Online research in philosophy

Edited by Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, this book presents the first comprehensive and authoritative collection of Emerson’s writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians—writings that reveal Emerson’s deep commitment to social reform. Included are speeches and lectures that have never before been published or collected in any other edition of Emerson’s writings.

The opening essay of Emerson’s 1860 book, The Conduct of Life, posed, in that fateful year of threatening Civil War and disunion, the philosophical problem of human freedom and fate. The essay “Fate” is followed in the present book by a series of essays on related themes, including: “Power,” “Wealth,” “Culture,” “Worship,” “Beauty” and “Illusions.” The central question of the volume is, “How shall I live?” Appreciating both our freedom and its limits, we understand the vitality of power to acquire what wealth is needed to scale the corrections and heights of culture and worship, find beauty in life and human society, wary still of the illusions. Overall, the book is a call for creative solutions. Yet the nation, in the year of Abraham Lincoln’s election, seemed fated to war or disunion in spite of all its dedication to freedom.

This new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Society and Solitude reproduces the original 1870 edition—only updating nineteenth-century prose spellings. Emerson’s text is fully annotated to identify the authors and issues of concern in the twelve essays, and definitions are provided for selected words in Emerson’s impressive vocabulary. The work aims to facilitate a better understanding of Emerson’s late philosophy in relation to his sources, his development and his subsequent influence.

Callaway’s intention, as he states in his Foreword, is to contextualize Emerson’s thought historically and so to help readers see that Emerson is not just an essayist and idealist poet but also an important philosopher whose later thought has been neglected. Emerson’s most familiar texts are probably some of his earliest, like Nature, “Self-Reliance,” the Divinity School Address, and other Transcendentalist texts Emerson wrote in the 1830s and 1840s. Arguably, the texts that Emerson produced in the subsequent three decades are both more mature and more philosophically important. As Callaway suggests in his Introduction, the later Emerson may have overcome his earlier Transcendentalism, at least if we understand his Transcendentalism as a reaction against materialism and its attendant political concerns. The essay in the Conduct of Life are, as the title suggests, concerned with the material conditions of our life and with the tug-of-war that goes on as we are pulled between them and the universal Ideal. This same tug-of-war of “double consciousness” is present in his earlier texts, certainly, but in this later text it receives a different treatment. These texts were written in the years leading up to the Civil War, and they are consciously marked with the stamp of the societal questions that were coming to a boil in American as Emerson wrote.

Summing up, Society and Solitude needs re-reading, and the newly published edition, beautifully edited by H. G. Callaway, and provided with notes, philosophical commentaries, historical contextualization, indexes, bibliography, and Introduction—will serve the reader well with a better understanding of the original text and help us to apply Emerson’s ideas with reference to philosophical and Pragmatic considerations.

Howard Callaway's new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Society and Solitude is an invaluable contribution to both the primary and secondary literature on Emerson. Its contribution to the primary sources is its use of the original 1870 edition of Emerson's text, though with modernized spellings to facilitate the reader's understanding. Its contribution to the secondary literature consists in the scholarly apparatus of page-by-page annotations, an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Callaway's Society and Solitude is a worthy companion to his earlier edition of Emerson's The Conduct of Life.

This work is Emerson's set of essays published in 1860 just before the start of the Civil War: 'Fate,' 'Power,' 'Wealth,' 'Culture,' 'Behavior,' 'Worship,' 'Considerations by the Way,' 'Beauty,' 'Illusions.'.

In the last few years H.G. Callaway has produced several helpful editions of some important texts by Emerson. Emerson's Conduct of Life was originally published in 1860, and it has appeared in a number of editions since then, but Callaway's edition has several noteworthy features that cause it to stand out from the crowd and make it an important contribution to Emerson studies. This is a rare volume that will serve students, academic philosophers, and causal readers alike: a critical edition of a less-familiar text that is attractive to ordinary readers without sacrificing scholarly rigor.

My new edition of Emerson's Conduct, modernizes the prose spelling, annotates the text and adds a short chronology, a bibliography foused on Emerson's sources, a new Introduction, and a comprehensive index. Available in HB and PB.