Walt Whitman and the Ideal of the Liberal-Democratic Individual

(2018. I wrote this in an all-nighter into the day I turned 2020. It was the final paper for my class on early American literature, a class I adored. The term had been one during which my understanding of Walt Whitman had deepened immensely, and this self-directed final essay allowed me to talk a lot about what made Whitman amazing. Whitman is the ultimate example of the ideal liberal-democratic individual, something all authentic participants in our culture should strive to be, and exploring this teaches us a lot about the self.)

Walt Whitman, according to George Kateb and myself, was “perhaps the greatest philosopher of the culture of democracy,” (Kateb 545). He saw his poetry and his prose as the direct product of the robust democratic environment in which he grew up, because “[t]he United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” (Leaves of Grass 1855 Preface). His mission was to absorb and celebrate the poetic essences of democracy, to give voice and body to the democratic ideal. Whitman’s 1871 essay on democracy, Democratic Vistas, makes explicit his beliefs about democracy and individuality. Here, he acknowledges the inherent tensions within liberal democracy, yet boldly asserts that the individual and the aggregate are mutually necessary and reconcilable through culture and love. After analyzing Whitman’s views on individualism and democracy, I will examine how Whitman embodies his ideal of “ensemble-Individuality” in his poetry. Then, I will move into more nuanced discussions of the problems that arise from Whitman’s example. Ultimately, while Whitman poses an impossible challenge, it is clear that his example provides a valuable mimetic model and a cultural ideal worth striving towards for any individual in a liberal democracy.

Liberalism and democracy are often assumed to be an inseparable pair in the modern world, but they are really two distinct ideas which have fused. Liberalism deifies the individual by empowering it with rights, delineating its circle of negative freedom, and encouraging it to autonomously pursue its own good in its own way. Democracy deifies the collective by placing the source of power in the hands of all people equally under popular sovereignty, and making all individuals subject to majority rule. Liberalism encourages eccentricity and individuality; democracy encourages levelling and commonality. Walt Whitman, in his Democratic Vistas, celebrates the fusion of these contradictory philosophies: “For to democracy, the leveler, the unyielding principle of the average, is surely join’d another principle, equally unyielding, closely tracking the first, indispensable to it, opposite, (as the sexes are opposite,) and whose existence, confronting and ever modifying the other, often clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of the highest avail without the other… This second principle is individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself,” (Democratic Vistas 425). 

Despite the contradictory nature of this fusion, both elements are, for Whitman, necessary for the existence of one other. Democracy needs individuality: if individual people are not autonomous, then the idea of self-government by the people collapses into anarchy. Furthermore, without differences in individuals, the generative, truth-refining power of interactionary discourse that John Stuart Mill identifies in On Liberty would be lost, and thus the majority would not be able to be counted upon to be more than half right more than half of the time. Individuality also needs democracy, for democracy is the best way to cultivate individuality in citizens: “Democracy alone… breaks up the limitless fallows of humankind, and plants the seed, and gives fair play,” (DV 413) for the aspirations of independence to realize possibilities. In the individual, the mass “is to be ever carefully weighed, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism,” (DV 407). Counterintuitively, “[t]his idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives support to the aggregate. For it is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation,” (DV 408). Thus, the “liberalist of to-day… seeks not only to individualize but to universalize,” (DV 416). Whitman understands that there are contradictions inherent in this fusion, but he believes in the potential for mediation between them; he actually represents this, in a meta way, through the very creation of the Vistas: “I feel the parts harmoniously blended in my own realization and convictions, and present them to be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim and assertion modified and temper’d by the others,” (DV 396). His famous self-declared ability to contain contradictions within the unifying multitude of himself is on full display here.

