Political Theory OnlineFirst, published on February 18, 2009 as doi:10.1177/0090591709332328
On the Passing of the
First-Born Son
Political Theory
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Emerson’s “Focal Distancing,”
Du Bois’ “Second Sight,” and
Disruptive Particularity
Shannon Mariotti
Southwestern University
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.
Keywords:
vision; particularity; Emerson; Du Bois; Adorno
Theory and Vision
Thinking and seeing are intimately connected. How we see, the ways we
focus our gaze, shape our theories of the world. Conversely, what we think
about the world directs what comes into our line of sight, as well as what
our eyes pass over. Thinking and theorizing, then, are deeply visual practices
Author’s Note: Jason Frank gave me valuable feedback and direction when I first began to
think about the relationship between Emerson’s “Experience” and Du Bois’ “On the Passing
of the First-Born Son.” Tom Dumm also gave me helpful comments and suggestions as I
revised this essay. I would also like to thank Mary Dietz for the care and time she took to help
my manuscript reach its potential. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers at Political
Theory for their suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank Ed Royce for his invaluable help
and generosity in talking about this essay with me.
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involving the eye as well as the mind. This is an idea with deep roots: the
word “theory” derives from the Greek theoria, which is defined as the practice of looking at, viewing, or seeing something, but also contemplating or
speculating about it. Visual practices, focusing the eye in specific ways, can
help us contemplate the world and theorize about it. But at the same time,
certain sights and spectacles can also challenge established theories and
newly awaken us to the costs of previous ways of seeing. In this essay, I
explore how an instance of disruptive particularity challenges and reconfigures the visual practices of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Critics have long recognized the importance of “the eye” and sight in
Emerson’s work, but the theoretical richness of Du Bois’ visual metaphors
has not been as deeply explored.1 Examining the different ways each conceives of how one might see the world, I contrast Emerson’s practice of
“focal distancing” with Du Bois’ enactment of “second sight” and seeing
through the “Veil.” Taking their different visual metaphors seriously, I analyze the lines of their sight, what catches their eye, and the objects their
gazes fix upon. Their theories, like their visual practices, are different. As
Cornel West notes in his study of American pragmatism, though The Souls
of Black Folk is written “in the Emersonian grain,” Du Bois also “subverts”
and “revises” Emerson’s thought.2 Emerson was one of Du Bois’ intellectual heroes and a primary influence on his thought. But, as West notes, Du
Bois tries to “overcome the blindnesses, silences, and exclusions” of
Emerson, in part by reframing Emerson’s notion of the alienated “double
consciousness” as the experience of being both black and American, with
these two parts of the self at war.3 Moving in a different direction from
West, I argue that we can best illuminate Du Bois’ “subversion” and “revision” of Emerson by specifically analyzing their visual metaphors and how
their eyes adjust, in different ways, to bring the world into unique focus.
In addition to their similar use of overt visual metaphors, Emerson and
Du Bois are united by a singular event. In tragic coincidence, both thinkers
shared, and wrote about, a striking personal loss that offers a unique field
to compare their ways of seeing the world: both of their firstborn sons died
at very young ages. In “Experience,” Emerson mentions, almost in passing,
the death of his son Waldo two years before and meditates on the nature of
his grief. The death of his son might at first seem tangential to “Experience,”
but it soon becomes clear that this loss reshapes his view of life itself. Du
Bois suffered a similar loss. In chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk, we
come upon the piece titled “On the Passing of the First-Born.”4 Here, Du
Bois, with great pathos, shows how race colored thebirth, short life, and
death of his infant son Burghardt, changing his own perspective on life’s
possibilities.5
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Emerson’s and Du Bois’s eyes move in different patterns as they contemplate these events and try to bring the world into a focus that will help
them cope with their deep losses. They both struggle over how to keep the
proper perspective between disruptive particular things, such as the death
of a son, and more harmonious visions of a universal realm. Given their
different contexts, their struggles are weighted with different freights. The
immediacy of the loss of Waldo causes Emerson temporarily to pull back
from his usual focus on distant horizons to reconsider the costs of circling
beyond particular things. Du Bois’ faith in an ideal realm where we dwell
as sovereign souls, beyond the color-line, is shaken by the death of
Burghardt: momentarily, at least, he cannot seem to see beyond this particular loss. Their losses give rise to similar struggles, over and against the
differences between their usual practices of “focal distancing” and “second
sight”: both lose sight of the more distant universal realm that has previously been part of their visual practices. Both are momentarily focused on
the immediate, disruptive, and painful realm of the particular: they find it
difficult to tear their eyes away from the deaths of their sons.
What is at stake theoretically in these different visual practices? What
are the costs of these ways of looking for answers, as each tries to gain
perspective on their grief?6 I show how the disruptive particular event of
the deaths of their sons causes both Emerson and Du Bois to challenge the
idealist elements of their respective gazes: both become more attuned to
the dangers associated with directing their gaze toward a more universal,
harmonious realm, removed from the material problems of everyday life.
Ultimately, neither Emerson nor Du Bois entirely disavows their previous
way of seeing. But after the deaths of their sons, their respective visual
practices are taken up with greater critical appreciation for the seductions,
costs, and violences of the idealist gaze. They are more wary, chastened,
and skeptical of this way of seeing. Out of their struggle, out of this moment
of grief where they are both looking for answers, comes critical knowledge
that is painfully won, but valuable.
