Poelker Emerson/Thoreau Blog

Chapter Four of Emerson’s essay Nature, which deals with Language, is the author’s attempt to argue perfectibility in the nature of writing. Near the end of the chapter, he quotes and idiom: “Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth” this he says, “is the fundamental law of criticism.” Only a few sentences before he writes: “‘Material object,’ said a French philosopher, ‘are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thought of the Creator.’” With these two things in mind, I’ll apply another continental thinker, Ferdinand de Saussure, to Emerson’s notion that words are an essentially “natural” union between physical things and the beauty of the human spirit, that “Words are signs of natural facts.” Take this quotation of Emerson:

 “Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is proper creation. It is the working of Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.”

Basically, the link between words (while there is certainly a space occupied by the link) and “true meaning” is the work of the creator, a product of Emerson’s Transcendentalist notion of union between the soul of nature and of man. A few decades later, Saussure understood things much differently. The thrust of his essay Linguistic Value” is summed up in the essay’s final statement:

“This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.”

Visual representation of Saussure's theory of linguistics

Both writers understand that language is a thing that has been developed over millenniums, and thus there exists a gap between what we “mean” and the words we say. Saussure, though, abandons the notion of the beautiful truth of the all pervading soul to make room for a critical approach that operates separately from the belief in such convenient conclusions. Its easy to see how DH Lawrence, a contemporary of Saussure could accuse Emerson of thinking the human soul as “perfectible as the Ford.”

As for Thoreau, it is often the case that his writing, or at least the popular notion of what his writing is, far exceeds the extent of his real actions. For all he has to say about civil disobedience, he only spent one night in jail before being rescued by his loving aunt. We could say the same of an unemployed, and therefore non-tax paying, man in the drunk tank. This potential hypocrisy stems from his idyllic belief in the perfectibility of the American political citizen: “Cast your whole vote, not on a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.” While Plato’s republic would be heaven for the type of voter Thoreau describes, there doesn’t seem to be any room in the complicated political sphere for people with no desire to compromise. Thoreau believes in the perfectibility of man, but this just isn’t practical for people who are trying to support themselves, or families, and be

Perhaps I’ve taken an overly critical attitude toward these writers and their call to perfectibility. After all I enjoy reading these essays and the beauty of their language is enough to forgive any faults I can a find by applying modernist criticism to their arguments. Furthermore, Civil Disobedience is one of the most important means of finding justice in our world, and Thoreau’s stance against slavery is nothing less than noble.