Whitman bases his belief in the supremacy of liberal democracy in its alignment with basic laws of nature. The bearded bard writes that “[a]s the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress.” This lesson demands both “a large variety of character,” a liberal ideal, and “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions,” which is accomplished only in the open air of the democratic space. Indeed, to Whitman, the interplay of these forces is like the weather, “whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality,” (DV 395). Liberal individuals are the air molecules aswirl in their own paths, based on their trajectories, inclinations, and the particular way they reflect the all-touching sun. Democracy is the bright blue of the sky which illuminates and makes possible this play, and mediates interactions and conflicts. Democracy is the “fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power,” which reconciles the individual into the universal melt. Liberal democracy is ultimately the “doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals, and to the State,” (DV 409). Here Whitman acknowledges the democratic responsibility inherent in the interconnectedness of individuals with each other and with the State, and implies that conflicts will all be reconciled in the great democratic melt. 

Of course, this is pure idealism; in practice, the tensions between individuality and democracy have been brought to a boil time and time again. This was tragically demonstrated in the inability for popular sovereignty and the inherent dignity of human slaves to end the “liberal” right of slave owners to own property, which led to the bloodiest war in American history. It is also visible today, in what Yascha Mounk calls a “decoupling” between liberalism and democracy across the globe. He writes that in “democracies around the world, two seemingly distinct developments are playing out. On the one hand, the preferences of the people are increasingly illiberal: voters are growing impatient with independent institutions and less and less willing to tolerate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. On the other hand, elites are taking hold of the political system and making it increasingly unresponsive: the powerful are less and less willing to cede to the views of the people. As a result, liberalism and democracy, the two core elements of our political system, are starting to come into conflict,” (Mounk). Whitman acknowledges such problems when he presciently states that, while he does not fear America’s destruction by outside forces, “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me,” (DV 402).

But Whitman does believe that liberal democracy can survive and thrive, as long as its ideals are embodied by the individuals within such a society. Democracy needs a stable and renewing substratum of “a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States,” (DV 399); it is clear to him that democracy, “unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions and belief… and inaugurates its own perennial sources, welling from the centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting,” (DV 401). For Whitman, it is up to the poets and writers of democracy to promote a truly democratic moral and social culture, and only in this way can democratic ideals be, in the future, realized. This job he takes on himself, but he calls on others to do so in each generation in order to counter the enervating forces of complacency. He acknowledges what many political scientists today emphasize, which is that material security, “a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort” (DV 417), is an essential stabilizer for liberal democracy. However, this is not the most essential thing; for Whitman, the essential virtue of democracy is love. It is the development and cultural prevalence of adhesive love that he looks to “for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof… I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin and counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself,” (DV 449). He believes that the ideal of democracy inherently implies this power to bind mankind into a family, and that loving comradeship provides the “most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States,” (DV 449). A democratic literature ought to spiritually promote both the “perennial regulation, control, and oversight, by self-suppliance” (DV 457) necessary for the moral exercise of liberal autonomy, and the “adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all,” (DV 415) necessary for the moral exercise of democratic intermingling. “Both are to be vitalized by religion,” he proclaims, “for I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there,” (DV 415). Only the active cultivation of a “Religious Democracy” by a democratic literature can ensure that individuals morally uphold and realize the ideals of liberal democracy. Love is the essential fluid adhesive which makes it possible to alleviate the frictions between the individual and society which are the central contradiction of the liberal democratic project. Love overcomes all distinctions between individuals; love fosters the appreciation of other individuals as equally valid to oneself; love allows individuals to assimilate others into oneself in order to develop a uniquely composite individuality; most importantly, love encourages individuals to submit to the needs of others with forbearance, which is essential in a democratic society that sometimes requires individuals to make concessions to their inextricable connections with other individuals. Love is the difference between Ishmael’s acceptance of the monkey-ropes which tie him to Queequeg and Ahab’s bitter cursing of his “moral interindebtedness.”