I draw upon Theodor Adorno to explore the larger lessons of Du Bois’
and Emerson’s experiences of loss. As a critic of idealism, Adorno articulates both the allure and danger of the idealist gaze. Adorno helps us understand the difficulty of sustaining the idealist gaze and the inevitable
challenge of the disruptive particular, as well as the unlikely critical value
of these unsettling moments. Given the falsity, violence, and illusory comforts that Adorno associates with the idealist gaze, he sees it as critically
vital to stare resolutely at the disruptive particular. As a countervailing practice
to idealism, the “microscopic gaze” that Adorno enacts in his practice of
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negative dialectics trains an unyielding eye on the disruptive particular as a
stimulus to our critical capacities, resisting all offers of retreat or refuge. In
recognizing the seductive dangers of the idealist gaze and the value of the
disruptive particular, Adorno more explicitly theorizes what Emerson and
Du Bois also perceive, in a less overt way, as they experiences their losses.
Adorno’s critique of idealism also helps us appreciate that Du Bois’ and
Emerson’s different ways of seeing the world do not reduce to a racial
binary: Emerson’s abstracting practice of “focal distancing” is not necessarily “white” nor is Du Bois’ more materialist, particularizing gaze necessarily “black.” Certainly, as we will see, the material conditions of racism
shape Du Bois’ moments of departure from idealism and figure prominently in his “subversion” and “revision” of Emerson. What Du Bois calls
“the problem of the color line” may be one factor that can attune us to particularity, but it is not the only one. The critique of idealism is prompted
more generally, as Adorno helps us appreciate, by paying attention to particularity. Indeed, I argue elsewhere that Henry David Thoreau, like Du
Bois, also employs a particularizing, microscopic gaze that goes against the
grain of Emerson’s way of seeing: Thoreau also “subverts” and “revises”
Emerson’s transcendental idealism in ways that are sympathetic to Adorno’s
negative dialectic.7 Thoreau’s motivations were different from Du Bois’ but
both were prompted to pay attention to particularity and this forms the basis
for their criticisms of idealism. Paying attention to particularity disrupts the
idealist gaze and makes it difficult to sustain. Even a transcendental idealist
such as Emerson, who would seem to enjoy racial privilege, momentarily
appreciates this in “Experience”: a flash of what Adorno would call the
“nonidentical” attunes him to disruptive particularity and makes him newly
appreciate the costs of his practice of “focal distancing.”
Emerson’s Practice of “Focal Distancing”
Emerson’s idealist gaze emerges as a way of coping with the distortions
of the world surrounding us. For Emerson, the ultimate reality is found in
the realm of the ideal, not the world of things that immediately surround us.
In everyday life, we feel lost and estranged in a world of shadowy, insubstantial, fleeting images: “Dream delivers us to dream and there is no end
to illusion” (“Experience,” 30). We yearn for some stability in the shifting
sands, yet our groping hands cannot seem to reach any firm foundation.
We search, hopefully, for an anchor, “but the anchorage is quicksand”
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(Experience,” 32). In “Experience,” we see Emerson’s most evocative
description of this condition:
Where do we find ourselves? In a series, of which we do not know the
extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair:
there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs
above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight (“Experience,” 27).
Emerson uses the trope of vision to describe this estranged state: “Sleep
lingers all our lifetime about our eyes . . . All things swim and glimmer. Our
life is not so much threatened as our perception” (“Experience,” 27). The
things we see around us are not real: “There is an optical illusion about
every person we meet” (“Experience,” 31).
But, for Emerson, both the problem and the solution are internal; he continually tells us that our feelings of alienation and estrangement are rooted
inside us, in flaws of vision, in distortions in how we see the world. When we
see poorly, we see only shadows and illusions, unstable objects that slip out
of our grasp. The problem is that we see through what Emerson calls “subject
lenses” that skew reality: we can’t see beyond ourselves, beyond the surfaces
of everyday objects, to the deeper universal reality we yearn for: “We have
learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means
of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of our errors” (“Experience,” 43).
But we are not inevitably doomed to see only shadows, surfaces, and
particular things: we are also capable of moments where reality is more
purely illuminated, when we see without our usual distortions, when we see
with the proper “focal distance.” Emerson’s idealism in enacted in this
visual practice. The focal distance or focal length is the distance from a
lens, in the eye or in a camera, for example, to the focal point.8 Emerson
implies that we see things best from far away: paradoxically, we see reality
most clearly from a distance. Emerson’s abstracting eye seeks out universals, horizons, stars and moons, landscapes, and rooflines. He says “The
health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as
we can see far enough.”9 We must look beyond the particular things in our
foreground, abstracting: for Emerson, genius is about being able to find the
proper focal distance at which our eyes adjust, the blurry shadows and illusions pass away, and a more distant reality comes into focus.
Forgetting to focus our eyes properly, indeed, for Emerson, seems to
characterize our human condition and account for our sense of alienation.
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But we need not be trapped by our instinctive way of seeing. It is in our
power to correct our sight: “People forget that it is the eye which makes the
horizon” (“Experience,” 44). We can train our eye to focus beyond the
ephemeral phenomena of particular things around us, to see truth and reality itself. Otherwise, Emerson asks, “Of what use is genius, if the organ is
too convex or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual
horizon of human life?” (“Experience,” 30). In other words, how is genius
useful to us if it cannot help us overcome the “optical illusions” that impairs
our vision and tricks us into perceiving that reality is found in the objects
immediately surrounding us? When we see with the correct focal distance,
we can perceive that reality is composed of Spirit, that everything flows from
the Universal Mind, that we ourselves are part of this Universal.
