Humanity and Compassion: Kant's Philosophy
and Whitman's "Song of Myself"
and Whitman's "Song of Myself"
There is an inclusiveness to Whitman, a desire to accept everyone which is the result of both his awareness of a deeper source of emotion, and his inability to know why we are drawn to it. Ultimately, we do not know who we are and yet we are aware that we are one both in terms of our biology and our attraction to sensory experience. For Whitman, not knowing the origin of our love of sensory experience is disconcerting, since it is indicative of our inability to really know who we are, and this fact is frightening. Whitman's awareness of this, however, is what compels him to accept everyone, to seek the company of others. In essence, therefore, this acceptance and compassion is born out of fear. There are some very poignant passages in "Song of Myself" that illustrate Whitman's humanity and compassion. As we read them, we are able to see fully Whitman's desire to embrace all of humanity; in effect he cries out that he, too, is afraid, but that he is with you and you are with him. Here is one involving the lunatic. "The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, / (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room) (Whitman 37). Surrounded by a whirlwind of sensory experiences that intoxicates us but not knowing how or why, we seek each other for comfort and solace. Paradoxically, although Whitman celebrates the individual and the individual’s sensory experience, in the final analysis "Song of Myself" is about our common humanity, a humanity derived from our shared physical/biological past as well as our shared entry into a Kantian experience that relegates the self to a nominal role. In celebrating himself, Whitman celebrates the unknowability of himself and others which leads him to a deeper commitment to embrace all of humanity.
No doubt much of the energy that runs through "Song of Myself" is derived from the frenzied and seemingly unquenchable desire for Whitman to take all of life in, to experience everything. The poem serves as a reminder of how adventurous, beautiful, and exciting life always is, even in its most mundane moments. It is proper, therefore, for Whitman to begin this celebration of sensory experience with something as simple and commonplace as "a spear of summer grass." Whitman saw our sensory experience as being the most important thing we have in life, and the thing that puts all of us on an equal footing, especially in terms of our empathy and humanity. Whitman seems to have just enjoyed life, all of life, and, similar to Thoreau, was fascinated by the hustle and bustle of capitalism and free trade.
The lists compiled in "Song of Myself" reflect this energy. The length of some of the lists, however, can be a bit unnerving. We may well wonder why so long? Or why this or that experience and not another? Is there some significance to it? Some pattern? Why any lists at all? Why not simply list one or two representative items and then, there, the reader has it. To properly understand the lists and "Song of Myself" in general, we must consider the period in which Whitman was writing – the Romantic period. Dissatisfied with the Enlightenment and its failure to explain the mysteries of life through logic, science, and reason, the Romantics pushed back and sought to privilege the sensory experience of the person in order to understand themselves and the eternal truths and mysteries. It was a resurgence in the belief of the validity and power of our senses, especially the individual’s senses. Here we have Emerson, for example, stressing the importance for the individual to seek God in nature and to abandon following any formal or established religion, arguing that by joining an established religion you distance yourself from God rather than bring him closer. The sensory experiences provided by nature provide a direct link to God and to your own genius. Emerson saw nature as a reflection of the soul, so that the sensory experience of nature helped the individual to see and find God, both in himself and in nature. Whitman, well aware of Emerson's thought, also stressed the sensory experience, but he pauses at it. He delights in noticing and experiencing every little aspect of life. In New York he was fascinated by the large crowds and noises and the constant waves of immigrants arriving by boats. He loved the different manners of people, the sounds of things passing by him, the sound of his own voice. Prior to anything else, prior to believing the love and beauty and passion for living led to anything or meant anything or signified anything, Whitman reveled in life in all of its myriad confusion and noise. The lists are long and varied and, at times, confused, because they are a reflection of how Whitman experienced life. As we read the lists we are inside the mind and body of Whitman as he lives and moves through the streets of New York and elsewhere. Reducing these long lists would fail to capture the dizzying array of details that any one of us notices even in the briefest of moments. If anything, therefore, we may argue that the lists should be even longer.
The emphasis on sensory experience does eventually prompt Whitman to attach a significance to it, outside of its obvious and immediate benefits. Yes, I hear the myriad sounds of the street and delight in them, but so what? Yes, our ability to sense the world is beautiful in and of itself, but Whitman also believes that our humanity is, in a very real sense, made one due to the fact that each of us is of the world and experiences the world. The first of these two aspects is fleshed out in the first section, where Whitman writes "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 26). And further down: "My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same" (Whitman 26). This is the physical or biological sense of our oneness that Whitman is referring to. We are physically one since we are all born of the soil, and we have become cognizant beings that now experience the soil. The act of experiencing ourselves is the second aspect that illustrates our oneness; not only are we all formed out of the same soil, but we are all capable of experiencing ourselves and our surroundings. It is also in this sense that we experience everyone who is living or has lived or will live. Whitman may write, therefore, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 26).