Now we will examine how Whitman undertook this mission of creating a moral and spiritual democratic culture through example, embodying the ideal “ensemble-Individual” in his poetry. Philip Fisher, in his excellent essay on “Whitman and the Poetics of a Democratic Social Space” from his book Still the New World, makes an argument for Whitman’s success in this endeavor. Fisher identifies four key characteristics of a “democratic social space”: it is atomistic, cellular, and therefore uniform, which enables representation and sampling; it is unbounded; it is transparent and intelligible; and it negates the possibility of an “outside observer” by making everyone a member and participant (Fisher 47). Whitman embodies all of these traits, authenticating his claim to represent democracy. His obsession with “seeking types” (As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life), his penchant for listing and sampling, and his affirmation of uniform value all represent the first characteristic; indeed, representation itself is represented by Whitman in an embodiment of the representative aspect of American democracy. In “Song of Myself” stanza 24, he claims that “through me many long dumb voices” speak, and, according to Fisher, “[t]o speak for is one of the political meanings of representation” (Fisher 82). The characteristic of unboundedness is also prominent in Whitman’s metaphysics; Whitman embraces a philosophy of perpetual Becoming, as exemplified in such lines as “Urge and urge and urge,/ Always the procreant urge of the world” (Song of Myself, Stanza 3). This reflects the way in which the self is always expanding through incorporation of Others; it also reflects the way America is always expanding due to the influx of immigrants. Whitman is also transparent (if not always intelligible); in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, he writes in praise of “perfect personal candor… for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world and that there is no single exception.” Finally, Whitman’s poetry demonstrates that there are no outsiders, to him, and that he is a member and participant in life with all those he represents in his poems: for example, he lists many individuals and activities before claiming that “I was the man, I suffer’d, I was there,” (Song of Myself Stanza 33). He is no mere observer; he is a participant.

Fisher later identifies Whitman’s synthesis of valuing both the individual and the aggregate as reaching an apotheosis in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” stanza 9, where Whitman, thinking of all humans in all times, enjoys the image he sees of his head in the water over the side of the ferry: “Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!” “That each man or woman at any time, or for all time, will find that the rays of light seem to make this glorious halo on the water for himself alone or herself alone creates an almost mystical image for democratic uniqueness and democratic commonness and interchangeability. It is the single greatest image of Whitman’s aesthetics,” writes Fisher. Here, Whitman’s religious conception of individuality and universality is epitomized, and the “wonder of uniqueness and the pleasure of commonness are fused,” (Fisher 68).

The essence of Whitman, which mirrors his beliefs about the essence of America, is his loving, self-expanding openness. This, too, is based on his understanding of natural laws of the universe. Quite ahead of his time, Whitman deeply believed in a constantly expanding universe, which grows outwards in complexity through synthesizing collisions between existing particles. Whitman writes that the “law of laws, is the law of successions,” and challenges the reader: “would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it” (DV 415), as he does, by intermingling with and absorbing the masses. Only through this perpetual merging and absorption can one become a truly composite democratic individual. This requires pure openness, as exemplified in stanza 2 of my favorite poem, “Song of the Open Road”: “Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial… None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.” To be as expansive as a democratic individual must be, you must open yourself in order to “gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their hearts,” (Song of the Open Road, Stanza 13). None must be rejected; all must be processed; this reflects Whitman’s liberal beliefs in the inherent good of moreness and in the productive synthetic interaction between unique individuals that leads John Stuart Mill to stand for pure free speech. No opinion must be lost in the democracy of the mind if one is to grow and enclose more of the universe. As Kateb writes, “[d]emocratic connectedness is mutual acceptance. Rejection of any other human being, for one reason or another, for apparently good reasons as well as for bad ones, is self-rejection. A principal burden of Whitman’s teaching, therefore, is that the differences between individuals do not go as deep as the commonalities,” (Kateb 552). This common humanity implies that an individual can imagine themselves in the shoes of any other, can attempt to identify with any other in order to broaden oneself: “Whitman wants to coax us into thinking that we can identify with anything if we try, and that if we try we show not presumption but democratic honesty,” (Kateb 554). Identification means that the other takes a place in one’s self, one’s ego; this not only takes the courage to overcome the natural human fear of self-dissolution, but it also takes love, since love involves an identification and merging of the self with the other, as exemplified in the Christian command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is a difficult burden for Whitman to place on all members of a society. Kateb writes that it “is undeniable that the heights of receptivity and responsiveness are impossible to live on continuously” (Kateb 554), since people have to take care of the ordinary business of life at work and at home. However, Whitman’s example provides an ideal of openness to strive towards, and through the power of mimesis inherent in art, his example can effectively make people more open. As a Big Five personality trait, openness is highly correlated with intelligence, since intelligence is so involved with the ability to handle complexity and contradiction and to adapt to new stimuli. Ultimately, Whitman’s cultural example can help to foster a society of more open individuals who can approach a post-conventional morality, which, as described by Lawrence Kohlberg, enables more thinking that is based on societal or universal good rather than narrow self-interest.