Though Emerson emphasizes that this idealist way of seeing may be
cultivated with practice, moments of true vision can also come via something like divine revelation. In Nature, Emerson famously recounts his own
experience of true sight, where he became “a transparent eye-ball”:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have
enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. . . . In the woods, we return to faith and reason. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity
(leaving my eyes) which nature cannot repair. Standing on bare ground—my
head bathed by blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of Universal Being circulate through me . . . In the tranquil landscape
and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as
beautiful as his own nature. (Nature, 10)
Here, Emerson loses his “subject-lens” entirely: he becomes “nothing”
because he loses himself in the Universal. He sees differently: he himself
seems lifted up into the “tranquil landscapes” and “horizons.” And this is
calming, soothing: we “return to faith and reason,” and are exhilarated by a
rare glimpse of a reality typically cloaked and obscured.
When we have experienced this way of seeing the universal, we see past
all particular things, with their innumerable differences: we hear the “old
well-known airs” that nature “hums” through “innumerable variations.”10
With the proper focal distance, we can see the “guiding identity” that “runs
through all the surprises and contrasts” of particular natural objects.11
Particular objects move, change, and are unstable. But, beyond this surface,
there is a deeper “Rest or Identity” that exists in the unchanging, eternal,
Universal Spirit (“Nature,” 112). Seeing the universal brings us “sanity to
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expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays us
into a hundred foolish expectations” (“Nature,” 113). For Emerson, there is
something healing and sane about abstractions and something ugly, painful,
and frightening about particulars: “Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until
it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe . . .” (“Experience,” 28).
When we see with the idealist gaze and employ the practice of focal
distancing, we can perceive an underlying identity in people as well, not
just particular objects. In “History,” Emerson writes “There is one mind
common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all
of the same . . . (“History,” 3). The Universal mind is protean and takes
different shapes, but because it courses through us all, Jesus, Moses,
Socrates, even Prometheus, are kindred spirits: “Tantalus is but a name for
you and me” (“History,” 18). Thus we become self-reliant individuals,
overcoming our sense of estrangement and insecurity. When we see with
the proper perspective, we can identify the universal soul, the common
mind that unites us. We can see how the universal flows through us too, that
we can become self-reliant.
This is the idealist visual practice that, until he wrote “Experience,”
Emerson celebrated with a surprising lack of awareness for the way his eye
violated particular differences and with a surprising lack of concern for
what he was looking past. He could not see the costs of his practice of focal
distancing, but only its comforts. Thinking primarily of how the idealist
gaze empowers the individual and assuages anxieties and insecurities, he
was blind to the price we might have to pay for seeing the world in this way.
In “Experience,” however, Emerson seems to have a moment of reckoning
and reconsiders his previous way of seeing.
Waldo
January of 1842 was a month filled with death for Emerson’s friends and
family: first, John Thoreau got a cut from his razor and died from lockjaw.
Two days after John died, friends and family thought Henry Thoreau would
succumb to the same illness, but his symptoms turned out to be a sympathetic reaction to his brother’s death. Relief in Concord, however, was
short-lived. The very same day that Henry Thoreau recovered, Waldo
Emerson died. He was five years old.12
Waldo became ill with scarlatina or scarlet fever on January 24; he
developed a high fever and soon became delirious. Despite the doctor’s
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treatment, and before his family had even really begun to fear he may not
recover, he was dead, a short three days after first falling ill. In retrospect,
after his death, a childish statement of Waldo’s must have seemed prophetic
to his parents: when he was four years old and he and his sister Ellen were
recovering from colds, Waldo said a prayer “that I might be good—that
Ellen might live and grow up.”13 Robert Richardson describes Emerson’s
reaction to Waldo’s death:
Emerson wrote four short letters to friends and family the night that Waldo
died and he wrote six or seven more the next day. He was reduced to a stuttering and helpless repetition. “Farewell and farewell,” “my darling my darling,” “my boy, my boy is gone.”14
The grief of Emerson and his wife Lidian “was deep, real, and
immediate.”15 Indeed, the immediate reality of this painful particular loss
seems to prompt Emerson to explore the costs of the practice of focal distancing that he relies on elsewhere to cope with the alienated condition of
experience. With a loss this immediate, Emerson questions whether even
idealism can provide comfort. “What help from thought?” he asks: after all,
“Life is not dialectics” (“Experience,” 34). He seems to recognize and
lament the ways his practice of focal distancing prevents him from grieving
this particular loss. Instead of touching the “reality, sharp peaks and edges
of truth,” he finds only “scene painting and counterfeit” (“Experience,” 29).
Instead, Emerson says, “The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how
shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the
costly price of sons and lovers” (“Experience,” 29).16
He laments the world of particular things, sons, lovers, estates: what is
the difference if one can lose them all equally easily? They all slip out of
our grasp: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets
them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most
unhandsome part of our condition” (“Experience,” 29). Emerson begins this
famous passage about “unhandsomeness” with a grasping motion of the
hand: “I take.” But his hand comes up empty. No matter how we try to hold
onto them, even sons turn out to be evanescent, “caduceus,” like a skin that
the snake sheds, just like any other object:
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a
beautiful estate—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me . . . this calamity; it
does not touch me: something which I fancied was a part of me, which could
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not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls
off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caduceus. I grieve that grief can teach
me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature (“Experience,” 29).