The fact that we are all of the earth and therefore all connected is a relatively simple concept to understand, at least in light of modern science. What is less simple to understand is the other kind of connection that Whitman is espousing in "Song of Myself," and that is the connection between people at the experiential level. According to Whitman, we not only empathize with each other, but we actually experience what others are experiencing or have experienced or even will experience. The leap that Whitman takes from believing we are one due to our shared physical biology to believing our individual sensory experiences are sublimated or incorporated into a universal one whereby the entirety of mankind’s sensory experiences from the beginning to the end of time should be regarded as being accessible by any one individual at any time.
We must recognize the importance of the sensory in "Song of Myself." This is the staging area, if you will, for Whitman’s thought. Here is a segment of one of the many lists we find in "Song of Myself:"
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouting jokes, pelts of snow-balls (Whitman 32)
Examining each of the sensory lists in "Song of Myself," we notice that there is often an emphasis that Whitman wishes to put forth. In the excerpt above, it is the simple sensory enjoyment of the everyday sounds and sights of a busy street. Whitman documents, celebrates, and sings all of what he experiences as he walks the streets of New York City, but he also imagines himself experiencing in the past, both as himself and as other people. Most importantly, moreover, is what seems to be Whitman's argument that these experiences are just as real and valid as those experiences obtained first-hand.
Whitman, first of all, is tantalized with the notion of interconnectedness at the atomic level. We are not only interconnected because of our shared physicality, namely the soil, but we are interconnected at all times because of this as well. In other words, in a purely physical sense, we do not die. Here is a brief selection from section six in "Song of Myself."
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at
the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses (Whitman 31)
It is difficult for us to absorb this kind of thought fully since we are so invested in equating life with the "I" of existence – the "I" that experiences. And yet, Whitman is encouraging us to imagine a world where we can partake in life without being attached to an "I" that is experiencing it. At the same time Whitman is encouraging this kind of world where we may experience it on a sensory-less level, he is also celebrating the senses. He sings his "love of life," as Jack London might put it; there is a "madness" to experience life – "I am mad for it to be in contact with me" (Whitman 26). The long lists of sensory experiences testify to this love of life. For Whitman, however, it is our attraction to the very act of experiencing(and not the character or abundance of particular experiences) combined with an ignorance regarding the answers to life's mysteries, that connect us with each other and the world and point us to the very marrow and meaning of our existence. And so it is this act of experiencing that trumps the individual experience. For Whitman, ultimately it does not matter who is doing the experiencing. Throughout the poem he makes it clear that he is somehow able to walk in other people’s shoes. Here is an excerpt from section twenty-one: "In all people, I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, / And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them (Whitman 42). And here in section twenty-one again, he is able to easily sing the song of a woman. "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man" (Whitman 43). And again in section thirty-three, Whitman compiles a list of a great many types of people throughout time and remarks
I am the man, I sufffer’d, I was there.
The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry
wood, her children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the
murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am (Whitman 58)
There is something about all of this that comes off as arrogant. In our own experience, we are always quick to point out how we can never truly know someone. We are fond of denying that someone can even have the slightest idea of what someone is going through. Our everyday belief, in terms of empathy, is that it is severely limited, so much so that we use its lack of effectiveness in our arguments to silence the opposition. If we talk about war, for example, the soldier may say to the civilian, "You can’t possibly have any idea of what I am talking about unless you were there." And there ends the argument, for the civilian was not there, so what can he add? And yet, we have a novel such as Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, written by someone who was never in battle, but is often held up as a fine example of what the Civil War(and war in general) was like. How to explain such phenomenon?
