Emersonian Circles

Context

Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

Emerson liked tagging poetry to the opening of his essays.  His poetry tends to be some mongrel mix of metaphysical poetry and romantic poetry, not always easy to understand.  Later critics, with a few exceptions, have often failed to recognize both, the importance and the high quality of Emerson’s poetry.  Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are held up as the two most important innovators in early American poetry; whereas, both of those were greatly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson might rightly be called the father of American literature, although others came before.  (I suppose Thomas Jefferson might be a better candidate for that title; but why quibble?  That argument would also be complex and convoluted.)  One might even suppose that Emerson was a 5GWarrior par excellence, considering the extraordinary influence he had on those around him and the reverberating influence those individuals have had. One extraordinary and highly recommended biography of Emerson is titled, Emerson among the Eccentrics:  A Group Portrait, by Carlos Baker —

The biography considers his influence, by looking at the individuals who came into repeated contact with Emerson throughout his lifetime.  Not so much a strict biography of Emerson, it is a biography of the times of Emerson, or the social matrix that had him as a center.  A partial list of the ‘eccentrics’ surrounding Emerson, also circling each other in multiple configurations:

• Bronson Alcott
• Margaret Fuller
• Father Edward Thompson Taylor
• Henry David Thoreau
• Jones Very
• Ellery Channing
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Theodore Parker
• Walt Whitman
• Captain John Brown

Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions; Emerson reported of one occasion in his journal, with an implication from the president that he had attended one of Emerson’s lectures, this reaction from the president:

“O, Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you!’ ”

[Emerson among the Eccentrics, page 434]

Carlos Baker notes that Lincoln, who was a Kentuckian, had especially remembered that line, at least!

But these eccentrics were eccentrics.

ec·cen·tric  adj. 2. Not having a common center; not concentric; “eccentric circles”.

[see eccentric on Webster’s Online Dictionary]

I.e., they’re likely to follow their own paths. A sphere is not a circle, after all; and Emerson’s ‘ephemerals’ in the poem he used to open his essay on “Circles” are all individuals.  They are individual in that they follow their own paths, uniquely; but nonetheless, these multifarious path-treaders on the surface of the sphere rarely seem to grasp the fact that they are attached to surface conditions, and that all their unique movements have a common center.  They do not see the sphere; if they did, “A new genesis were here.”

    Detour: Ephemerality

e·phem·er·al adj. 1. Enduring a very short time

[see ephemeral on Webster’s Online Dictionary]

One might suppose that human mortality is a precondition for the prevalence of surface-gazing and surface-treading individuality.  From an OODA perspective, we might add a related precondition:  the inability to observe all that occurs.

From a network theory perspective, we might consider how such ephemerality materializes as a shifting set of nodes.  Although we have a network architecture that would, on the surface, appear to be long-lasting, the actual use of that architecture is constantly changing.  (That architecture, itself, is now changing rapidly, as well.)  As I’ve said repeatedly in various posts: if actual “social networks” exist, they must be short-lasting and brief.  New circles are always being drawn.

From a blogospheric perspective, I’m tempted to compare the dynamic of Emerson and his eccentrics to others and their own eccentrics.  Thomas Barnett, for instance, has a wide variety of interlocutors, as does John Robb,  Mark Safranski, and others.  But where is the center of the ‘Sphere?  I’ll make an admission:  I sometimes think of these bloggers and their eccentrics and try to “match up” the various styles, ideas, and connections with persons from Emerson’s orbit, to see if there is any correlation! 

From a 5GW perspective — or, for the sake of honesty, from my own 5GW perspective, there are these words opening up Emerson’s essay on “Circles,” to be considered:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.

[“Circles”, RWE, emphasis added]

This has reminded me of a post I wrote on “Water, Tao, and Jesus” on my blog Phatic Communion. [Skip the introduction and go to the first subheading, and read from there, heh.]   The Tao as described by the Tao Te Ching is everywhere and nowhere;

Heaven's net is vast.
It is loose.
 
Yet nothing slips through.

[from # 73, trans. Charles Muller, Tōyō Gakuen University]

Heaven and Earth are not humane,
And regard the people as straw dogs.
The sage is not humane,
And regards all things as straw dogs.
The space between Heaven and Earth is just like a bellows:
Empty it, it is not exhausted.
Squeeze it and more comes out.

