Ralph Waldo Emerson

This short poem is an Emersonian interpretation of the Hindu concept.

Many commentators have claimed that Nietzsche views the “sublimation” (Sublimierung) of drives as a positive achievement. Against this tradition, I argue that, on the dominant if not universal Nietzschean use of Sublimierung and its cognates, sublimation is just a broad psychological analogue of the traditional (al)chemical process: the “vaporization” of drives into a finer or lighter state, figuratively if not literally. This can yield ennobling elevation, or purity in a positive sense—the intensified “sublimate” of an unrefined original sample. But it (...) can also yield drives that are attenuated or otherworldly, in a pejorative sense. One (but only one) kind of Nietzschean sublimation is the “translation” of drives to “imaginative and spiritual” (Imaginative und Seelische) modes of expression. I con­clude that, despite certain appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche ultimately values basic drives’ powerful expression, without preferring either that this occur specifically as “higher culture” or as “savage” natural impulse. (shrink)

With its poetic and highly paratactic style and its reliance on the essay form Emerson’s program, I believe, is best captured with the expression ‘speculative pragmatism’. I will attempt to give this expression some consistency. The trajectory I have chosen for this task is as follows: I will begin with considerations concerning the fundamental relation between metaphysics and aesthetics for Emerson, then move on to the more specific relation between aesthetics and the work of art with literature as its prime (...) example, and end with some thoughts on the relation between art and ethics. What emerges at the end of this trajectory is an understanding of art as the primary means of metaphysical inquiry apt to disclose the fundamental nature of Being. In Emerson’s romantic-idealist framework, such ontological disclosure at the same time amounts to the unearthing of the ethical injunction to attune oneself to the Idea. Emerson’s speculative pragmatism accordingly preaches ‘the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life’. The primary site of such practice, that is, the paradigmatic speculative pragmatist enterprise is precisely art; hence the form that Emerson’s writings take. (shrink)

This paper offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group's philosophizing in order to illuminate characteristic features that may still resonate in today's philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual (...) authors. These philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. American philosophers suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life. (shrink)

This essay argues that Montaigne and Emerson share not only a literary style and a form of skepticism, but also a moral project, namely—to borrow a concept from Charles Taylor—the affirmation of ordinary life. Moreover, Montaigne and Emerson approach this project in fundamentally the same way: rather than offering readers discursive arguments, they attempt to reform readers’ imaginations. Finally, recognizing the poetic nature of their respective affirmations of ordinary life allows us to appreciate how their seemingly dogmatic claims regarding human (...) equality and the human good are compatible with their shared form of skepticism. (shrink)

As environmental concerns rightly take a greater role in the critical reevaluation of the American philosophical tradition, it behooves us to return again to the often slippery notion of “nature” to ask if it can be redeemed as not merely the canvas on which human endeavor is depicted but an active element of the diverse and distinct philosophical perspectives that make the tradition. Indeed, there is a great need to depict the potentially subversive ways that human and nature can be (...) understood as radically connatural, in intimate ecological and constructive relations that make nature not just the instrument for the exertion for human wants and desires but also thoroughly and... (shrink)

This study aims to highlight some major aspects of Emersonian skepticism while at the same time showing their deep links with the philosophy of Montaigne. In doing so, it does not rely solely on the well-known essay “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic” (1850), but it tries to articulate its content and other works of Emerson, in order to enrich and refine the moral and anthropological meanings of his skeptical attitude.

This article examines Stanley Cavell's method of reading Emerson—and finds it wanting in rigor and fidelity to the original. Though Cavell declares himself to be among those who "care about the Emersonian text," who are "concerned to preserve the order of words of the Emersonian text," there is a substantial amount of evidence that this is not always the case. A close reading of Cavell's readings of Emerson reveals a pattern of misconstrual and misquotation whose effect is to strip away (...) the "otherness" of Emerson's words and further the project of refashioning him as a secular, skeptical, postmetaphysical thinker. (shrink)

This text is a review of Joseph Urbas's Emerson's Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (Lexington Books, 2016). In this book, Urbas proposes a reconstruction of the metaphysics of the American poet, essayist, and self-defined philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Urbas, Emerson has a coherent metaphysics, the fundamental principle of which is the category of causation. Reacting to David Hume, Emerson would have deliberately emphasized causation, connection, relation, tie, link, and so on. Emerson is thus characterized as a (...) "causationist" and his philosophy is considered a "causationism." Urbas also argues — against other prevalent interpretations — that Emerson's philosophy is part of the New England "ontological turn" and that it is best understood as a "metaphysical realism" of both particulars and universals alike. I examine these lines of argumentation and propose a couple of critical remarks concerning Emerson's relations to Goethe and Francis Ellingwood Abbot. (shrink)

This book proposes an original philosophy of nature, contributes to our understanding of two of America’s greatest philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles S. Peirce, and examines the philosophical expressions of the art of nineteenth-century American landscape painting.