It is at this point where we must talk about Whitman’s non-physical sense of empathy and experience, a sense that borrows from Kantian philosophy which was very present and influential during Whitman’s lifetime. Henry Alonzo Myers comments on this influence quite well:
The dogmatic rationalism of a period had foundered on problems that were for the time unanswerable. Only one conclusion could be drawn from this result, and the transcendentalists did not fail to draw it. The meaning and value of life are beyond the methods of rational, logical, and scientific procedure; hence where rational method and discipline have failed, poetic insight
and imagination are once more free to assert their supremacy. In the fifty years following Kant’s
death in 1804 this conclusion spread like a rumor over the literary world on both sides of the
Atlantic; Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, and Whitman were among those who planned to
take over the functions of a bankrupt philosophy in the name of poetry and imaginative thought
(Myers 244)
It was Kant, wanting to establish a common understanding or truth in the face of a society that appeared to be anchorless, who developed his notion of universal subjectivity, whereby a person could look at an object, say a flower, and claim it to be beautiful and to think everyone else would think the same way if they were looking at the flower too. As soon as the person asked someone what he or she thought of the flower, however, that other person might very well say that the flower is nothing but an ugly weed. The point, therefore, is that each of us, to ourselves, has a notion, or window, into the same experience of the beautiful, even though we reach it through different avenues. There was something about the flower that attracted one person to it and, likewise, there is something to some other object that attracts other people to those objects. It is this something that is the beautiful, and so beauty does not lie within objects themselves, but rather objects act as vehicles or portals into this other realm that each person has access to via his or her own personal and variable tastes.
Whitman takes this Kantian sensibility concerning beauty and weaves it into "Song of Myself" to advance his claim of oneness, of being able not only to empathize with another person, but to actually be that person, to be "The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on." To be "The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat." And what prompts him to make this claim is his belief that the wonder, beauty, and enjoyment of sensory experience emanates from a common source that each person has access to. If the runaway slave is experiencing fear, this experience of fear is not located or derived only from his particular experience, but may be derived from a great variety of experiences. Thus, the fear that the runaway slave feels is the same fear I have access to, albeit through a different experience. Whitman is referring to this deeper source of emotion and humanity when he says "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems" (Whitman 27). And what is the origin of all poems but mankind’s attempts at answering the fundamental and enduring question of who we are?
"Song of Myself" is a celebration of our common humanity. Whitman rejects the notion that we are individuals incapable of experiencing other selves. What is more, our desire or "love of life," our passion for the endless variety of experiences, proceeds from a place that is mysterious, and yet common, to us; we do not know why we are drawn to the great variety of life’s experiences. Like Jack London, we may say we have a "love of life," but we can not say why. Following Kant we may observe that we are captivated by a particular flower, but ultimately we do not know why, even as we conclude that our desire for beauty emanates from the same source. It is this inability to know why that serves as the basis for Whitman’s impassioned plea or conviction that he is everyone and that everyone is him. In section nineteen we hear a reflective Whitman wondering who he is, who anyone is.
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it that I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? (Whitman 41)
That line especially, "How is it that I extract strength from the beef I eat?" reminds us that we are forever stumped by first causes – we know we like " The blab of the pave," for example, but don't know why.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 3rd ed., Thomson Wadsworth,
2005, pp. 416-40.
Myers, Henry Alonzo. "Whitman's Consistency." American Literature 8.3 (1936): 243-257.
Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." Leaves of Grass and other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon.
New York: Norton, 1973.
No doubt much of the energy that runs through "Song of Myself" is derived from the frenzied and seemingly unquenchable desire for Whitman to take all of life in, to experience everything. The poem serves as a reminder of how adventurous, beautiful, and exciting life always is, even in its most mundane moments. It is proper, therefore, for Whitman to begin this celebration of sensory experience with something as simple and commonplace as "a spear of summer grass." Whitman saw our sensory experience as being the most important thing we have in life, and the thing that puts all of us on an equal footing, especially in terms of our empathy and humanity. Whitman seems to have just enjoyed life, all of life, and, similar to Thoreau, was fascinated by the hustle and bustle of capitalism and free trade.