Stanley Cavell makes much of Emerson’s sense that little has been gained
in “manipular” attempts to build our own world. Cavell sees Emerson as constantly wavering between two opposing urges, one “handsome,” the other
“unhandsome”: Emerson enacts a struggle between trying to access reality by
unhandsomely grasping and clutching, versus being handsomely passive,
receptive, abandoning oneself to Being, and letting the universal flow through
the self.17 For Cavell, Emerson constantly “circles” toward this greater intimacy with reality: we cannot move closer to the universal by clutching and
grasping, but only by abandoning the self to what is “next.” Cavell describes
Emersonian perfectionism as a continual process of transformation of both the
self and the world whereby we, in circling spirals that never end, continually
project the world we think, the world we imagine and dream of, as the possibility for the world we live in now, as the possible next. For Cavell, Emerson’s
thinking and writing is “aversive”: his thought constantly turns away from the
current (lost) state, turning toward the next in opposition to the now.
But these continual aversive circlings, taken with the visual practice of
focal distancing, also have costs that Emerson seems to come to appreciate
in “Experience,” but that Cavell’s reading misses. For Cavell, circling is
about coping with loss generally: it helps us to negotiate a life often colored
by losses. But I would argue that, in “Experience,” Emerson’s habit of focal
distancing gets in the way of his ability to grieve. In the act of abandonment, the self is constantly and immediately circling to what is “next,” the
next self, the next world, instead of letting the gaze linger on the dissonant,
unharmonious qualities of particular objects. In contrast to Cavell’s assertion that Emerson “circles” toward greater intimacy with reality, I argue
that his practice of focal distancing seems instead to pitch him away from
the greater contact with the immediate particularity of everyday life.
Throughout his writings, Emerson accumulates a list of objects that are
things to be quickly looked past: society, government, “every establishment,” “every mass,” men and women and their social life, poverty, labor,
sleep, fear, fortune, tragedy, moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands,
swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies. In “Experience,”
however, sons and lovers also seem to enter onto this list. But this now
seems deeply problematic to him. He questions his logic of identity and the
sameness his gaze has inscribed on the world of particulars: “In the death
of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful
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estate—no more” (“Experience,” 29). But sons and estates are not the same,
as Emerson suddenly appreciates: he “seems” to have lost a beautiful estate,
“no more,” but his feelings contradict these surface appearances and he is
now uncomfortable with the idea that the world of particulars is easily dismissed as mere phenomena to be looked past. As his desire to grieve shows,
and as the pain of Waldo’s death shows, losing a son feels very different
from losing an estate.
For Emerson, the death of Waldo is a moment of disharmony, of fissure:
the violence and untruth of his idealist gaze seems momentarily revealed.
His experience of this disruptive particular forces into his consciousness a
new realization: seeing the universal as the true reality makes it difficult to
linger in the realm of the particular and fully experience grief. He writes
that there are “moods in which we court suffering,” hoping to touch the
reality immediately around us. Finding himself in one of these moods, he
yearns “for contact” with his grief (“Experience,” 29). And yet, “an innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and
wish to converse with” (“Experience,” 29). He wants to stare directly at
Waldo, but his eyes are not used to doing this. He can’t draw the “calamity”
of the death of his son “nearer” to him and grieve as fully as he wants to.
He wants his eyes to linger on the disruptive particular, but his eyes are
more used to flying up and over.
Ultimately, however, Emerson does not entirely reject his previous commitments to “focal distancing.” His faith in the universal has been shaken,
his optimism chastened: he still has some doubts, but he ends the essay with
a renewed effort that is heart-wrenching in its almost palpable desire for a
reaffirmation of faith. Emerson wants to be convinced. He is trying to convince himself. He rallies, but the reassertion has a feel of desperation.
Emerson is tired, world-weary, and his vision is shaky, but his eyes are still
looking for universals. What else can they do, given the death of a son? His
image of the universal seems to take on a dream-like, otherworldly aura. He
describes how “this region gives further sign of itself”:
in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose,
as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching
traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at
their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pip and dance . . .
(“Experience,” 41)
The description of this realm is fantastical. Does he take it seriously anymore?
Is he mocking the possibility of this ideal realm that he had previously
described with exuberant confidence?
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Ultimately, he seems to feel that the “new America,” the “Mecca” that
represents the universal may be “unapproachable,” but we can’t stop striving for it (“Experience,” 41). Though he has newly recognized that idealism
prevents us from fully grieving, he has long known that idealism also offers
comfort and that makes it hard to give up. “Grief, too, will make us idealists,”
he writes as he thinks of Waldo. He has realized the costs of his aversive
circlings and the true contact that they prevent. But he cannot reject his
idealism entirely: the idea may still offer some slight comfort in the face of
a world where sons can die. As he has long known, other things make us
idealists: poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, tragedy, moaning women, and
hard-eyed husbands, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,
enemies. But the seeming unreality of the loss of his son, another particular,
singular, immediate thing, “too” can make us idealists. He consoles himself: “Patience and patience, we shall win at last . . . Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!” (“Experience,” 49). Never
mind the doubts, up again, old heart, have faith, once again, in the universal.
His practice of focal distancing, though not disavowed, has been humbled,
chastened. He has reckoned the costs of the idealism he once celebrated
with an almost exuberant disregard for its violence and instrumentalism.
There is, ultimately, value in such painful experience. As we will see, faced
with the death of his son Burghardt, Du Bois’ faith in a different kind of
universal is also uprooted and questioned, forcing him to renegotiate and
reconsider the idealist elements of his gaze.
Du Bois, the “Veil,” and “Second Sight”
Du Bois describes African-Americans as born with a gift: “After the
Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian,
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world” (Souls, 5). I want to take the metaphors of the
“Veil” and “second sight” seriously and interpret their many valences.