Investigating it with a lot of talk
Is not like holding to the center.

[# 5, trans. Charles Muller, Tōyō Gakuen University]

The talk is surface perambulation.  From Emerson:

Conversation is a game of circles.

[“Circles”, RWE]

Words, opinions, and perspectives are ephemeral — they come and go — but they may relate to the center of the sphere, after all.  Particular family relations, friendship networks, and other “social networks” may come and go, but individual conscious adherence to God, if such could be achieved, may ultimately connect these individuals far better than the hit-or-miss of conversation and day-to-day connection.  I concluded the post with words from Jesus:

Perhaps nowhere else is Jesus’ anti-network stance as pronounced as in Luke 12:49-53:

“I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed!  Do you think I came to bring peace on earth?  No, I tell you, but division.  From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.  They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

[“Water, Tao, and Jesus”, Phatic Communion]

Another man greatly influenced by Jesus, Ralph Waldo Emerson — once a Unitarian minister who gave up his ministry because he disagreed with the practice of the Communion service — considered something similar in “Circles”; a passage I highlighted long ago:

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

[“Circles”, RWE]

Highlights and Spin

Here are some more of those passages highlighted long ago in “Circles.” With some of my spherical spin — or relation to the theory of 5GW.

New arts destroy the old.

Emerson considered “aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications by gunpowder”, etc., just after that phrase.  The central premise is this:  that innovation rewrites our method of inter-operating with the world.  Ways of doing disappear with the appearance of relevant new ways of doing.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

This is quite 5GWish.  The helm might be considered the center of a person’s own “OODA sphere”, or the measurement by which all observations are measured and categorized.  What strikes me as important to 5GW is the proposition that reforming that sphere requires the addition of a new idea commanding it.  I.e., rather than a 4GW assault on another’s system of measurement or personal narrative; or a simple 4GW utilization of that narrative, 5GW would introduce new data that would require a realignment of that person’s understanding.  His own ideas may remain; but they will be commanded by the new center, which en-compasses them.

The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures, of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted.

I.e., the previous central fact, or the helm guiding the individual, will become abridged vis-a-vis its importance and assume a lesser place on the circumference which is now determined by the new fact or understanding.

In this essay, Emerson consistently uses the idea of generalization differently than I have typically used it in discussing 5GW.  I have used the term to denote a quick and false circle made by those trying to artificially eliminate complexity — they create “myopic dreams of reality” — but Emerson uses the term more in the sense of consilience.  Indeed, a true consilient understanding would necessarily command all the particular (particularized) facts it comprises.  Emerson also considers the process of creating these new consilient understandings as a process of drawing a new circle that encompasses the old.

Finally, for this passage:  There is the prescription for eliminating the deadlock of multifarious ossifications, hard-coded networks, etc., presently attempting to force the world of humans and human activity to align with them.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

This follows up on the last highlight.

For a time, I’ve been considering the possibility that a 5GW operator may operate in the open.  Certainly, some critics of 5GW theory greatly oppose the precondition of secrecy often given for 5GW operations.  This post is not intended to address that criticism, however, because it would require its own post.  Secrecy can be looked at from various perspectives, requiring some semantic conjugation!  But consider the possibility that Emerson’s thinker could be a politician or celebrity who is capable of managing multiple threads in the open:  I.e., an individual capable of taking the chaos which seems ever-present in our contemporary world and offering an understanding which seems to en-compass so many otherwise divergent threads.

When I think of this, I think of Barack Obama and his keynote address at the last Democratic National Convention —

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America - there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

[“Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention”, Barack Obama]

— there is a case of drawing ever-larger circles.  It remains to be seen if he can tie more than these threads together, however, and offer more consilience.  (Or even, cause these understandings to manifest, in the broader scale.)

The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.

[“Circles”, RWE]

Here we tie the train of these highlights back to the first and find the 5GWer par excellence.  New arts destroy the old; A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.

Emerson saw the OODA, even if he did not call it that.  Our actions are intimately related to 1) our observations and 2) our understanding of what we observe.  Change the understanding, and you change the activity.  Change the observations, and you may (but may not) change the understanding.

