My essay on Whitman and Hegel is the fruit of three years of meditation on the relationship between selfhood and poetic form. The idea is that Whitman’s organic form is an expression of the modern conception of the ground of selfhood as what Isaiah Berlin called positive freedom. Sounds complex? Maybe it is, but it’s a value of mine to present complexity as clearly and directly as possible. Both the virtue and the limit of my argument — and of Hegel for modernity, I would say — are expressed in this passage from late in the essay:

“One may escape the pressure to define a community’s laws in terms of an autonomous rationality, but one cannot define an actual ethical sphere based on identifications without some horizon of exclusion.”