These images recur throughout The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois often
describes African Americans as seeing through the Veil, seeing from within
and without the Veil, moving inside and outside of the Veil. Du Bois also
imagines a “dawn” and a “mighty morning” where the Veil might be
“lifted” “to set the prisoned free” and people might live “above the Veil”
(Souls, 174-175). But what is the Veil? Why does Du Bois choose the image
of the Veil to describe the problems of “the color line?” Du Bois begins and
ends his second chapter “Of the Dawn of Freedom” with the same sentence:
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“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”
(Souls, 13). He ends the chapter with the same sentence, conveying circularity, a lack of progress, an inability to overcome racism. But how do “the
Veil” and “second sight” figure into this problem? How do we see, if we see
through a Veil? And how does Du Bois work through these visual practices
to cope with the passing of his firstborn son?
To answer these questions, we must first explore these metaphors. In
using the term “second sight,” “the Veil,” and the idea of the Negro as a
“seventh son,” Du Bois evokes several strains of folk wisdom. First, the
idea of “second sight” refers to the power some people possess, where they
can see future occurrences: for those with this gift, as the Oxford English
Dictionary notes, “things at a distance are perceived as though they were
actually present.” The future is glimpsed in the present. Second, the idea of
the seventh son comes from old Irish legends, as well as other folk traditions: the seventh son of a seventh son will hold great powers of healing,
granted by the gods. Legend has it that good and evil will struggle over the
soul of this powerful son. Third, the Veil and the idea of second sight also
evoke the image of the child born with a “caul.” The “caul,” sometimes also
called a “veil” is the amniotic sac that encloses the fetus in the womb before
birth. A child born with a caul is delivered with the amnion still enveloping
its head. This is regarded as a good omen: sailors saw it as a protection
against drowning.
But the Veil is also an image evoked in the Bible, most notably in 2
Corinthians 3: 14–16:
. . . but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the
Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us,
with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to
another . . . 18
Du Bois introduces the image of second sight and the Veil in the chapter
titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The biblical passage speaks of people
being unveiled, being freed, to see Spirit. As the veil is removed, “all of us”
see the glory of the Lord “as though reflected in a mirror”; that is to say, we
see the spirit in each other, see the same image of the spirit repeated in
those around us. As the passage tells us, freedom lies in our ability to exist
in a realm where we meets as universal, sovereign spirits, above the problems of the “color line,” above the “Veil.”
This passage evokes Emerson quite clearly. The life “above the Veil”
evokes the idealist moments of Du Bois’ gaze and echoes Emerson’s
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
13
universal realm. And like Emerson, for Du Bois too, freedom is found in
self-culture, in the cultivation of the spirit, the soul. In “Of the Training of
Black Men,” Du Bois eschews vocational programs that train black men for
a life inside the Veil, a life ruled by the color-line. He says that educational
institutions must not train men to serve the status quo, but “it must develop
men” (Souls, 90).19
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist
and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect;
there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to
know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and
self-development; that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. (Souls, 90)
Du Bois recounts his own conversations with Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas,
Aristotle, and Aurelius “and what soul I will, and they come all graciously
with no scorn nor condescension” (Souls, 90). Because of this practice of
self-culture, “wed with Truth” of a more universal sort, Du Bois says “I
dwell above the Veil” (Souls, 90). Du Bois’ second sight allows him to see
past the Veil, to see the sovereign human soul,” to dwell “above the Veil” in
a realm that might be the “Promised Land” (Souls, 90). These elements of
his gaze are deeply evocative of Emersonian idealism, but Du Bois’ second
sight and seeing through a Veil do not only illuminate a more ideal, distant,
harmonious, and universal possibility.
For Du Bois, to see through the Veil is also to focus on what is in the
immediate foreground, to focus on the particular problems of the “colorline.” He uses this second sight to highlight the double-consciousness
where the two halves of the bifurcated self (African and American) are
constantly at war with each other. Indeed, this possibility, in a way, is contained within the idea of the veil itself. What is it like, really, to see through
a veil? A veil is, by definition, a translucent, gauzy material. It is something
we can see though, even if we place it over our heads and it covers our eyes.
Because a veil is transparent, but at the same time (to some extent) obstructs
our sight, it is something we can both see through and not see through,
depending on how we focus our vision. If a veil is placed before our eyes,
we can focus our sight on the veil itself, at which point we cannot see past
it to the outside world except in a very shadowy and obstructed way. But if
we shift our focus away from the immediacy of the veil, we can also see
past it, see beyond it.
The Negro, then, for Du Bois, is a seventh son, born with a Veil but
gifted with “second sight” that ultimately allows him to attain a deeper
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understanding of the reality of race in America and also envision the future
possibility where we exist as souls instead of races. But it is clear that dwelling “above the Veil” has nothing to do with colorlessness or with the
assimilation of black culture into white culture. Instead, he evokes an image
of black culture and white culture transforming each other: indeed, in the
beginning of each chapter, Du Bois pairs poems by Byron, Schiller,
Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and The Song of Solomon, for example, with wordless musical notations from traditional Negro spirituals. Is this
solely to indicate the silenced status of African Americans? Though the notations certainly do evoke voicelessness, they also pair the words of one culture with the music of another culture: putting the two together would
transform both. Perhaps this is part of what it would mean to be a “co-worker
in the kingdom of culture.” This mutual creation of culture is Du Bois’
“theodicy” to use Cornel West’s term: this is his vision of providence in view
of, in spite of, the existence of evil.20 His gift of second sight allows him to
see a future state of affairs, as though it were a present possibility.21
But the second sight that allows Du Bois to both see the Veil and to see
a future beyond it does not mean that he looks past, or fails to perceive, the
particular things of his world that disrupt and unsettle this future recognition of a more universal, sovereign soul. In contrast to Emerson’s practice
of focal distancing, Du Bois is constantly drawn to the ways that particulars
challenge his universal vision. His gaze does not quickly move beyond, but
lingers on them. He looks at the things in his immediate surroundings, but
also maintains a vision of the future despite present evils. In The Souls of
Black Folks, his narrative itself is not abstract, but concrete and populated
with particular stories of particular people: Alexander Crummell, the two
Johns, Josie, and even his first realization that his white classmates looked
down on him for being black, while exchanging visiting cards in a New
England schoolhouse. There is no urge to ignore the ways these particular
stories of ugliness conflict with his vision of a life “above the Veil.” In “Of
the Meaning of Progress,” he recounts how, years later, he returned to the
country town where he taught school, only to find that his star pupil has
since died. He stares directly at this disruptive particular: “How can man
measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?” (Souls, 62).
