Progressive change in Emerson's 'the Conservative'.

• Author: Savage, Daniel M.
• Position: Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essay

Emerson scholars have long noted the ubiquity of change in his perspective on the natural and social worlds. They have also called attention to the dialectical process that Emerson credits with driving such change. They have not, however, paid much attention to the fact that the standard Emerson applies to the pace of change in the social world is the same aesthetic standard that he derives from the world of nature, and applied to the world of art. Emerson refers to the aesthetically pleasing nature of flowing or graceful change (as opposed to abrupt) found in nature and art as "beauty." When applied to the political, social, and religious worlds this pace of change results in what we call gradualism. Although Emerson frequently favored political, social, and religious reforms that were considered radical at the time, he believed that the proper pace of progress toward these goals was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is my contention that Emerson's preference for gradualism was based on his application of a natural aesthetic standard to the political, social, and religious spheres.

In true Heraclitian fashion Emerson saw a world that was in a state of continuous change or flux. (1) He understood such change to be not only an essential aspect of existence, but evidence of a healthy level of energy and vitality. Change is simply "The Method of Nature": "If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed." (2) Emerson believed that political, social and religious institutions, being parts of the natural world, are just as subject to the ubiquity of change as any other aspect of existence. Whereas change in the world of physical nature, however, occurs according to the working of unconscious laws, change in the sphere of human activity can be affected by the choices humans make. The power of the will can be used to manipulate the pace and direction of change in human societies, and in human psyches as well.

In the natural world, according to Emerson, change takes on an aesthetic quality, and thus can be evaluated according to a natural aesthetic standard. He characterized any experience in which change is absent, for example, as "deformed." In fact, Emerson found beauty to exist in the process of change itself--in the actual movement of phenomena from one form into another. "Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness ... or concentration on one feature ... is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed." (3) The deformity of fixedness is particularly apparent in human activity. In a social environment the power of the will can be utilized either to promote or to hinder change.

That Emerson considered this natural standard regarding change to be as applicable to human activity as to purely physical phenomena, there can be no doubt:

We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the

school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only fitted the former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of every usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? (4) Hence Emerson believed that political, social, and religious vocabularies and institutions were not only subject to, but benefited from, continuous change.

Change within the cultural sphere, as any reader of Emerson knows, will owe a lot to the contributions of "a few imaginative individuals." Imagination, like all other natural phenomena, "is to flow, and not to freeze." (5) Although previous scholars have pointed out that Emerson traces change to a dialectical process, his dialectic differs from the Hegelian version in being driven, not toward a rational telos, but toward an aesthetic one. "Therefore," Emerson writes, "we value the poet. ..."

In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eyes on my own possibilities. (6) Our, as yet unrealized, possibilities are not rationally necessary goals, but aesthetically pleasing ones. "There is no attractiveness," Emerson emphasized, "like that of a new man." (7)

Vocabularies and institutions ought to change to reflect the change in individuals because vocabularies and institutions are only authentic to the extent that they reflect the forms and needs of the individuals of whom they are a product. (8) Emerson consequently saw cultural vocabularies and institutions, as he saw all of existence, as in a state of continuous movement. "[A]ll symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead." (9) There would accordingly seem to be little doubt that Emerson was sympathetic to the spirit of reform and innovation.

Emerson's advocacy of the principles of reform and innovation were, however, bounded by a natural aesthetic standard regarding the pace of change. In his essay "The Conservative" (1841) he insists that innovation is only ever properly enjoyed when tempered by the opposing principle of conservatism. Thus, when Emerson speaks of beauty as a "flowing," he is not speaking merely of the necessity of change, but of the pace of change. Change, in order to abide by nature's aesthetic standard, must maintain continuity with old forms. In other words, it must be gradual and contextual.

Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to any action or emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these elements; not to the rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! what a disparity is here! (10) Thus the label "beauty" is reserved for change that occurs according to a natural aesthetic standard. In other words, change that is a consequence of--rather than a radical break with--the past.

In "The Conservative," therefore, Emerson argued that gradual change is the result of a natural tension between the opposing forces of conservatism and innovation. "Throughout nature," he points out, "the past combines in every creature with the present. ... In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support." (11) Conservative and innovative tendencies are, as Emerson understood them, as generic as the process of evolutionary change that they govern. Emerson saw the consequences of this natural tension between conservative and innovative forces everywhere in our physical and social environments. In the physical world, for example, mountain ranges are gradually created by the clash of continental plates, each simultaneously forcing change and fighting to maintain their old forms. Riverbeds are formed by the gradual, but steady and irresistible, erosion of resisting rock and soil. The transformations undergone by living species, resulting from the process of natural selection, display the same conservative and innovative principles at work. (12)

In human activity the principles of conservatism and innovation, sometimes called tradition and progress, represent the "same primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature. ..." (13) Circumstances and settings change, but the two principles are always present, working against each other. The tension between these two poles explains political and cultural reforms, as well as the psychological growth that can occur within the individual human psyche, or soul. In human environments, however, because of the role played by the will, one of the opposing principles, by becoming too powerful, can upset the delicate balance that produces gradual transformations, and result in either stagnation or discontinuity.

In politics and culture the conservative principle represents the perspective of tradition, the will of a people to maintain its cultural identity--the notion that what we are today is the acme of all of our prior growth. The innovative principle, on the contrary, represents the idealist perspective of the "ought," the will of a people to become better than it is according to its own cultural aspirations. The idealist perspective is a product of the imaginative and creative impulse, and finds fault with the "actual" for falling so far short of the world that can be imagined. So while the conservative element represents our link with the past, and memory, the innovative element represents our aspirations for the future, and hope. Conservatism, as Emerson puts it, is the "pause on the last movement," while innovation is the "salient energy" that moves us on to another climax.

Overemphasis on either of the two opposing principles results in an extreme that is damaging to the health of a community and a violation of the aesthetic standard. Overemphasis on the conservative principle, on the one hand, acts as an obstacle to reform. Norms, laws and...