ABSTRACT
Working with a concept of depth quite like Adorno’s, Whitman elaborates an ethic of appearances resting on the same philosophical assumptions and meeting the same philosophical requirements. Although at times we find him to be less explicit, or on those occasions perhaps more subtle, throughout his verse Whitman lays out clearly principles that support an aesthetic receptivity to the world according to the way in which it appears. And Whitman leaves little question as to the meaning of these principles. He is never vague about what it means to relate aesthetically to appearances or why such an exclusive orientation is justified, nor is he vague about qualities belonging to appearances. No mystery is made of the mystery and wonder of unfathomable worlds, or of the feelings of delight and well-being wonder occasions. Nor does Whitman mystify the fathomless darkness that leaves us with what lies ostensibly before us, or falsely illuminate either the opacity that sets worlds apart from us as worlds of difference or the darkness of each world that makes it different from the rest. Whitman is convinced and makes plain his conviction that nothing before us is without wonder and that no wonder, on that account, should be left out of account or can be given a complete account, and that every account only returns us reflexively to the mystery and wonder that provoked it. Whitman does not doubt or permit us to doubt that the appearances he revalues are each unique and of equal value and sufficient when taken as they are. Nor does he appear the least uncertain that difference suffers injury when represented as being anything other than it appears to be and that it can be protected by letting it be, a tolerance providing the raison d’être of an ethic of appearances. Surely Whitman’s aesthetic sensibilities are especially, and often enough painfully, acute, with regard to his concern about the safety of difference, as in his “Calamus” poems. And Whitman unselfconsciously parades the most effusive attachment for the appearances of the world, as though cultivating a genuine intimacy meant having but the intense sense of a world of wondrous though inaccessible privacies.
