Concurrently, by dismantling temporal linearity, immanence abrogates the teleological by revoking the concept of divine predestination. As Robert Caponigri points out in “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History” (1973: 247): “To Emerson, the doctrine of the divinity of man could mean but one thing, the divinity of every individual and, consequently, the immediate access of every individual to the plenitude of the divine in his own experience”; suggesting that the individual may retain the highest degree of autonomy at each and every moment of his or her daily life, and still be in constant interaction with the godhead. This is how the very moment, in Emersonianism, is contaminated with the immediate promise of the transcendent – a bond that brings a new ontological dimension to human experience. Crucially, in its ambition to exemplify the creative principle of the universal mind in the here-and-now on the site of the self, Emersonian engagement anticipates the temporal parameters of existentialist authenticity to a great extent, where authentic being is prompted by the necessity to fulfill the innermost and deepest self in strict relation with the conditions of the very moment.
27Still, Emersonian engagement remains largely distinctive: planted in idealism, it proclaims the supremacy of spirit over matter – a spirit actualized in historical reality by and through the individual. For Emerson, the pre-eminence of spirit implies that one’s commitment to his or her surroundings is, first and foremost, a function of nature, an expression of the creative principle encapsulated within the self. In Emersonianism, the process of engagement is not the effect of “a power which exists […] in time or space, but [rather of] an instantaneous in-streaming causing power” (Emerson 1836/2003: 79; italics added). This in-streaming causing power is referred to as an act of intuition by Emerson; defined in “Self-reliance” as “that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, [in which] all things find their common origin” (1841d/2003: 187). As Caponigri pointed out (1973: 242), “the faculty which [intuition] symbolizes is the most direct channel between man and the realm of absolute spiritual reality.” This engagement does not derive from the transcending of a consciousness of death – the office of nothingness in the Sartrean paradigm;4 rather, it stems from the intuition of nature within the individual, who may thus acquire the opportunity to relay the universal principle of creation through his or her own being. As Larzer Ziff put it in his Introduction to Nature and Selected Essays (2003b: 17), “the spirit that is present behind nature does not act upon us from without but acts within us.”
28Understood as the spiritual manifestation of nature within the self, intuition triggers a series of implications that redefine the links between history and commitment. For Emerson (1841b/2003: 171), “in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.” History is devised as a function of the universal mind; a physical extension that emanates from the creative principle of nature encapsulated within the individual – the intuition. It entails that history and the self are not only tightly interrelated in Emersonianism, they are also indivisible. This is how for Emerson, the historical is interweaved with the biographical: “We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is no proper history, only biography” (1841b/2003: 153).
29In this context, one’s engagement with historical reality implies, first and foremost, a commitment to the deepest self: a commitment directed primarily inwards, towards the intuition, which may thus be channelled into the physical space of the real. In consequence, “for Emerson, history is not so much knowledge of the past as a form of thought – a sympathetic participation in a certain state of consciousness, a mode of experiencing and perceiving” (Mohseni 2021: 13). Such a conception diverges from the Sartrean model, in which history is envisaged as a mass of facts that not only precedes, but also justifies, the incentive for present action. In Sartrean Existentalism therefore, commitment is principally directed outwards towards the material circumstances of contemporaneous reality, an engagement with sociohistorical contingencies that strives to recover a space in the here-and-now for the innermost self to thrive.
30Ultimately, for Emerson spirit rules over matter through men and women; an axiom through which history is authorized by the universal mind upon the enactment of intuition, envisaged as an act of commitment by nature. As Mohseni observed (2021: 10-1), “the Romantic belief that (human) nature and experience is the proper locus of revelation, shows Emerson’s emphasis on intuition as a means of historical insight.” It entails that, in Emersonianism, engagement extends primarily vertically toward the godhead. While this type of engagement also impacts the surface of the real, it does so strictly as an aftereffect of this verticality: the sum of actions carried out in historical reality is but the corollary of the intuitive drive of each individual, a by-product of the idealism that sits at the core of Emersonianism. Such a trajectory deviates from that of Sartrean Existentialism, where commitment is directed principally at the materiality of history, and therefore develops exclusively on a horizontal plane.