The lists compiled in "Song of Myself" reflect this energy. The length of some of the lists, however, can be a bit unnerving. We may well wonder why so long? Or why this or that experience and not another? Is there some significance to it? Some pattern? Why any lists at all? Why not simply list one or two representative items and then, there, the reader has it. To properly understand the lists and "Song of Myself" in general, we must consider the period in which Whitman was writing – the Romantic period. Dissatisfied with the Enlightenment and its failure to explain the mysteries of life through logic, science, and reason, the Romantics pushed back and sought to privilege the sensory experience of the person in order to understand themselves and the eternal truths and mysteries. It was a resurgence in the belief of the validity and power of our senses, especially the individual’s senses. Here we have Emerson, for example, stressing the importance for the individual to seek God in nature and to abandon following any formal or established religion, arguing that by joining an established religion you distance yourself from God rather than bring him closer. The sensory experiences provided by nature provide a direct link to God and to your own genius. Emerson saw nature as a reflection of the soul, so that the sensory experience of nature helped the individual to see and find God, both in himself and in nature. Whitman, well aware of Emerson's thought, also stressed the sensory experience, but he pauses at it. He delights in noticing and experiencing every little aspect of life. In New York he was fascinated by the large crowds and noises and the constant waves of immigrants arriving by boats. He loved the different manners of people, the sounds of things passing by him, the sound of his own voice. Prior to anything else, prior to believing the love and beauty and passion for living led to anything or meant anything or signified anything, Whitman reveled in life in all of its myriad confusion and noise. The lists are long and varied and, at times, confused, because they are a reflection of how Whitman experienced life. As we read the lists we are inside the mind and body of Whitman as he lives and moves through the streets of New York and elsewhere. Reducing these long lists would fail to capture the dizzying array of details that any one of us notices even in the briefest of moments. If anything, therefore, we may argue that the lists should be even longer.
The emphasis on sensory experience does eventually prompt Whitman to attach a significance to it, outside of its obvious and immediate benefits. Yes, I hear the myriad sounds of the street and delight in them, but so what? Yes, our ability to sense the world is beautiful in and of itself, but Whitman also believes that our humanity is, in a very real sense, made one due to the fact that each of us is of the world and experiences the world. The first of these two aspects is fleshed out in the first section, where Whitman writes "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 26). And further down: "My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same" (Whitman 26). This is the physical or biological sense of our oneness that Whitman is referring to. We are physically one since we are all born of the soil, and we have become cognizant beings that now experience the soil. The act of experiencing ourselves is the second aspect that illustrates our oneness; not only are we all formed out of the same soil, but we are all capable of experiencing ourselves and our surroundings. It is also in this sense that we experience everyone who is living or has lived or will live. Whitman may write, therefore, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 26).
The fact that we are all of the earth and therefore all connected is a relatively simple concept to understand, at least in light of modern science. What is less simple to understand is the other kind of connection that Whitman is espousing in "Song of Myself," and that is the connection between people at the experiential level. According to Whitman, we not only empathize with each other, but we actually experience what others are experiencing or have experienced or even will experience. The leap that Whitman takes from believing we are one due to our shared physical biology to believing our individual sensory experiences are sublimated or incorporated into a universal one whereby the entirety of mankind’s sensory experiences from the beginning to the end of time should be regarded as being accessible by any one individual at any time.
We must recognize the importance of the sensory in "Song of Myself." This is the staging area, if you will, for Whitman’s thought. Here is a segment of one of the many lists we find in "Song of Myself:"
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouting jokes, pelts of snow-balls (Whitman 32)
Examining each of the sensory lists in "Song of Myself," we notice that there is often an emphasis that Whitman wishes to put forth. In the excerpt above, it is the simple sensory enjoyment of the everyday sounds and sights of a busy street. Whitman documents, celebrates, and sings all of what he experiences as he walks the streets of New York City, but he also imagines himself experiencing in the past, both as himself and as other people. Most importantly, moreover, is what seems to be Whitman's argument that these experiences are just as real and valid as those experiences obtained first-hand.
Whitman, first of all, is tantalized with the notion of interconnectedness at the atomic level. We are not only interconnected because of our shared physicality, namely the soil, but we are interconnected at all times because of this as well. In other words, in a purely physical sense, we do not die. Here is a brief selection from section six in "Song of Myself."
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at
the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses (Whitman 31)
It is difficult for us to absorb this kind of thought fully since we are so invested in equating life with the "I" of existence – the "I" that experiences. And yet, Whitman is encouraging us to imagine a world where we can partake in life without being attached to an "I" that is experiencing it. At the same time Whitman is encouraging this kind of world where we may experience it on a sensory-less level, he is also celebrating the senses. He sings his "love of life," as Jack London might put it; there is a "madness" to experience life – "I am mad for it to be in contact with me" (Whitman 26). The long lists of sensory experiences testify to this love of life. For Whitman, however, it is our attraction to the very act of experiencing(and not the character or abundance of particular experiences) combined with an ignorance regarding the answers to life's mysteries, that connect us with each other and the world and point us to the very marrow and meaning of our existence. And so it is this act of experiencing that trumps the individual experience. For Whitman, ultimately it does not matter who is doing the experiencing. Throughout the poem he makes it clear that he is somehow able to walk in other people’s shoes. Here is an excerpt from section twenty-one: "In all people, I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, / And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them (Whitman 42). And here in section twenty-one again, he is able to easily sing the song of a woman. "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man" (Whitman 43). And again in section thirty-three, Whitman compiles a list of a great many types of people throughout time and remarks
I am the man, I sufffer’d, I was there.
