Fall 1998
Volume 25, Number 1

In the middle of "Nominalist and Realist" Emerson articulates his disillusion with the conventional idea that persons are separate and integral entities: "I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals."3 The essay equivocates between belief in individuals and disbelief in them ("Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniancy in household matters, the divine man does not respect them" ["NR," p. 580]), seeing this equivocation as a matter of shifting moods. But in the end Emerson's point of view is unambiguous, in favor of acknowledging what in "Montaigne" he names the "catholic sense," the "larger generalizations," in effect the impersonal, called by him "the Over-soul" in the most famous example:4 "In youth we are all mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal."5 Impersonality is the antidote for the egotistical, the subjective, the solipsistic. It is so specifically because it refutes the idea that the mind is one's "property," that one's relation to being is that of ownership, on the one hand, and separate identity, on the other ("O," p. 390). From the perspective of the truth Emerson advocates in "The Over-soul," subjectivity and egotism are delusions about personal identity. From the vantage of the truth Emerson advocates in "The Over-soul," what defines "thoughts" as well as "events" is "alien energy" not "the will I call mine" ("O," p. 385). Thus the private will is overpowered by a force--variously named a "common heart" ("O," p. 386), and in others a "universal mind," an "identical nature"--that inhibets all.6 . . . When Emerson in "The Over-soul" writes "we do not yet possess ourselves" ("O," p. 391), he means that we live out of synch with the truth of this impersonality. Yet to live in synch with it is to become indifferent to any fate one might conceivably call "mine" (the point ultimately made by the essay "Fate").

In part 1 of the following I examine formulations that elaborate the mechanics of impersonality, an examination necessary to specify how persons come in contact with the impersonal.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nominalist and Realist," Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York, 1983), p. 580; hereafter abbreviated "NR."

4. Emerson, "Montaigne," Essays and Lectures, p.709; hereafter abbreviated "M."

5. Emerson, "The Over-soul," Essays and Lectures, p.709; hereafter abbreviated "O." Emerson's primary understanding of the meaning of person and of personality (hence of impersonality) originated with the sense of the three-personed God. Despite the fact that Webster, following Johnson, in 1828 never mentions that there's a millennial idea of person bound up with the idea of Christ, Emerson certainly would have known this from Patristic sources. Thus although Emerson uses the idea of the impersonal as if its divinity is part of his intuitive sense of the word, rather than part of its etymology, when he brings in the idea of God what he is bringing in is the long history of person associated with the theology of the Trinity.

In fact what Emerson inherits is a misunderstanding. For the word person when it pertains to God was not originally meant to indicate an individual, but rather denote a way of subsisting, a way of being, a hypostasis. Not pertaining to aspects of God, nor to mythological intermediaries for God, and certainly not to any modern sense of individual, the Trinity originally implied a sameness of divine essence through three modes that belied the idea of person-as-individual that Emerson found so abhorrent. See the entry by M. J. Dorenkemper, "Person (In Theology)," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Catholic University of America, 18 vols. (New York, 1967), 11:168-70, for the sense of person as Emerson would have inherited it. For the more modern, philosophcical sense of person as self, as in personality, see J. Ellis McTaggert on "personality," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (New York, 1908), 11:773-81.

For a historically nuanced account of Emerson's complex relation to individuality, see Sacvan Bercovitch's clarifying discussion of the understanding of individualism Emerson inherited from the socialists, of his reconception of this idea in the 1840s as a "vision of cosmic subjectivity" (opposed to socialism), and of his ultimate understanding in the1850s of individuality as allied with industrial-capitalist "Wealth" and "Power" (Sacvan Bercovitch, "Emerson, Individualism, and Liberal Dissent," The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America [New York, 1993], pp. 310, 323, 330, 340). Bercovitch charts the shifts in Emerson's understanding of individualism as it moves from the utopian to the ideological, but in doing so he fascinatingly demonstrates the dynamic relation between these impulses throughout Emerson's thought and writing.

6. Emerson, "History," Essays and Lectures, p.2 37, and "Spiritual Laws," Essays and Lectures, p.322; hereafter abbreviated "SL."

7. Emerson, "The Poet," Essays and Lectures pp. 460, 459; hereafter abbreviated "P."

Sharon Cameron is Kenan Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (1979), The Corporal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1989), and Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles (1992)