Whitman’s example of a liberal-democratic “ensemble-Individual” is validated by a lot of modern social theory. The command in stanza 2 of “Song of Myself,” that “[y]ou shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself,” is reminiscent of Mill’s view that truth is a matter of combining and reconciling different limited viewpoints, and also Jurgen Habermas’ understanding of the intersubjective nature of language and rationality. Habermas’ intersubjective “communicative action,” furthermore, takes place in what he terms the “lifeworld,” which is the background knowledge of all culture and ideas which individuals have implicit access to, and within which individuals communicate. Whitman shows an implicit understanding of the existence of a “lifeworld” when he writes “[t]hese really are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me./ If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 17). The intersubjective nature of language here is combined with a democratic understanding of truth; in Habermas’ view, all communicative action must be based on mutual understanding of reasons, without which rationality is nothing. Another liberal democratic philosopher, John Rawls, also supports Whitman’s worldview. A key aspect of Whitman is his acknowledgement of existential contingency, which for him simultaneously means that no one owns anything and everyone owns everything. Kateb writes that “[i]mplied in Whitman’s idea of the burden of perception and sympathy that the spirit of democracy means to impose is the will to activate the feeling of contingency: It is a matter of chance that any person has been born and then been raised in one way rather than another,” (Kateb 554). The implications of this contingency for the concept of ownership is represented in Whitman’s famous opening lines: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 1). This means that anyone could be anyone, and that anyone can be anyone. George Herbert Mead’s theory of the self as a collection of intersubjective roles to play also echoes Whitman, who wants to add more and more roles to his repertoire. The developments of science and of social theory in the 1800s led many modern thinkers to despair about the state of man and society. Things like the “death of God” and the end of ideas of eternal selfhood unnerved many of Whitman’s contemporaries, but “Whitman’s celebration of many of the conditions that would make up the melancholy and elegiac side of sociology… remains immune from this cliche. He gives instead his remarkable celebration of just those conditions of a fluid boundary of the self that only later were called the “loss” of some imagined traditional, stable self,” (Fisher 65). Whitman predates Emile Durkheim’s desperate call for a pseudo-religious common worship of individuality as the only way to unite a humanity increasingly divided by the division of labor by over 50 years. Whitman’s radical views of the self are not only sound in terms of social theory; they also escape the pessimism associated with many social theorists, and instead optimistically celebrate a new, intersubjective world.