Conventional wisdom concerning the intellectual relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s first public intellectual, and William James, arguably Emerson’s greatest philosophical progeny, has tended to follow a path of invidious comparison. “Literary critics admit his philosophy and deny his literature,” John Dewey notes in characterizing this tendency in an address delivered during the Emerson centenary celebrations in 1903. “And if philosophers extol his keen, calm art and speak with some depreciation,” he adds, “it also is perhaps because Emerson knew something (...) deeper than our conventional definitions”. In more recent decades, critics in both philosophy and literary studies, rather than... (shrink)

This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Joseph Urbas proposes an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also the life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself—the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change.

Although short, Espen Dahl has written a book that truly delivers on its title: it clearly, concisely, and powerfully shows Cavell’s frequent and deep links to and engagements with religion and religious themes and with Continental philosophy. While both of these strands have been explored piecemeal by scholars, Dahl’s innovation consists in the detail with which he can engage these themes and the position he is able to carve out. That position is one that sees Cavell’s thought “as essentially open (...) to theology or religion more generally” . Dahl is the first—as far I know—to extensively pursue all of Cavell’s major themes in this context. This is quite an accomplishment, and something for which he ought to be commended. Dahl has also written a highly accessible book on Cavell, and yet one which in no way “waters down” or dilutes Cavell’s thinking. There ought to be more books of this kind on .. (shrink)

Emerson’s adoration of Plato began early in his life, and it hardly waned as he ages. His habit of regularly reading Platonic dialogues began before he matriculated at Harvard, and in 1822, at the age of nineteen, he concluded that Plato possessed two important characteristics: “intimate familiarity with the profoundest principles of philosophy, and at the same time a power to express them with the most perfect simplicity”. Emerson’s fascination with the connection between ideas and expression in Plato persists long (...) after his time at Harvard. Just as he launches his career as a lecturer, Emerson immerses himself in a fervent examination of Plato’s work. Library lending records indicate that Emerson.. (shrink)

While acknowledging a certain affinity between his own thought and the Vedanta concept of a world-soul or universal spirit, Josiah Royce nevertheless locates this concept primarily in what he terms the Second Conception of Being—Mysticism. In his early magnum opus, The World and the Individual, Royce utilizes aspects of the Upanishads in order to flesh out his picture of the mystical understanding of and relationship to being. My primary concern in the present investigation is to introduce some nuance into Royce’s (...) conception of Indian thought, which may then serve to suggest similar possibilities for nuance for Royce’s conception of the Absolute. I will attempt to do in two primary ways: first, I will consider Royce’s use of Indian thought via the Upanishads in explicating his second historical conception of Being. I will then turn briefly to Emerson’s poem ‘Brahma’ and the Bhagavad Gita to see if a certain reversal that occurs in both places problematizes Royce’s depiction of the universal spirit in Indian thought as well as opens up new possibilities for Royce’s own Absolute. (shrink)

Flush with the juices of adolescence, American philosophy declared independence from its European parentage in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his generation. In 1837, Emerson addressed the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society on the occasion of its inaugural meeting for the year, which he called a “holiday.” Emerson began: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength (...) or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and .. (shrink)

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking essay Nature, he wrote, “The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process.”1 This moral quality of nature is embedded in its very core—the stems of plants and the interior of bones—the very places where the transactions that give life take place. And it goes out, like the light of the sun and the stars, to the (...) farthest reaches of the universe. But how did Emerson interpret this book of Nature to which he turned in his religious imagination? While Emerson is often read as a secularizing force in American society, the American liberal religious traditions that .. (shrink)

