Review of Jeremy David Engels’s The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita

Jeremy David Engels’s scholarly and ambitiously interpretive work accesses the relation of worldviews of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman by drawing on contrasting internal textual resources of the ancient Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita. He consistently plays out a polemical interpretation that prioritizes Whitman’s supposed this-worldly Vedanta strain of the Gita in contrast to Emerson’s promotion of an otherworldly Advaita strain of the same Hindu classic. Whitman’s worldview is interpreted in terms of a democratic ethics of oneness that is viable for our times. Arguably, however, Emerson’s doctrine of Over-Soul is grounded in mainstream concepts of Western Neoplatonism and post-Kantian strains of objective idealism, not in the Gita. Engels’s project increasingly aligns with the rhetoric of postmodernism and global ethics that is common coin in today’s academy. It plays out as a kind of monocultural ethics of equality in disagreement with the ethics of democracy based on the twin principles of liberty and equality in the open marketplace of performance, as represented by William James and the other classical Pragmatists.