In the “Light Out of the East”: Emerson on Self, Subjectivity, and Creativity

Abstract

In “Experience” Emerson announces his readiness “to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West” (CW 3:41). Whatever personal manifest destiny the passage expresses, it arises from Emerson’s deep affinity for Eastern philosophy. The inscription in Emerson’s notebook “Orientalist” is “Ex oriente lux,” or “Light out of the east” (1993, 39), and, as Ronald Bosco notes in his introduction to the notebook, Emerson believed that the light of the East “has the power both to nourish otherwise impoverished individuals and nations and to transmute . . . the crime of materialism into wisdom” (1993, 14). His west is far to the east in “the sunbright Mecca of the desert,” not Huckleberry Finn’s territory, the pioneer’s prairie, or the miner’s rocky west, and unlike miners, settlers, land speculators, governments, and most Western philosophers, he does “not make” or stake a claim; he “arrive[s] there, and behold[s] what was there already” (CW 3:41). Emerson’s approach to the west entails the death or disappearance of “all mean egotism” (CW 1:10) and the open flexibility of a Zen practitioner’s mind. The grand sense of entitlement and the mission of proliferation that sent most European Americans west are quite foreign to Emerson’s acknowledgment and receptivity. All a miner knows is by penetration into the earth; all