However, there are dangers to this fluid selfhood. The idea of a semi-permeable cell membrane surrounding an individual cell within a larger social body is a sound one in nature; however, if there is no membrane and pure openness, the cell and the body would both collapse. There is a need for some sort of grounding “self” to avoid pure dissolution. Nancy Rosenblum, in a critique of Kateb’s essay, writes that “D. H. Lawrence most famously took Whitman’s limitless “I” for terrible dissolution: “Walt” was leaking out into the universe, on the verge of disappearing altogether,” (Rosenblum 579). Kateb is made uncomfortable by Whitman’s allusions towards the existence of a “core self.” He writes that “I think that such substantialist talk about the person or the soul gets in the way of Whitman’s most democratic teaching. I much prefer to stay with his idea that what is left inside oneself when one is filling a function or playing a part is an infinite reservoir or, better, repertoire. Unexpressed potentiality rather than an indestructible core (that must remain hidden or can show itself only specially) suits the idea of ‘a great composite democratic individual,’ which is the idea to be preserved,” (Kateb 562). I am inclined to somewhat agree with this perspective, which takes Whitman’s democratized soul “all the way.” However, I would like to qualify this by asserting that the source of this “potentiality,” the base of the “self,” is the body. It is the body that is tied to life and death, and it is the body that provides identity. Most importantly, it is the body that is the seat of the libido, of love— this makes it ideal as the “center of gravity” that keeps all of Whitman’s multitudes together; the different parts of an ensemble-Individual must figuratively love one another to stay united in the mind. This is why love is so essential to this social being. There is evidence for this in the text. Whitman writes that “these come to me days and nights and go from me again,/ But they are not the Me myself / Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,/ Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary/… Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 4). The “Me myself” that is somehow not one of his social selves is compassionating; it is that which compassions; it is the animal lover, tied to the world, desirous of sexual communion with others. Later, Whitman supports this idea of a bodily, sexual potentiality as the seat of the “self” when he speculates about whatever that inner something is, musing “There is that in me– I do not know what it is– but I know it is in me,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 50) before immediately alluding to masturbation.

The other bodily condition for the individual “self” which separates it from society is death, Whitman’s other favorite word after love. Martin Heidegger had the idea that “Being-towards-death” is what individuates human beings, and Whitman gets at the same concept. He sees the “self” as a repository of meaning, a generative node that can contribute to the All after the death of the individual. This is revealed in his poem “To Think of Time,” when he celebrates the idea of an identity: “You are not thrown to the winds, you gather certainly and safely around yourself,/ Yourself! Yourself! Yourself, for ever and ever!” “It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and father, it is to identify you,” “And I have dream’d that the purpose and essence of the known life, the transient,/ Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent,” (To Think of Time, Stanzas 7-9). In other words, transient selves tied to bodies are born so that they may form identities out of the many possible things which the self can absorb and incorporate during a finite life; this always creates a unique identity, a novelty in the universe, which of course to Whitman is an inherent good. The individual self is a recombinative, generative node, which reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s view of the individual poet as a synthesizing, catalyzing repository of the tradition in his essay “The Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The unique identity formed in life then guarantees the individual “immortality” beyond death thanks to their introduction of novelty into the universe, novelty that is permanently accessible to other human beings. This is why Whitman says “[w]hen I give I give myself,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 40); everything he contains is himself; all he can give is himself. An interesting nuance is struck in stanza 44, when he says that “I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be.” Note the “am” and then the lack of “am.” His identity is the acme of all that he has taken into himself. However, “I” is simply juxtaposed to “an encloser of things to be”; Whitman elects not to make a definitional statement out of this clause, because here, I believe, he is subtly indicating that the concept of “I” as he means here is one of “unexpressed potentiality rather than an indestructible core,” or one of Becoming rather than Being, the Becoming that is responsible for accumulating the Being and will continuously progress beyond it. Identity is “I am”; the encloser of potential is “I.”

Whitman’s “ensemble-Individual” is still workable, now, using the model of a Becoming essence tied to a Being existence. One can then continually grow and assimilate, just as America has done for 400 years. However, Whitman’s program presents another problem, the problem that Nietzsche (who has more in common with Whitman than one would expect) calls the most important question for philosophy, the problem of value. After all, the process of perpetual absorption is also the way that human beings refine their understandings of value. We have to truly engage with something to gain a sense of value for it, have to really feel it; William James said that if we were to lose all our emotions at a stroke, we would be unable to determine preference for anything. And these values are always relative, up for grabs, determined by us, and determined in relation to all our other values; after all, valuations determine how we deploy our limited time and attention. A common criticism of Whitman was expressed best by William James in his 1903 “Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson”: “[Emerson’s] optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar.” This accusation of indiscriminate hurrahing is a serious one; after all, essential to the process of valuation is discrimination. Without discrimination, we would never know what to give our attention to— we’d get stuck staring rapturously at the sink while sitting on the toilet until we got a hemorrhoid. Is the criticism justified? Yes and no. Whitman contradicts himself frequently to make points, so we should be wary of taking any one declaration as essential. He does claim that all is “equally wonderful” in “Who Learns My Lesson Complete?”; and this is of course not true. Stars are more wonderful than asteroids; the Beatles are more wonderful than the Rolling Stones; these are essential facts of value differences that allow us to focus on what’s important. However, he also says “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, and the pismire is equally perfect,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 31). Equally perfect is a different claim than equally wonderful; equally perfect implies the Emersonian view that everything is perfectly in its place as an integral part of the wonderful, perfect whole. Two things can both be “perfect” in themselves while still being of different values within the grand, interconnected scheme of All Value. I think it is more fruitful to see Whitman’s “indiscriminate hurrahing” as providing a needful correction to the tendency of humanity to overdiscriminate, and to “round down to zero” when ignoring valuable things that are not immediately relevant to daily life. Whitman’s project is to broaden people’s horizons, and given his Emersonian influence, it is not surprising that he makes a point of celebrating the fact that all unique things do have value, some value as part of the All, and that all these different values do not diminish one another, are not directly comparable in essence in any definitive way, and therefore that it is better for him to celebrate them all. 