31In this sense, intuition plays a fundamental role in the implementation of existential forms of engagement in Emersonianism. It may be viewed as a spiritual channel with an ontological function – a channel through which the individual may act and simultaneously regenerate his or her own self. It entails that both self and spirit are reified synchronously in historical reality through a strategy of intuitive performativity – an effect of the creative principle of nature that transcends the self. The accomplishment of this transcending dynamic constitutes one of the main conditions for the emergence of existential authenticity in the context of Emersonianism. It exemplifies a commitment to one’s most intuitive drive which enables the individual to fulfill, and expand, both self and the universal mind in a mutually regenerative process: a paired, self-creative movement which characterizes the modus operandi of the distinctive type of transcendental ontology that runs through a significant part of the Romantic culture of mid-nineteenth-century America.
32Grasped within the environment of the transcendental ontology described in the former section, the vertical trajectory of Emersonian forms of engagement highlights the existential necessity to preserve the channel between self and the godhead. Mediated through intuition, this channel is what enables the individual to realize the highest form of his or her being – defined as a type of existential authenticity in the Romantic context of Emersonianism. However, when this connection of a transcendental character fails to occur, the individual is divorced from nature and therefore remains alien to its creative principle – a separation which, in turn, prevents self-actualization both in ontological and in spiritual terms: “As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God” (Emerson 1836/2003: 73-4). Locked out of nature and segregated from its spiritual essence, the individual is estranged from its regenerative power; falling victim to a state of self-alienation that constitutes a primer for existential inauthenticity.
33Crucially, this inauthentic condition is prompted by the multifarious encroachments inherent to the predicament of nineteenth-century modernity. For Emerson as well as for a number of other American Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, the stirrings of the American Industrial Revolution were seen as interfering with the grace of first-hand experience – a mediation of their intimate engagement with nature and its spiritual essence that inevitably hampered intuitive self-expression. Emanating from the locus of modern civilization, these mediations are conceived as interpositions of their cultural environment to natural phenomena; deemed, for the most part, as detrimental for the cultivation of the deepest and most intuitive self. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. pinpointed in “Transcendentalism and Jacksonian Democracy” (1973: 139), the “Transcendentalist[s] detested special groups claiming authority to mediate between the common man and the truth. [They] aimed to plant the individual squarely on his instincts, responsible only to himself and to God.”
34For Emerson, social mediations in particular play a significant role in this deleterious effect. In essays such as “Nature” (1836) and “History” (1841b), Emerson envisages individuals as united by their intimate bond to the universal spirit, which they contribute to actualize in the here-and-now via the fulfillment of their intuitive drive. In this instance, the collective body is apprehended as a coherent microcosmic aggregate which is fundamentally virtuous. Yet, in a number of other writings by Emerson, the collective appears to be more problematic. In “Self-reliance” (1841d) for example, the social sphere is conceived as a threat to individual integrity:
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not reality and creators, but names and customs. (Ibid.: 179)
35Here, the world of social interactions is conceived as a field of limitations and constraints that sways individual experience into social compliance and conformism by introducing a series of agreements – and therefore obligations – which work, there and then, in furtherance of the civilizational project of modernity and against the cultivation of natural phenomena. Devised as such, social interactions are envisaged as superfluous and profane: they squash the intuitive self and jeopardize authentic being by preventing the establishment of an intimate and privileged dialogue between the innermost self and the transcendent. Grasped as a hindrance to immediate and unconditional self-realization, society is thought to impede access to a higher form of being, authentic and transcendental: it becomes an agent of alienation.
36Most importantly, this hostility vis-à-vis society, envisaged here as the absorption and neutralization of the transcendental self, implies that the proposition of existential authenticity in Emersonianism is, in reality, two-fold: as the individual engages with his or her deepest self to enact and fulfill the intuition, he or she simultaneously disengages from the social and cultural spheres of influence. As Fromm remarked in “Emerson’s Evolutionary Existentialism,”
no transcendent lawgiver was needed since the raw materials of the universe were themselves legislative. The religious enterprise of the individual self was to decipher these laws through the promptings of its deepest being, an existential task that entailed the casting aside of society’s anachronistic directives in order to find “the truth for me.” (Fromm 2004: 91)
37This “casting aside” may be viewed as an existential strategy for disengagement: a deliberate attempt to withdraw from the quagmire of a contemporaneous reality perceived as increasingly industrialized, rationalized and mechanized, and interfering with more intuitive and autonomous modes of being.
