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JenniferClark-FirstPaper 4 - 23 Mar 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | Finally, Emerson also urges against consistency, the desire to avoid contradiction in life. In response to this desire, Emerson tells his readership not to fear inconsistency because they should not worry about being misunderstood. However, in the judicial system, the fear of being misunderstood is very real when confronted with life in prison; it is even more real when confronted with the death penalty. Because we as a society act as judge and jury over one another, to be misunderstood in our society is to be black-listed at the least and murdered at the utmost. This is where Emerson’s idea of a self-reliant society seems to break down when confronted with the realities of our society today. We are so inter-dependent that our desire to control the actions of others is great enough that we sacrifice our own freedoms to do so and call it “magic”. | |
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- The distance between the incommensurables you adduced here is simply too great. It's true that Emerson's version of realism offered in Self-Reliance bears just enough similarity to the realism of Jerome Frank that they can be made to resonate ever so slightly. But the juxtaposition doesn't illuminate either element at that vast distance, so that one learns neither what Emerson means nor what Frank intends, let alone what "we" ought to think about either. You could tell that this was true at the outline stage, where you found neither an introduction that could state a thesis, nor a conclusion that could fulfill the development of that thesis. Instead you begin abruptly with the first part of A and end on the last part of B, with no more than grammatical glue and one similitude holding the paragraphs together. The route to improvement is to evolve the thesis. In all likelihood Emerson then falls away altogether, or is present solely as an invocation, because the real point, whatever it is, that isn't merely a cliche restatement of Frank, will have emerged.
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