Whitman still clearly indicates that some things are more valuable to him than others, contradicting his occasionally indiscriminate hurrahs. He tells us to “see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it,” (Song of the Open Road, Stanza 13). In other words, enjoy everything in the abstract, but also be sure not to miss the discriminant reality of the finite thing in front of you. In the sublime stanza 4 of “I Sing the Body Electric,” he describes the joy of being near other human beings, saying that “[a]ll things please the soul, but these please the soul well.” How beautifully vague! He doesn’t hierarchize values, but rather acknowledges the Muchness of all values, and admits that some things, specifically human beings, the most important things in the world to him, have more Muchness than others, and of a different tone or taste. It’s all good, and humanity is more good. The problem of value, when applied to human beings, gets uncomfortable quickly; after all, in a liberal democratic society, we are supposed to believe in equality. However, at the same time, the world is blatantly unequal all the way down. Some human beings are clearly more “valuable,” at least in some senses, than others; Abraham Lincoln was more valuable than James Buchanan; he was also more valuable than any individual slave. See how uncomfortable that is? However, if we are able to imitate Whitman and contain contradictions, then we can deal with this, by valuing in multiple dimensions. We can value Beings, the acme of an individual, what their identities enclose; we can also, simultaneously, value the shared human essence that all human Becomings share. It’s that childlike essence, the adaptational force, evolution, Life, the burning poetic Something, the body, the libido, the star-smash at the center of gravity. This, to Whitman is of infinite value due to its potentiality; it could become anything. This was inherited from Emerson’s belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” As Henry Alonzo Myers put it, “[h]ow can one unlimited personality be either more or less than another?” (Myers 246). While mathematicians now know that some infinities are larger than others, in the social world this is irrelevant. We can simply appreciate the infinite value of individual humanity, while also appreciating the finite value of individual identities.