38Ultimately, the strategy for disengagement epitomizes a will to not only reclaim one’s authority over that of society, adhering to the American myth of self-reliance, but also to rise above cultural conditioning and ideological formatting. Here, Emersonianism meets the proto-existentialist ideas of Nietzsche, as David Mikics (2003: 1) pointed out, where the “dream of individual power [is] set against what Emerson called conformity, the common or official beliefs that surround us.” This yearning for individual power, often achieved at the cost of a deliberate alienation from one’s own contemporaneity, typifies a leitmotiv located at the crossroads between Emersonianism and existentialist thinking which constitutes a distinctive trait of the ontological modulation that surfaced in the philosophical culture of the American Renaissance.
39The ambiguity of a withdrawal from the plane of sociohistorical reality that yet allows the individual to discover and perceive the essence of the world is a singular paradox which is key for unravelling the modus operandi of a pioneering form of Existentialism in America, one inspired by the precepts of Emerson. As seen earlier, in the Romantic matrix of Emersonianism authentic being is achieved through a process of engagement which has the capacity to fulfill both self and spirit, and which nonetheless contains its own form of disengagement. This dynamic is antithetical but not contradictory: endowed with moral legitimacy, it assists the immediate and unrestricted accomplishment of the innermost self in historical reality via the enactment of intuition, which it seeks to establish as an act of resistance not only to the regulations and prescriptions of the social body, but also to the facticity of history. For Emerson (1841b/2003: 168), “[f]acts encumber [men], tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.” Such a view of history enabled him to justify the stance against both the social organization of an increasingly conformist America and the cultural rationale of the Industrial Revolution, devised as profane in essence and fundamentally alienating. Motivated by the primacy and the authority of the intuitive self, this wilful estrangement from one’s own contemporaneity may be conceived as a genuine existential strategy for the individual to preserve, and extend, the perimeter of his or her freedom – viewed as the capacity to enact the least of his or her intuitive impulses in the here-and-now with the fewest possible constraints. In this sense, the project of disengagement typifies a romantic attempt to overpower historical contingencies and curb the material limitations of the world for the ideal self to prosper; a chance for the individual to embody a form of authentic being by recovering a space – private yet universal – in which the deepest, but also the highest self can thrive immoderately and instantaneously.
40Yet, while the intuitive insights of the individual are apprehended as supreme and non-negotiable, they also preclude a more social form of consciousness to emerge. Indeed, the triumphant self of Emersonianism largely contradicts the Sartrean principle of social responsibility. For Sartre (1946/2007: 32-3):
When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind – in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility. […] one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception.
41This sense of individual responsibility in existentialist theory, which Sartre sought to extend to the collective, acts as an ethical guideline which constitutes the counterpart to individual freedom. In Emersonianism however, social responsibility is subdued at the expense of the moral duty to act wholly and exclusively upon the intuition – an operation, ontological in nature, which aims to rehabilitate the reign of the ideal self in the here-and-now. This proposition tallies with a more Romantic ethos: it may be viewed as an act of commitment that seeks to channel the innermost self at all costs – an act that participates in the definition of the existential authenticity that lies beneath the surface of Emersonianism.
42The call to disengage from the field of sociohistorical reality in order for the intuitive self to prevail contributes to establish self-worship as a moral injunction. It signals a commitment motivated by, and for, the ideal self; an engagement that expands vertically, and which is at risk of being brought back onto itself through the obstinate self-centeredness that it exemplifies. While such a type of engagement has the capacity to generate forms of being conceived as transcendental in essence and existentially authentic, it remains nonetheless highly ambivalent: the social estrangement that it cultivates promotes a deliberate alienation from contemporaneity that constitutes a perilous strategy for the continuity and sustainability of the self in situ. As Golomb argued in In Search of Authenticity (1995: 140), “the phenomenological studies make it clear that we cannot create our selves by looking inward into our seemingly given selves. […] Only by action, by changing the world, can the self be created.” This is one of the most significant pitfalls of forms of existential authenticity conceived in an Emersonian context – an authenticity envisaged as self-reliant at heart, fundamentally intuitive and intrinsically seditious: the imperative to channel the innermost and deepest self without hindrance foregrounds an impulse which is radically individualistic and which hinges on solipsism.
