Dream a Little Dream of Not Me: The Natures of Emerson's Demonology

What is it about?

Emerson believed that god was not an anthropomorphic figure, but an impersonal system of natural laws, designated under the umbrella term of nature; that deity was universal, omnipresent, and could have a personality attributed to it—that is, it could be personified. But it was not human in any way; Emerson could never have a personal Jesus. The impersonal god, or All, was a mediating structure, a regulatory system that governed all forces of nature, mechanisms of communication and exchange, and principles of rationality. But underpinning Emerson’s depictions of benign, rational and universal nature is always an occult demonology, a sense of an unconscious, irrational “crack: at the heart of being itself. Emerson’s notion of the self, or me, was always predicated on the not-me—the opposite of what was purported to be the white male self, so it was also often coded as back, female, animal-like, dream-bound, and “aboriginal.” Emerson’s nature s always haunted, and will always eventually betray Emerson’s attempts to constrain it within rational discourse.

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Why is it important?

Emerson developed a theory of pantheism (the deification of an impersonal nature) in which every aspect of the impersonal world was alive and interconnected, and which was governed only by a universal nature. But he has been radically misinterpreted to be a champion of individuality, when by he loathed individuality as form of specious self-indulgence, and championed the transcendence of the self and archetypal or aboriginal self stripped of everything most people would identify with their individual personalities. Contrary to popular conceptions of his notion of self-reliance, Emerson rarely considers anyone or anything in individual terms: as he admonishes, “We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins.” Yet very few critics ever acknowledge this primary strain of Emerson’s thought, instead treating him as an optimist proponent of individualism. But his system of nature doesn’t rely on individual biography (individual pumpkins), but transpersonal, transgenerational, transnational and transcendental impersonality. Throughout his essays and journals, Emerson warned that God is “no respecter of persons,” and that for our truest relations, “there is no personeity [personality] in it.” For Emerson, the representative man must “disindividualize himself” and align with “the universal mind.” To Emerson, the self is the parasite, and a deficient fragment that can find a unified identity only by joining with collective nature, not society. Contrary to popular perception that he championed the self, Emerson attributed true personhood only to the impersonal—to archetypal nature, universal truth, and traits that transcend the self. Emerson’s nature—also universal, immortal and omnipresent—consequently begins to bear many of the attributes of inhuman impersonal systems. Late in life, even Emerson accedes that only laws and impersonal forces abide: “I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual.” In other words, the price for impersonal immortality in nature is the personal self. Emerson has been misappropriated and inverted by the right wing, but would not be assimilable to the general culture if his work weren’t misread and misapplied. One could say this phenomenon pertains in a generic sense to figures from Christ to Gloria Steinem, but a particular and exigent dissonance applies in the context of American self-reliance, which always was predicated on a history of genocide, slavery, denial and corporatism. Emerson doesn’t laud individuality, but its dissolution into an archetypal and hierarchical higher self purged of human particularity and idiosyncrasy. Emerson’s concept of self-reliance, which advocated harmonious merger with a generic self in nature, has been appropriated to represent an antagonism to government. But the ethos of self-reliance also reified and hid the fact that the U.S. economy was, even in the North, dependent on the opposite of self-reliance—the exploitation of slave labor. Demonology represents the return of the repressed in Emerson’s work—grief, mourning, the unassimilable, non-universal (or homo sacer), that which cannot be accommodated into systems of classification or become universal.

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