There are fair criticisms of the validity of Whitman’s example of the ideal liberal-democratic individual. Nancy Rosenblum’s critique is particularly salient in our modern discourse about identity. Not only does she point out the failure of pure openness to obtain full reciprocity in the real world, saying that “Whitman loved America more than Americans loved him or one another,” but she further points out how existential inequality begets essential inequality. She writes that “[t]here is the further question whether the personal experience of pluralism that activates feelings of contingency is actually available to everyone in democratic culture. We know it is not. Constraining economic and social conditions inhibit the experience of “potentiality”: race, gender, and the forces of socialization operate as formidable internal and external obstacles to imaginative identification with others… the circumstances of justice that make receptivity psychologically tenable simply must be taken up,” (Rosenblum 528). In other words, the openness and universality that Whitman wants all Americans to strive for, based on the unlimited potentiality of the Becoming self, simply isn’t as universal as Whitman would want. There are inherent inequalities that restrict openness and growth. While Whitman would likely nonetheless claim that all, no matter what, have the potential to “debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small,” (Song of Myself, Stanza 49), and would enthusiastically value any such debouchment from any starting point, Rosenblum’s criticism nonetheless hits home. Working towards conditions of greater equality of opportunity is one of the great struggles of liberal democracy; inequality has held back progress as long as progress has been made. However, progress has been made; opportunity and potentiality are continually being expanded more and more to those who were once limited. This is accomplished through interventions such as the regulation of lead, so that fewer children’s brains are handicapped by lead exposure. While the project is incomplete, it is undoubtedly occurring. The fact of its unjust incompleteness is no reason to abandon the idea as a whole; the inability for everyone to approach universality as the white male Whitman was able to do does not imply that we should abandon the dream of universality. That would mean giving up on the idea of anything that could bind humanity together, giving up on the idea of “humanity” itself;  it would mean abandoning the idea of progress altogether, abandoning everything that can pull limited individuals beyond themselves to greater heights; in short, it would mean abandoning the very project which seeks to bestow greater and greater universal potentiality on all individuals, the situation that Rosenblum cites as the problem. This discussion has echoes in many major debates across our culture today and across postmodern academia, where dissection of the failures of “Enlightenment” and “the West” has led many to adopt an eternally negative critical pose and to abandon the truly valuable and potentially universal products and ideas that came out of this tradition. Whitman’s contradictions, ideals, and way of appreciating the world provide us a way to embrace a de-essentialized world of intersubjective selves and balkanized values without losing our human center, or our orientation towards something better.

Walt Whitman made it his life project to embody the ideal liberal-democratic individual, and to share his ideals with the world through his poetry and his prose. He spent his life assimilating as much as he could into himself with love and openness, and the identity that his corpse left behind has become truly immortal, just as he guess’d. While it is fair to criticize the way his ideals fall short in reality, to do so misses the point. Rosenblum’s final criticism of George Kateb’s celebration of Whitman as the “great composite democratic individual” claims that Whitman failed because his “spectacle” had no direct outcomes for politics. “Yet,” she admits at the end of her essay, “Whitman’s spectacle of diversity does have significance for political theory if we are willing to acknowledge the binding power of aesthetic response,” (Rosenblum 528). The “binding power of aesthetic response,” the mimetic power unleashed by reading poetry, is exactly what Whitman wanted to use to change the world by encouraging a culture of moral and religious democracy, as stated in his Democratic Vistas. His embodiment of the ideal “ensemble-Individual” may be impossible to imitate fully— it is doubtful even Whitman was as Whitman as Whitman pretended he was. The point was to spread the ideal, to “take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and archetypal models— to fill with pride and love the utmost capacity, and to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future,” for “the mind, which alone builds the permanent edifice, haughtily builds it to itself,” (DV 438). As Thoreau said, the greatest art a man can perform is the crafting of the lens through which he sees the world. Whitman was the prophet and redeemer both for the great spiritual literature of democracy which he called for; I, for one, believe his claim that individuals need to believe in and realize the moral ideals of liberal democracy, in a religious way, in order to constantly revitalize liberal democracy itself. We are seeing today what happens when this is lacking, with liberal democracy in retreat around the world, and with democratic culture reflecting the popular culture of reality TV. Liberal democracy would be much stronger today if America and the world were to re-encounter Walt Whitman, the epitome of the liberal-democratic individual. It is enough to work towards the ideal; ideals, like horizons, are always receding for us as we approach them. But we can’t let that blind us to the value of the distance covered along the way.

Works Cited

Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas. 1871.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855.

Fisher, Philip. Still the New World. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Kateb, George. “Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy.” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 4 pp. 545-571. Sage Publications, Nov. 1990. JStor.

Mounk, Yascha, “The People vs. Democracy.” Harvard University Press, March 5 2018.

Myers, Henry Alonzo. “Whitman’s Conception of the Spiritual Democracy.” American Literature, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 239-253. Duke University Press, Nov. 1934.Rosenblum, Nancy. “Strange Attractors: How Individualists Connect to Form Democratic Unity.” Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 4 pp. 576-586. Sage Publications, Nov. 1990. JStor.