The particular things of his immediate surroundings play another role in
Du Bois’ thought: he sees the double consciousness of African Americans
as shaped by the material conditions of their daily lives. Emerson is more
resolutely idealist, eschewing materialism for innate ideas. For Emerson,
the soul is shaped by tapping into the universal spirit, by opening itself up
to the flow of a universal mind. But for Du Bois, the little things of everyday
life shape the “common consciousness” of black Americans:
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
15
I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and
yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, spring
from common joy and grief, at burial, birth or wedding; from a common
hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and above all from the sight
of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this caused us to think
some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in
various languages. (Souls, 57)
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes the common material conditions of hardship that shape “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive” (Souls, 1). Du Bois’ understanding of the
alienated nature of experience of black Americans, of their sense of a double
consciousness, is based in the material world. Emerson’s understanding of
the alienated nature of experience, on the other hand, is described in more
existential terms, as a state that conditions our humanity.
Burghardt
The circumstances of Burghardt’s death, perhaps the very reason for his
passing, exist in the material conditions of the color-line. As David Levering
Lewis recounts in his biography of Du Bois:
The plain facts are that Burghardt contracted nasopharyngeal diphtheria,
grew progressively feverish, and died ten days later on May 24th, 1899, a
Wednesday, at sundown. He was two years and almost one month old. The
night before, Du Bois had rushed out in a futile search for one of the two or
three black physicians living on the other side of town.22
The white physicians in Georgia refused to treat black patients and there
were few black doctors. When it became clear that the child was very sick,
in a night of “dreamless terror,” Du Bois sought a doctor: “Out into the
starlight I crept, to rouse the gray physician—the Shadow of Death, the
Shadow of Death” (Souls, 172). But the doctor was unable to chase away
this shadow of death and the two parents are left “alone,” looking upon the
child “as he turned toward us with great eyes,” helplessly watching him die
(Souls, 172).
Du Bois’ loss makes it difficult for him even to imagine a more harmonious universe. The idealist moments of his gaze, when he envisioned the
possibility of a life where we can dwell as sovereign souls, above the Veil,
are now cast into suspicion. They seem problematically unreal. He doubts
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this possibility, challenges it, sees it as a dream, unworldly. The days of his
son’s life evoke the ideal where we dwell together as sovereign souls, above
the Veil and away from the problems of the color-line, “uncolored and
unclothed.” But for Du Bois, as for Emerson, when viewed in the aftermath of
his son’s death, this ideal seems like a dream, impossibly unworldly, unreal.
The short time that Burghardt was alive is characterized over and over again
in terms that evoke not real life, but the divine and a dream.
He sees his son as a “Prophet” who dwelt almost entirely above the Veil
and notes how he and his wife worship the child “as a revelation of the
divine” (Souls, 171). The baby “tinged” his wife’s “every dream and idealized
her every effort” and “no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland”
(Souls, 171). The mother and baby spoke in an unknown tongue that “held
communion” (Souls, 171). In him, Du Bois saw “the dream of my black
fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world” and the
baby’s voice is described as the voice of “the Prophet” (Souls, 171).
This time is imagined as an incarnation of the ideal universal realm,
once thought to be distant:
he knew no color line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had
not yet darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, the loved his black
nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed
(Souls, 172–73).
It is imagined as a piece of heaven, perfection:
A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it brighter—sweet
as a summer’s day beside the Housatonic. The world loved him; the women
kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the
children hovered and fluttered about him . . . (Souls, 172–73).
“And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full
flush of the long Southern spring . . .” (Souls, 171). During this time, Du Bois
felt somehow insulated from the problems of the color-line and the material
world of racism: “About my head the thundering storm beat like a heartless
voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the weak; but what cared
I, within my home beside my wife and baby boy?” (Souls, 172). His gaze is
focused not on the foreground, not on the material reality of the color-line, but
on the ideal realm, on the possibility of a life above the Veil: what once seemed
distant is now being experienced in his own home, through his son.
But then Burghardt falls ill and suddenly dies and everything changes.
The “deep unworldly” realm described above is replaced by “this narrow
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
17
Now” (Souls, 174). Now Du Bois’ vision focuses in a different direction: he
finds it difficult to tear his eyes away from what lies in the immediate foreground, from his present state of mourning, from the wailing voice (his
own?), crying out “on that dark shore within the Veil” and invokes an image
of his son, that “fair young form,” lying “coldly wed with death” (Souls,
174). He can only see, in this narrowest of nows, “the world’s most piteous
thing—a childless mother,” “writhing in the chamber of death” (Souls,
172). His gaze has shifted now entirely. He chastises himself for his
dreams: “Fool that I was to think or to wish that this little soul should grow
choked and deformed within the Veil!” (Souls, 174). He fantasizes that in
dying, the child has been freed: “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond,
but free” (Souls, 173). Maybe the only possible ideal realm is found in
death, something that Emerson also considers in “Experience.” Du Bois
almost rejoices in the pain Burghardt has avoided in dying young: “Well
sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had
held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far
this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you” (Souls,
174). At this moment, his eyes cannot see beyond his present sorrow and he
seems to have forsaken the possibility of that ideal realm completely. Du
Bois’ faith in the ability to dwell above the Veil has been shaken by the
death of his son, which has forced the disruptive particulars of the colorline into his line of sight.
