Simulation of the Authentic by S Rocha

As Herder praised the essential beauty of language and the ancient secrets it possesses, he and the Grimms understood what was in the process of being lost in German culture.   The impact of the humanist center of self and one’s property was now evolving into the romantic notion of the aesthetic of poetry.  The floodgate of the enlightenment era searched for ways to authenticate the emotional nature of humankind and did so in its celebration of what they could no longer identify as, but tried to identify with—the “old and wild peoples” (39).  They had become so much a part of their own invention as men of reason, it seems to me they lost their nation-essence.

Therefore, the search for self as a genuine human being continues onto the shores of someone else’s home in what Europeans call the New World.  They proceed cloaked in the intent of executing the primary objectives of the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian ethics, proselytizing the agenda of rational men directed by God.  The fascinating thing about the European search for authenticity is their need to destroy the authentic in order to somehow absorb through its death the authentic essence and then reclaim it as a European prize. 

“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man.” (Nature Chapter II-Commodity).  

Indeed, the elements of nature as a pedagogical force were assumed and appropriated as material gains by the Euro-American.  His definition of the First Nations of people was one of contrivance via grand arrogance and disdain.  The magnificence of Indigenous civilizations that existed throughout the pre-Americas was negated to the point of near extinction and to acknowledge humankind as the rightful heirs of this continent Emerson had to refer to them as “children”, “wild”, “savage”.  As much as man wanted to reclaim authenticity, he was at constant odds with its connotation.  At best, he created impoverished mock-ups from appropriations of some of the very same ideas he was responsible for extinguishing.  To coin Gerald Vizenor—Emerson, Boas and so many others, rather than achieve the claim to authenticating humankind exercised their “manifest mannerisms” in the simulation of the very thing they were accomplices in destroying.