Tag Archives: Books

Emerson and His Critique of So-Called Me-First Individualism

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Sorry that it’s been so long since I posted last. The end of the quarter kind of consumed me, and then decompressing for the last two weeks made me oblivious to most things too. I am now in Austin, Texas for the week before Christmas with my partner, Kristen, visiting her family.

I caught an article this morning at Salon.com on Emerson and the Transcendentalists as “America’s Me First Generation.” I guess that it is a review of a book only half-mentioned in the article, though the tone of the whole piece is like that of a conversation you might have with someone who just read the book and is interested in talking about the subject of the book, and not the book as a subject.

The jist is that Emerson, who famously wrote that essay most of us read in High School, Self-Reliance, and similarly self-focused Transcendentalists were at odds with more socially-focused Transcendentalists.

This was the puzzle that the Transcendentalists faced: It is hard to remake a human being without also changing the society around him, but it is even harder to change a society when the human beings in it remain their old, recalcitrant selves

To this end, Miller represents or furthers a representation of Emerson as a beginning to what is today recognized as an abhorrent “me-first” or “me-me-me” attitude qua consumerist demand.

Some of us have even managed to convince ourselves that individualism is the only viable route to social justice, sharing Emerson’s faith in self-reliance as the consummate virtue

This is just poor argument of equivocation though. It is accurate to say that Emerson advocated a kind of way of life that turned on the individual rather than society. It’s even fair to say he brought this across as a way of making life better for people. Where Miller throws Emerson out the window is when she, like the author she seems to be reviewing, connects this notion of the individual to so-called individualism. Emerson is a very hostile to this individual, which Miller echos when she writes that he and other Transcendentalists both objected to “the materialistic, status-conscious ruthlessness of life under the reign of industrial capitalism.”

Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance is a critique against this individualism, which is a herd-mentality, to borrow from Nietzsche, the only person who seems to have read Emerson in the 19th Century. The trust in and reliance on ourselves that Emerson talks about is not the naive, self-made capitalist-Objectivist. For Emerson the motives driving this formation of the individual were as outside of the self as the authority from which Kant, in “What is Enlightenment,” says we must release ourselves, lest we remain unenlightened and spiritually/intellectually immature.

All I can say for now, because I’d like to post this now though I have to go, is that Emerson undermines the contemporary feel-good individualism that Miller would like to agree really starts with him. I will try and update this post this week with some

Green English

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My partner directed me towards what she thought was and what I was anticipating to be an exciting New York Times article on Irish-inspired American Slang. The author makes the exciting observation that taken-for-granted phrases and words like “thanks a million” and “gimmick” are in fact anglicized Irish Gaelic phrases and words. That isn’t the whole story though. The Irish didn’t just come into English (American or otherwise), they took English in and made it something of their own.

What I’m referring to is Hiberno-English, English that borrows from the deep as well as the surface features of Gaelic.. It’s not simply that certain Irish immigrants borrowed words and phrases from their native tongue when trying to make the switch to English more familiar. For those born and raised speaking Gaelic, a whole way of approaching language itself is brought to the new language. What this means is that phrases like “thanks a million” point to more than borrowed words, but borrowed syntax and morphology too. Such a phrase, both awkward and natural in our mouths, indicates more than merely a translated cobble of words, but a linguistic rationale that obviously comes from outside English’s own.

The book on this has already been written though. It’s called “Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language,” by Loreto Todd. Todd’s thesis takes Kilgannon’s much further, and well before his too. Todd argues that there is more Irish in English than we think, from borrowed words and word-construction to sentence-structures, to even the feminine personal pronoun, “she.” This view seems to be shared by Seamus Heaney, who in his recent translation of Beowulf explains how he used Hiberno-English to render tricky Old English linguistic formations into contemporary English while retaining the poetic sense of the original poem. It’s a beautiful translation too, and bilingual ta-boot. Needless to say, there is something profoundly beautiful about the cadence and sounds of Hiberno-English and otherwise Irish-influenced English, and we gain much from its influence.

For those who were intrigued by the article above, I suggest checking out Todd’s book first. Admittedly, I haven’t read Kilgannon’s book, so I don’t know if he makes the appropriate gesture to work already done in this field, but just the way it was described in the article, commited so to its subject matter of slang, it comes across as pedestrian. It’s nonetheless exciting that he’s bringing the idea of a relationship between Irish and English to a popular venue like the New York Times. I just hope that people don’t get the wrong impression that all this language borrowing stuff is just about surface-level phrases and words, but about mingling sensibilities about the world of language itself.