Emerson took it further than the individual OODA, however, or would draw a larger circle by considering the entire system of human pursuits.  Culture is something that each person may have; but it is also something that individual persons may share, as individual OODA loops operate together in a system.

We each hold some things dear — because we are accustomed to hold them dear —

cus·tom  n. 1. A practice followed by people of a particular group or region. 2. A habitual practice of a person  [Middle English custume, from Old French costume, from Latin consu etudo, consuetudin-, from consu etus, past participle of consu escere, to accustom : com-, intensive pref.; see COM- + su escere, to become accustomed; see s(w)e- below.]

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 s(w)e-. Important derivatives are: self, gossip, bustle, suicide, secede, seclude, secret, secure, sedition, seduce, segregate, select, separate, sure, sober, sole, solitary, solitude, solo, sullen, desolate, soliloquy, custom, ethic, ethnic, idiom, idiot, idiosyncrasy.

[The American Heritage Dictionary, electronic edition]

—i.e., because of our own ephemerality and quite limited, idiosyncratic observations.  Despite our ephemerality, and despite our limitation, we are nonetheless prone to find order.  Our “mental horizon” will “cause the present order of things”, not only in how we observe it — the order we see — but also in the way that our activities continue to preserve it.  Add a new thought that commands our own, and the old central facts become less dear, are seen as merely ancillary to the new commanding idea.  Draw a larger circle, manifested en masse by co-optation that is not secret and manipulative but obvious to all comprised by that circle — i.e., make the larger circle apparent to all, or show them the sphere — and the system of human pursuits would be instantly revolutionized.

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UPDATE:  I’ve received a comment through email from blogreader Isaac that is quite interesting, and have decided to add it as an update to this post, as well as a few personal observations afterward. (TypeKey authentication was not working for him, wouldn’t allow him to comment for some reason; I’ve updated the recent “Commenting On” site notice with a possible solution to that problem.)

Very good stuff. Hadn’t cracked my RWE or HDT in years. Of course, his famous ‘transparent eyeball’ would make an excellent 5GW warrior - secret, workin’ the OODA faster than all it observes… Seriously, though, this made me remember my favorite HDT quote, “Always the line of beauty is a curve”, which caused me to go back and read the HDT essay “The Service.” The following two paragraphs jumped out at me anew after having read your post:

We say, justly, that the weak person is “flat,” — for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life. Most things are strong in one direction; a straw longitudinally; a board in the direction of its edge; a knee transversely to its grain; but the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side, and is equally strong every way. The coward is wretchedly spheroidal at best, too much educated or drawn out on one side, and depressed on the other; or may be likened to a hollow sphere, whose disposition of matter is best when the greatest bulk is intended.

We shall not attain to be spherical by lying on one or the other side for an eternity, but only by resigning ourselves implicitly to the law of gravity in us, shall we find our axis coincident with the celestial axis, and by revolving incessantly through all circles, acquire a perfect sphericity. Mankind, like the earth, revolve mainly from west to east, and so are flattened at the pole. But does not philosophy give hint of a movement commencing to be rotary at the poles too, which in a millennium will have acquired increased rapidity, and help restore an equilibrium? And when at length every star in the nebulæ and Milky Way has looked down with mild radiance for a season, exerting its whole influence as the polar star, the demands of science will in some degree be satisfied.

Rather apt, I’d say. Think I’ll go home tonight and break out the ol’ Self Reliance.

Henry David Thoreau is famous for his essays — Ghandi declared that his essay on “Civil Disobedience” was one of his bedside books and wrote a translated synopsis of it in 1907, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who was greatly influenced by Ghandi, nonetheless also had read HDT’s essay several times in his “student days“  — but he is also famous for living at Walden Pond — which was owned by Emerson.  Emerson met Thoreau when Thoreau was still in Harvard, nearly twenty years old, in 1837; Emerson, a decade older; and they had a lifelong friendship lasting until Thoreau died in 1862.  For me, it is curious to wonder who influenced whom the most, between the two, and how the passage offered by Isaac might relate to Emerson’s essay on “Circles.”

I suspect, btw, that tracing the effects of “Civil Disobedience” as well as peering into the text itself might produce some further 5GW-related insights!