43This impulse suggests that existential solace can only be self-directed – a backlash from Emersonian idealism which, here again, works against the Sartrean ethics of social responsibility. For Sartre (1946/2007: 32), “[r]esignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind.” In contrast, in its obsession with the freest, most direct expression of the innermost and deepest self, the existential authenticity that radiates from Emersonianism risks being subdued by its own inwardness. In an attempt to clarify his ethics of engagement, Emerson wrote in “The American Scholar” (1838/2003: 92):
The world, – this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. […] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion.
44Here, the world, and with it its extant reality, becomes admissible as long as its spiritual residues convene on the site of the self. As the act of engagement becomes utilitarian, it may keep the individual blind to historical facticity and social contingency; subverting their empirical status and replacing it with what the ideal self recognizes as its sole interests. By summoning the despotic truth of the intuitive self under the pretext of self-discovery, the individual runs the risk of a slip towards solipsism that may ultimately thwart the proposition for authentic being. It is this balancing act which is symptomatic of the most radical expression of the existential authenticity ingrained in the Romantic culture of nineteenth-century America; typifying a self-apotheosis that gives rise to forms of being which are transcendental and ultimate, and yet perpetually threatened by self-collapse.
45By interrelating Emerson’s ontological forays with some of Sartre’s main existentialist precepts, this reading has illuminated the rudiments of a pioneering form of Existentialism in America, one which is closely related to its own cultural legacies. Transcendental in essence and predicated by nature, this variant stages the pursuit of an existential form of authenticity that aims to fulfil the innermost and higher self by way of intuitive performativity; shedding light, at the same time, on the contribution of Emersonianism to the rise of existentialist thinking in the US. As in Sartrean Existentialism, this quest for authenticity stems from an act of engagement: one which is prompted, singularly, by natural phenomena – which assume the ontological function of nothingness – whose incorporation within the self and subsequent enactment constitutes one of the highest responsibilities of individual existence. At the same time, it promotes a radical form of disengagement, characterized by an insurrection against the sociohistorical conditions of the real that aims to maintain the legitimacy, the potency, and the liberty of the deepest self; an emancipation achieved through a form of being that is strictly intuitive, entirely performative, and transcendental at its core. Interpreted as a distinct expression of a type of existential authenticity in the environment of Emersonianism, this higher form of being pivots on the enactment and subsequent elevation of the innermost self – an accomplishment which is as ontological as it is moral: in so doing, the individual negotiates the corporealization of what is conceived, in the pantheistic frame of Transcendentalism, as the universal spirit in historical reality – a proposition symptomatic of the idealism that lies at the core of Emersonianism.
46Spiritual in origin, existential in character, and transcendental in destination, this impulse in the individual typifies a commitment, first and foremost, to inner nature: an impulse which seeks to engage with inner phenomena with the fewest restraints, simultaneously reifying spirit in the here-and-now by embodying its creative principle. In so doing, it exemplifies a radical brand of individualism which is commensurate with the values of self-reliance and anti-conformism in which American Transcendentalism is firmly grounded. While this moral imperative translates into an existential motive for authentic being, it also tends to merge with the political in its revolt against the institutionalized structures inherent to sociohistorical reality, apprehended as factors of alienation that cripple intuitive self-expression. Aiming at removing all barriers to the transcendental accomplishment of the most intuitive self, this revolt deviates from that of French Existentialism in its neutralization of the ethical: it promotes a resolute withdrawal from the social and historical entanglements of contemporaneity, interpreted as a strategy of disengagement which is existential at heart. Concomitantly, this disengagement breeds an estrangement that may jeopardize the very potentiality for authentic being; it renders the individual vulnerable to an experience of self-alienation which, in turn, may catalyze a state of existential inauthenticity, enhanced by the tyranny of a self devised as all-legislating and irrefutable.
47Thus shaped by the interplay between engagement and disengagement, this modulation of a singular type occurs at the interface of the ontological with the historical and the spiritual: a confluence that lays the foundations for an American brand of Existentialism which is resolutely Romantic and predicated by nature. While the pragmatic dimension of this prototypical form of Existentialism has remained largely clandestine, it has been co-opted by the Romantic matrix of Emersonianism and put at the service of its modus operandi. Plunged in the predicament of the Industrial Revolution, shaped by the dynamics of intuitive performativity, and striving for the restoration and supreme rule of the ideal self, this pioneering form of Existentialism eulogizes a vision of existential solace which is transcendental and sanctified at every moment, and whose inward impulse may nevertheless be confounded with a mystical form of self-absorption.