The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry
wood, her children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the
murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am (Whitman 58)
There is something about all of this that comes off as arrogant. In our own experience, we are always quick to point out how we can never truly know someone. We are fond of denying that someone can even have the slightest idea of what someone is going through. Our everyday belief, in terms of empathy, is that it is severely limited, so much so that we use its lack of effectiveness in our arguments to silence the opposition. If we talk about war, for example, the soldier may say to the civilian, "You can’t possibly have any idea of what I am talking about unless you were there." And there ends the argument, for the civilian was not there, so what can he add? And yet, we have a novel such as Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, written by someone who was never in battle, but is often held up as a fine example of what the Civil War(and war in general) was like. How to explain such phenomenon?
It is at this point where we must talk about Whitman’s non-physical sense of empathy and experience, a sense that borrows from Kantian philosophy which was very present and influential during Whitman’s lifetime. Henry Alonzo Myers comments on this influence quite well:
The dogmatic rationalism of a period had foundered on problems that were for the time unanswerable. Only one conclusion could be drawn from this result, and the transcendentalists did not fail to draw it. The meaning and value of life are beyond the methods of rational, logical, and scientific procedure; hence where rational method and discipline have failed, poetic insight
and imagination are once more free to assert their supremacy. In the fifty years following Kant’s
death in 1804 this conclusion spread like a rumor over the literary world on both sides of the
Atlantic; Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, and Whitman were among those who planned to
take over the functions of a bankrupt philosophy in the name of poetry and imaginative thought
(Myers 244)
It was Kant, wanting to establish a common understanding or truth in the face of a society that appeared to be anchorless, who developed his notion of universal subjectivity, whereby a person could look at an object, say a flower, and claim it to be beautiful and to think everyone else would think the same way if they were looking at the flower too. As soon as the person asked someone what he or she thought of the flower, however, that other person might very well say that the flower is nothing but an ugly weed. The point, therefore, is that each of us, to ourselves, has a notion, or window, into the same experience of the beautiful, even though we reach it through different avenues. There was something about the flower that attracted one person to it and, likewise, there is something to some other object that attracts other people to those objects. It is this something that is the beautiful, and so beauty does not lie within objects themselves, but rather objects act as vehicles or portals into this other realm that each person has access to via his or her own personal and variable tastes.
Whitman takes this Kantian sensibility concerning beauty and weaves it into "Song of Myself" to advance his claim of oneness, of being able not only to empathize with another person, but to actually be that person, to be "The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on." To be "The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat." And what prompts him to make this claim is his belief that the wonder, beauty, and enjoyment of sensory experience emanates from a common source that each person has access to. If the runaway slave is experiencing fear, this experience of fear is not located or derived only from his particular experience, but may be derived from a great variety of experiences. Thus, the fear that the runaway slave feels is the same fear I have access to, albeit through a different experience. Whitman is referring to this deeper source of emotion and humanity when he says "Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems" (Whitman 27). And what is the origin of all poems but mankind’s attempts at answering the fundamental and enduring question of who we are?
"Song of Myself" is a celebration of our common humanity. Whitman rejects the notion that we are individuals incapable of experiencing other selves. What is more, our desire or "love of life," our passion for the endless variety of experiences, proceeds from a place that is mysterious, and yet common, to us; we do not know why we are drawn to the great variety of life’s experiences. Like Jack London, we may say we have a "love of life," but we can not say why. Following Kant we may observe that we are captivated by a particular flower, but ultimately we do not know why, even as we conclude that our desire for beauty emanates from the same source. It is this inability to know why that serves as the basis for Whitman’s impassioned plea or conviction that he is everyone and that everyone is him. In section nineteen we hear a reflective Whitman wondering who he is, who anyone is.
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it that I extract strength from the beef I eat?
What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? (Whitman 41)
That line especially, "How is it that I extract strength from the beef I eat?" reminds us that we are forever stumped by first causes – we know we like " The blab of the pave," for example, but don't know why.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 3rd ed., Thomson Wadsworth,
2005, pp. 416-40.
Myers, Henry Alonzo. "Whitman's Consistency." American Literature 8.3 (1936): 243-257.
Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." Leaves of Grass and other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon.
New York: Norton, 1973.