Both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and W. E. B. Du Bois' firstborn sons tragically died at very young ages. Drawing from the essays where they write about their grief, I explore Du Bois' “subversion” and “revision” of Emerson's thought by contrasting their visual metaphors: Emerson's “focal distancing” and Du Bois' practice of “second sight” and seeing through “the Veil.” I show how the disruptive particular event of the deaths of their sons causes both to challenge the idealist elements of their respective gazes. I draw upon Theodor Adorno to explore the larger lessons of these reconsiderations. In recognizing the seductive dangers of the idealist gaze and the value of the disruptive particular, Adorno explicitly theorizes what Emerson and Du Bois also come to appreciate, in a less overt way, in their moments of loss.
In 1825, when he was twenty-two, Emerson experienced rheumatic inflammation in his eyes, since diagnosed as (most likely) the eye disease uveitis. As Robert Richardson describes in his biography, "Over the next nine months, Emerson underwent two operations in which his cornea was punctured with a cataract knife." His eyes would periodically fail him in the future, literally, making it difficult for him to see, as well as subjecting him to intense headaches. As Richardson notes, "After his eye trouble . . . Emerson would never again be indifferent to eyes, sight, and vision." Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 66, 71.
2.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 142.
3.
Emerson did not invent the concept of "double consciousness." Several of Du Bois' other influences also used this term. As David Levering Lewis, Du Bois' principle biographer, has noted The divided self was, of course, not original with Du Bois. The construct was central to the fiction of Goethe and Chesnutt, two of his favorite writers. Emerson, another favorite, had used the term "double consciousness" in "The Transcendentalist," the 1843 published lecture in which he characterized the dilemma as one in which the `two lives, of the understanding and of the soul . . . really show very little relation to each other. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919 ( New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1993), 282.
4.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989). Hereafter cited in text as Souls.
5.
As Tom Dumm notes, the pain of the loss and the possibility of rebirth is made more intense given that Emerson's and Du Bois' sons share something of their own names, making an even more stark parallel to the loss of the self: Ralph Waldo Emerson's son was named Waldo and William Edward Burghardt Du Bois' son was named Burghardt. See Thomas L. Dumm, "Political Theory for Losers," in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
6.
In his excellent essay "Political Theory for Losers," Thomas L. Dumm also draws upon these two essays to ask "how might the experience of loss be theorized?" (145). Dumm argues that both Emerson and Du Bois try to gain something from their losses through a process of "reinspiriting": for Emerson "the passage of spirit…might allow us to die out of nature and be born again" while "Du Bois will be born again with a baby voice, come into his own as an American…(159)." My essay also explores these two essays, but with a specific focus on their visual metaphors and with a different question in mind. See Thomas L. Dumm, "Political Theory for Losers."
7.
See my article "Thoreau, Adorno, and the Critical Potential of Particularity," in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming). See also my book Thoreau's Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity, forthcoming in November 2009 from University of Wisconsin Press.
8.
Emerson's idea of "focal distance" might draw upon the technology of photography. In the nineteenth century, cameras were invented that recorded visual images using metal plates (later, glass, then film). These cameras used lenses to focus the images. In 1839, Louis Daguerre patented the Daguerrotype, the first practically used photographic technique. Oxford English Reference Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). But the eye also has lens that focus, so Emerson's concept of "focal distance" seems at once both a technological and a naturalistic image, reflecting the harmony Emerson often describes between technological processes of modernization and naturalistic images of man's coming to maturity.
9.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, vol. 1, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 13. Hereafter cited in text as Nature .
10.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, in Essays: First Series, vol. 2, ed. Joseph Slater, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 9.
11.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," in Essays: Second Series, ed. Joseph Slater, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 106. Hereafter cited in text as "Nature."
12.
Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 358.
13.
Ibid, 356.
14.
Ibid, 359.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Emerson's first wife, Ellen Louise Tucker, died of tuberculosis only seventeen months after they were married in 1829. Emerson loved Ellen deeply and was haunted by her death. In his journal, he writes that he visited her tomb after she died and opened the coffin, something that he also reports having done when Waldo died. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 121.
17.
Stanley Cavell , "Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson's `Experience,'" in Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003 ), 117.
18.
Thanks to Amanda Evans, a student in my American Political Thought class, for pointing out this allusion to Corinthians.
19.
Here we see Du Bois' critique of Booker T. Washington's plan for the advancement of Black Americans through "submission" to their place in society, through low-skilled vocational training. Du Bois articulates these criticisms more fully in chapter 3 of The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others."
20.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
21.
Rutledge M.Dennis notes this duality, but does not connect it to the image of the Veil: We can note precisely two double-consciousness themes presented by Du Bois: one, emphasizing the irreconcilable nature of the two opposing forces (one African, the other European) locked in an eternal battle the outcome of which cannot yet be known; the other theme offers the possibility of a synthesis of the two opposing forces suggesting that unity may yet emerge from great disunity, that a largely fragmented reality may give rise to a heretofore unthinkable coherence. Rutledge M. Dennis, "Du Bois's Concept of Double Consciousness," in W. E. B. Du Bois: The Scholar as Activist, ed. Rutledge M. Dennis, Research in Race and Ethnic Relations (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, Inc. , 1996), 73.
22.
David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919 ( New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 227.
23.
This quotation, from F. H. Bradley, is the epigraph to Part Two of Minima Moralia. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 83.
24.
Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 41.
25.
J.M. Bernstein, "Negative Dialectics as Fate," in Cambridge Companion to Adorno , ed. Tom Huhn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26.
26.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 6.
27.
Bernstein, "Negative Dialectics as Fate," 36.
28.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics , 6.
29.
The "microscopic gaze" that Adorno adopted was deeply influenced by Walter Benjamin's way of seeing (in fact, this was the phrase Adorno used to describe Benjamin's gaze). Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 74.
30.
Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press , 2001), 66-67.
31.
Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 181.
32.
As Emerson himself says, It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg . . . showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that there were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, vol. 1, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 206.