Recent scholarly comment on the relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James offers an either–or choice between conflating the two thinkers in a proto-postmodern, antifoundationalist cast or dividing them into mutually exclusive categories of idealist believer and relativist skeptic. Contending that neither of these positions captures the pragmatist adumbrations in Emerson or the transcendentalist retentions in James, this essay turns to James's annotations of Emerson's writings as a singularly revealing yet largely neglected source of information about the exact nature (...) of the Emerson–James connection. This evidence points to a pluralistic and distinctly literary formulation of intuitive insight as the key for opening up the Emerson–James relation and for framing it with a precision hitherto missing in discussions of these thinkers. The balance of the essay presents an analytic overview of the various aspects and implications of Emerson's and James's ideas of intuition. Combining doubt and belief, skepticism and faith, realism and idealism, a particular formulation of intuition is the answer that Emerson and James both offer to the problem of modernity—the problem of locating a source of value that is both of the self and beyond the self. (shrink)

By focusing on the thought of Classical American philosophers, this article addresses the existential problem of the fear of death. Drawing on the experiences and philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Jane Addams as a theoretical framework, a prescriptive claim regarding how to confront human mortality is advanced. It is suggested that embracing the notion of experience as a prelude to the disaster of death can be – despite appearances to the contrary – a useful approach to navigating (...) exigencies connected with mortality and, in particular, fear of death. The essay contributes to a small but growing body of literature on the topic of death in American philosophy scholarship, while addressing a perennial problem receiving treatment in contemporary popular discourse. (shrink)

The book traces connections between the literary experiments of Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Henry James, and the emergence of classical American pragmatism.

This article investigates the relationship between moral judgments, fallibility, and imaginative insight. It will draw heavily from the canon of classical American philosophy, the members of which (from Ralph Waldo Emerson, to C.S. Peirce, E.L. Cabot, to Jane Addams, to John Dewey) took up this relationship as pivotally important in moral theorizing. It argues that the process of hypothesis formation—characterized as “insight” by Emerson and extended by Peirce in his notion of “abduction”—is a necessary condition of moral progress for it (...) allows individuals to think through the boundaries of social and ethical life. In a world of unexpected occurrences and uncertainty, the ability to generate novel explanatory frameworks and normative ideals is a crucial, if normally underappreciated, moral faculty. This paper attempts to respond to this relative neglect. (shrink)

Emerson 's philosophical rehabilitation, begun in the late 1970s, has neglected an important branch of his thought: his metaphysics. Revisionist interpretations have generally followed Stanley Cavell's anti-metaphysical lead, privileging process and pluralism to the exclusion of any ultimate grounding principle. Russell Goodman's work takes Emerson scholarship in a new direction less hostile to metaphysics. His reading of Emerson 's "Nominalist and Realist" attempts to balance the principles of change and permanence, albeit in "unstable" alternation. What Goodman calls instability I call (...) synthesis or "bi-polarity," made possible by a metaphysical doctrine whose core principle is universal causation. Emerson 's "causationism" openly embraces both Nominalism and Realism as true to opposite poles of the same causal and ontological continuum—that of reality itself. (shrink)

First published in Essays: Second Series in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” has long been considered an enigmatic touchstone of the Emersonian corpus. This essay seems to point to many difficult—and key—questions as to the aims and implications of Emerson’s literary style, intellectual methods, and philosophical inquiries. Conventionally viewed as evidence of a hinge in Emerson’s intellectual development from youthful innocence to middle-aged experience, this essay has often been understood as an arena for the contestation of Emersonian ideas about self-reliance, (...) philosophical idealism, and self-knowledge; as with ancient gladiatorial spectacles, not all of these ideas may walk out of the arena alive.1 .. (shrink)

This essay explores Emerson’s reflections on self-reliance with particular reference to Emerson’s understanding of the concept of self-reliance, his view of ‘conformity’ as the major obstacle to self-reliance, and the moral significance of his thought. The essay is based on the premise that Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance, self-reference and self-responsibility has a relevance and an application to our contemporary lives which are often conducted through subtle shades of compliance and acquiescence to popular opinion and prevailing fashions of thought and behaviour.

Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought.

American transcendentalism is essentially a kind of practice by which the world of facts and the categories of common sense are temporarily exchanged for the world of ideas and the categories of imagination. The point of this exchange is to make life better by lifting us above the conflicts and struggles that weigh on our souls. As these chains fall away, our souls rise to heightened experiences of freedom and union with the good. Emerson and Thoreau are the two most (...) significant nineteenth century proponents of American transcendentalism. (shrink)