But, with what we can only imagine to be a Herculean effort, he tries to
pry his eyes away. In words that echo Emerson’s “patience, patience, up
again old heart,” Du Bois tries to rally his spirits: “Idle words; he might
have borne his burden more bravely than we—aye, and found it lighter too,
some day; for surely, surely this is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn
some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoner free” (Souls, 174).
Again, like Emerson, Du Bois strains to convince himself: he repeats
“surely” three times and seems to hope that by repeating himself he might
come to believe in the truth of these words. The “morning” will still come,
Du Bois tells himself, “when men ask of the workman, not “Is he white?”
but “Can he work? When men ask artists, not “Are they black? but “Do they
know?” (Souls, 174). Maybe not in his lifetime, he now thinks, but someday, for some other generation, the morning may still come.
The Critical Value of the Disruptive Particular
Given that Adorno defends the critical value of staring directly at disruptive particularity, it would seem cruel to invoke his thoughts here unless he
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also applied this visual practice in the face of his own experiences of deep
pain and suffering. Adorno did not have children and did not experience the
same form of loss as Du Bois and Emerson, but he was deeply intimate with
other forms of loss. This is important: if someone says, as Adorno did,
“Where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst,” we want to
know they have more than a passing acquaintance with “the bad.”23 A
German Jew who had to emigrate from Europe during World War II,
Adorno included the passage above in Minima Moralia: Reflections from
Damaged Life, written during his exile in America. This particular passage
acts as the epigraph to Part Two, written in 1945. Though a sense of loss
runs through his corpus, it crystallizes in this book. Written from a place of
homeless exile, fearing the worst about the conditions in Europe, haunted
by guilt at having escaped, grieving the loss of self characterized by the
logics of idealism and identity generally and by Nazism specifically, he
looks at the particular objects of the world with an unflinching eye to disrupt the seductive comforts of idealism and illuminate “damaged life.”
Exile, the concept of “home,” the uncanny, psychoanalysis, angst and
anxiety, technology, how people tell lies, sleepless nights, sickness and
health, manners and tact: in Minima Moralia especially, Adorno pays attention to the particular things that “philosophically-schooled authors have not
given any attention to” as a way of illuminating the contradictions that
testify to an unharmonious modern reality.”24 Things were bad for Adorno
when he wrote Minima Moralia, as they were bad for Du Bois and Emerson
in the face of the death of their sons. And yet Adorno defends the value of
staring directly at the disruptive particular. It is not easy. The quotation does
not unequivocally state it “is good to know the worst” but rather says “it
must be good to know the worst.” This knowledge is not pleasant and it
does not offer comfort: the unsettling quality of the particular is part of its
value. Adorno fears that relaxing refuges and comforting retreats can make
us acquiescent, quietistic, unthinking, too willing to affirm a problematic
status quo. Given these alternatives, when things are bad, it must be good
to know the worst.
As J. M. Bernstein notes, one of the reasons that Adorno’s dialectic is
“negative” is because his thought is moved by the experiences of pain and
suffering that accompany the violence of idealism.25 In the interest of maintaining the illusory appearance of reconciliation, stability, and the status
quo, the idealist logic and identity thinking blind us to all that is unharmonious. These ways of thinking deaden experience by silencing the unique
qualities of particular objects and imposing sameness on the world. As
Adorno writes,
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
19
Unquestionably, one who submits to the dialectical discipline has to pay
dearly in the qualitative variety of experience. Still, in the administered world
the impoverishment of experience by dialectics, which outrages healthy opinion, proves appropriate to the abstract monotony of that world. Its agony is
the world’s agony raised to a concept.26
When we are guided by the logic of idealism, we see in abstract and identifying ways. Such a life can barely be called living: it is “damaged life” or
“vanished life,” and while it may appear peaceful, it is ultimately false and
illusory, blind to the dissonant, rupturing qualities of the particular objects
all around us.
As much as the idealist gaze might try to project a world of harmony,
certainty, and stability, this image is constantly under threat: contradictions,
anxieties, dislocations, and flashes of the uncanny persist. The apparent
harmony of the world as seen by the idealist gaze is ultimately an illusion because, as Bernstein says, something inevitably “slips through the
unifying net”: “contradictions testify to antagonisms in reality . . .”27 For
Adorno, dialectics is driven by the nonidentical, by the recognition that
there is always a remainder that resists being synthesized into categories
or systems. But under an identifying logic, the nonidentical is seen as
nothing more than a contradiction to be reconciled. Its unique qualities
are violated in the rush to systematize. Idealism masks this inevitable
nonidentity and, smoothing over the disjuncture, instead “serves the end of
reconcilement.”28
Negative dialectics is the practice that Adorno enacts against the violence of the idealist logic and the comfortable numbness of its illusory
harmonies. In Minima Moralia, Adorno trains a “microscopic gaze” on the
nonidentical aspects of particular objects, to hear their dissonance, to see
the ways they resist synthesis or reconciliation.29 For Adorno, the qualities
that can stimulate this kind of thinking are contained within the antagonistic features of particular objects themselves: the disruptive voice of particularity can force itself into our consciousness even if we are not always
listening. As we saw, particularity intruded on Emerson’s thought, even
though his ears were not necessarily attuned to its voice. Adorno shows
how even Kant, the exemplar of bourgeois idealism, is ultimately uprooted
by the nonidentical: contradictions testify to irreconcilable elements of his
system of thought.30
But to engage in the practice of negative dialectics is to explicitly grant
“preponderance to the object” and its dissonant call, to highlight experiential differences, widen contradictions, and work against the false manipulation of the identity principle. Negative dialectics is a continual process of
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Political Theory
upsetting “what is,” highlighting its contingency and instability. As Seyla
Benhabib puts it, for Adorno
The task of the critic is to illuminate those cracks in the totality, those fissures
in the social net, those moments of disharmony and discrepancy, through
which the untruth of the whole is revealed and glimmers of another life
become visible.31
This is “critique,” this is “thinking”: the knowledge that is gained by paying
attention to disruptive particularity is valuable but also disharmonious,
unsettling, and often painfully won.