In the practice of education and educational reforms today ‘meritocracy’ is a prevalent mode of thinking and discourse. Behind political and economic debates over the just distribution of education benefits, other kinds of philosophical issues, concerning the question of democracy, await to be addressed. As a means of evoking a language more subtle than what is offered by political and economic solutions, I shall discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of perfectionism, particularly his ideas of the ‘gleam of light’ and ‘genius’, (...) as an alternative mode of thinking of human power. Through this Emersonian lens, a provocative shift will be made from meritocracy and ‘mediocracy’ to aristocracy. Emersonian aristocracy destabilizes balanced measures and prevailing discourse about fairness and justice, and makes us reconsider how to achieve a just society in democracy. As an educational implication, I shall propose the idea of citizenship without inclusion—a vision of education for a democratic society in which we learn to live as and with the Great Man. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's appropriation of the Stoic tradition occupied a central and enduring place in his worldview, as is abundantly clear from his essays, poems, and journals. Just as clearly, like other modern thinkers and writers influenced by Stoicism as "perennial philosophy," Emerson interpreted what he learned within a historical framework shaped by Christianity, liberalism, and democracy as well as by influences particular to his own thought and his personal experience. In my paper I will briefly review the main ideas (...) of ancient Stoicism, consider the changes introduced by modern versions of the Stoic tradition, and then indicate what ideas Emerson specifically appropriated and what role they played in his .. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century American literature and culture-indeed, this collection argues, in the history of philosophy. The Other Emerson is a thorough reassessment of the philosophical underpinnings, theoretical innovations, and ethical and political implications of the prose writings of one of America's most enduring thinkers. Considering Emerson first and foremost as a daring and original thinker, _The Other Emerson_ focuses on three Emersonian subjects-subjectivity, the political, and the nature of philosophy-and range in (...) topic from Emerson's relationships to slavery and mourning to his place in the development of Romanticism as reread by contemporary systems theory. It is Emerson's appreciation of truth's instability that link him to the European philosophical tradition. Contributors: Eduardo Cadava, Princeton U; Sharon Cameron, Johns Hopkins U; Russell B. Goodman, U of New Mexico; Paul Grimstad, Yale U; Eric Keenaghan, U at Albany, SUNY; Gregg Lambert, Syracuse U; Sandra Laugier, Université de Picardie Jules Verne; Donald Pease, Dartmouth College. (shrink)

In Memories and Portraits: Explorations in American Thought, H. G. Callaway embeds his distinctive contextualism and philosophical pluralism within strands of history and autobiography, spanning three continents. Starting in Philadelphia, and reflecting on the meaning of home in American thought, he offers a philosophically inspired narrative of travel and explorations, in Europe and Africa, illuminating central elements of American thought—partly out of diverse foreign and domestic reactions and fascinating cultural contrasts. -/- This book is of interest for the contemporary interplay (...) of analytic philosophy with American pragmatism and for those focused on the interaction of European and Anglo-American thought and society. In this book, the formalism of analytic philosophy encounters a logically articulate version of the contextualism implicit in the pragmatist tradition; and a deep and abiding interest in natural science is augmented by a more literary account of the social and cultural contexts of inquiry—encountered in many years of travel and life abroad. The final chapter, employing a methodological naturalism, brings the perspectives and lessons, from near and far, back home for renewed reflection. (shrink)

Here it is shown that 'vacant nature' is deployed as sign in Anglo-American landscape representation of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to support a Cartesian imaginary of spatial extension. The referent of this imaginary is variously denoted as 'America' (John Locke), the 'north west' (Jefferson), the 'wilderness' (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the 'frontier' (Frederick Jackson Turner) but throughout it is essentially the same 'vacant' landscape; its function is to produce a site and space of appearance for an imperial self, an (...) isolate pursuing self-extension through commodity production and consumption. This spatial representation—the predecessor of the abstract space of shopping malls, interstates, commercial advertising, global markets, office buildings, and suburbs—is contrasted with 'place,' a space shaped by topography, collective memory, and ecological constraint. (shrink)

This article argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson employs metempsychosis (reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul into successive bodies) as a figurative template for human consciousness. Mapping various traditions from Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism onto the vastness of the geological and biological records, Emerson translates metaphysics for modernity: he depicts the soul's journey through the chronological sequence of history as a poetic process that culminates in a tenuous form of self-knowledge.

Two years after the death of his small son, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote of the experience, "I cannot get it nearer to me" (CW 3:29). Most readers have been troubled by this remark, reading it as a sign that Emerson's relationship to grief and even to his son was disturbingly oblique, and the predominant response has been that it demonstrates he was detached, cold, and disconnected in the service of his transcendental philosophy.1 Such a response is grounded in the (...) tacit assumption that philosophy seems to be, or to call for, some intellectually grounded transcendence of the personal, whether the personal is whimsical or fatal. Emerson himself worried at times that he was too cold, too intellectual, even as .. (shrink)

Selections from Emerson's copious journals, 1820-1842.