Conclusion
Adorno’s discussion of the disruptive particular helps us make sense of
the struggles Emerson enacts in “Experience” and the critical knowledge
won from his loss. As we have seen, even Emerson, the American version
of Kant, whose own philosophy derived its name from Kant’s “transcendental” forms, saw his idealist gaze challenged by Waldo’s death.32 His
grief acts as a flash of nonidentity that cannot be reconciled with his idealism: his sudden realization that “Life is not dialectics” seems to testify
to the intrusion of the disruptive particular into his system of thought
(“Experience,” 34). His practice of focal distancing makes it difficult to
grieve the immediate, particular, singular loss of Waldo. He becomes newly
attuned to the costs, limits, and dangers of this way of seeing that has
helped him cope with everyday life in other contexts. His faith falters and
he finds himself momentarily turning against his own idealism. Emerson
ultimately tries to reconcile this experience of the nonidentical back into his
system of idealism: “grief too will make us idealists”; but his reaffirmation
is still tinged by doubt and has the tone of one trying to convince himself.
Du Bois’ starting point is different from Emerson’s: he grants “preponderance to the object” from the outset, to use Adorno’s phrase. Du Bois is
more attuned to the material and the particular: this is the nature of his
subversion and revision of Emerson. Du Bois’ practice of second sight has
always taken in both the particular and the universal. Even before Burghardt’s
death, we see Du Bois’ attentiveness to the disruptive particular and the challenge it can pose to the idealist moments of his gaze: “How can man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?” (Souls, 62). Here, Josie
represents the flash of the nonidentical: the death of his former student calls
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
21
into question the possibility of dwelling as sovereign souls, beyond the
problems of the color-line. But with Burghardt’s death, Du Bois seems to
consider abandoning the idealist elements of his gaze entirely. The disruptive particular threatens to dominate his sight: Du Bois finds himself unable
to see past the “narrow Now.” Burghardt made the ideal realm above the
problems of the color-line, appear closer, within grasp, realizable. But his
death makes Du Bois feel like a fool for having believed in what later took
on the aura of a dream. The insulated world he momentarily existed in and
found to be almost real is cruelly and painfully unmasked as an illusion.
Emerson and Du Bois both seem to feel they are being chastened for
their moments of idealism. In “Experience,” Emerson hears the voice of
God speaking to him “‘You will not remember,’ he seems to say, ‘and you
will not expect’” (“Experience,” 39). Similarly, Du Bois hears a voice from
beyond telling him “Thou shalt forego!” (Souls, 174). But ultimately, their
losses are not wholly negative. Both Emerson and Du Bois gain new awareness of how the idealist gaze can become too unworldly, seducing us into a
dreamland that problematically denies, refuses to see, or doesn’t look long
enough at the material conditions of the world around us. In their respective
essays, we see a flash of nonidentity light up problematic elements of their
respective visual practices, making them more attuned to the ease with
which the disruptive particular can pull the rug out from under the ideal.
Adorno helps us make sense of the struggles we see Emerson and Du Bois
enacting in their writings on the deaths of their sons. They are grappling with
an experience that has profoundly unsettled the visual practices each had
previously relied on to make sense of the world. Through their lived experience, Emerson and Du Bois, with great pathos, show us just how disrupting
particularity can be. They testify to the unsettling intrusion of the nonidentical: they live through it, feel it, and document the challenge that disruptive
particularity poses to the idealist elements of their visual practices. And ultimately, the costs they come to appreciate, if not in a complete or permanent
way, also echo the dangers Adorno also associates with idealism.
Taken together, Emerson, Du Bois, and Adorno help us understand the
difficulty of, but also the critical value of, staring disruptive particularity in
the face. Given the connections between the eye and the mind, paying attention to particularity can stimulate new ways of thinking about the world.
From Adorno’s perspective, this critical knowledge is invaluable, though
often won only with great difficulty and often through experiences of suffering. But, given the alternatives, even when things are bad, it is still good
to know the worst.
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Notes
1. 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
Mariotti / On the Passing of the First-Born Son
23
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
Political Theory
24. Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, ed. Robert HullotKentor, 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.
Shannon Mariotti specializes in 19th century American transcendental thought and 20th
century critical social theory. Her book, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation,
Participation, and Modernity (forthcoming in November 2009 from University of Wisconsin
Press) reads Thoreau through the theoretical lens of Theodor Adorno to articulate the political
value of practices of withdrawal. She has several additional publications on Thoreau and
Adorno, some forthcoming. She received her doctorate in political theory from Cornell
University in 2006 and is an assistant professor at Southwestern University.