Introduction to the symposia on Pragmatism and Perfectionism appered on the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2 issue 2, 2010.

The paper aims to present and defend Cavell’s reading of moral perfectionism as an alternative political approach. For several decades, Stanley Cavell has been working to make Emerson’s voice reheard in the core of American philosophy. This activity, though, is not simply historical rehabilitation. What appears very clearly in, e.g., his 2003 collection Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, but as early as in the 1990 work Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, is that Cavell also wants to make heard the present-day political pertinence of (...) Emerson’s thinking and conception of democracy. Cavell wants to criticize either the interpretation of Emerson’s tonality which would make him a precursor of liberal individualism, or a precursor of progressive rhetoric, à la Dewey. Cavell has given himself the task of clearly differentiating Emerson from these trends. The author wants to show, however, that transcendentalism and pragmatism together as inheritors of Emerson’s voice allow us to rediscover something essential to democracy: possession of one’s voice – a question equally at the heart of Emerson’s philosophy, under the form of our capacity to speak, to stand up and speak, for oneself or for others as the very demand to trust oneself, which Cavell later calls the “arrogation of voice”. (shrink)

This lively volume explores the theme of friendship in the lives and works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

What is properly Emersonian about moral perfectionism? Perhaps the best answer is: not much. Stanley Cavell's signature concept, which claims close kinship to Emerson's ethical philosophy, seems upon careful examination to be rather far removed from it. Once we get past the broad, unproblematic appeals to Emerson's “unattained but attainable self,” and consider the specific content and implications of perfectionism, the differences between the two thinkers become too substantive – and too fraught with serious misunderstandings – to be ignored. It (...) is above all Cavell's complete disregard for the Emersonian “moral sentiment” that jeopardizes his claim to be a continuator of Emerson's legacy in ethical philosophy. I would not deny that Cavell's own work stands as an extraordinary contribution to contemporary ethics. Nor would I dispute his title as the living philosopher who has done more than any other to restore Emerson to his rightful place in the history of American philosophy, as a thinker worthy of the highest consideration. Still less would I discount the boldness and originality of Cavell's readings of Emerson. What I am contesting, rather, is the propriety of attaching the label “Emersonian” to the notion of perfectionism, especially in view of its strong anti-metaphysical bias. The Emerson canon provides ample grounds for rejecting Cavell's claim as largely unsubstantiated and in a number of crucial ways inconsistent with the moral sentiment's firm grounding of ethics in ontology. (shrink)

This is my review of D.W. Howe's 2007 book, What Hath God Wrought, Transformation of America 1815-1848. The book is a volume in the new Oxford History of the U.S.(O.U.P. 2007)--exploring the transformation of the early American republic through the period of domination of the Jacksonian Democrats. This is also the period of the New England Renaissance and the early work of R.W. Emerson. Howe devotes a good deal of attention to Emerson and his influence and thereby provides needed historical (...) context for the understanding of American thought. (shrink)

In his meditation on Emerson's self-reliance, George Kateb argues that Emerson's entrance into antislavery politics, particularly his calls for collective mobilization, constitutes a “deviation from his theory of self-reliance, not its transformation.” Though Emerson often imagines a self-reliance that can lead to action, his descriptions of the fundamental attitude of the self towards the world suggest passivity, attention, and waiting. Because he rules out logical or teleological sources for inspiration, his conception of self-reliance is fundamentally at odds with progressivist narratives (...) of history. His sense of “entranced waiting” flirts with an anarchic potentiality that he must reject in order to call for social solidarity and progressive action against slavery. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville takes the radical outsidedness of self-reliance to its conclusion, transforming Emersonian waiting into Bartleby's catatonic stillness. Emerson's waiting for inspiration becomes the copyist's quiet demand that his employer wait with him rather than use charitable actions to free himself from the burden Bartleby imposes. Bartleby obstructs the lawyer's ideas of improvement as well as his conception of himself as a moral agent in a world of moral possibility. Simone Weil provides a similar version of a quietist waiting with. To an ungenerous “active searching” she opposes a fundamental generosity, a “waiting or attentive and faithful immobility” through which one is able to recognize “that the sufferer exists.” For Weil, as for Melville, there is no passage from such a recognition to a conception of history as progress. The sufferer is not a problem to be solved within a narrative of social improvement but the source of an unlimited and impossible obligation. (shrink)