Abstract

This study situates Emerson's thought within the tradition of American Revolutionary political philosophy, or classical republicanism, and finds Emerson's politics inscribed in his philosophy of nature. It locates the common roots of Emerson's thinking on both nature and politics in his passion for eloquence, and shows how that passion came out of his education in classical literature and oratorical performance. ;Part One, "Classical Education and the Passion for Eloquence," relies primarily on the early Letters, early Journals, and major biographers to show that the secular and civic orientation of Emerson's thought has its biographical-historical origins in his secondary-school and college education and in his participation in a neoclassical New England culture. This highly oratorical culture and the same program of classical study that influenced the Founding Fathers inculcated in Emerson a civic-spirited ethos which included a love of eloquence. ;Part Two, "Public Nature," shows how, in the Early Lectures, the essay Nature, poems, and other writings, Emerson came to his philosophy of nature through his experience of eloquence. He developed a post-metaphysical, pragmatic ontology from the point of view of the poet-orator, on which basis he launched a critique of science and technology. Emerson believed the reasoning of the poet-orator, and hence ordinary language, to be founded on the kosmos of phenomena which appear to ordinary sense-experience unaided by scientific instruments or technological apparatus. In this kosmos and in language, Emerson located the bases of our public nature, where "public nature" is meant in a double sense, referring both to human beings and to nature. Emerson's book Nature describes a phenomenalist theory which leads, not to subjective idealism or solipsism, but to the discovery of the profoundly public nature of human beings. ;Part Three, "Self-Reliance and Classical Republican Political Tradition," turns explicitly to the political vision expressed throughout the Essays and Journals. Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance, far from serving an individualist philosophy in the usual sense of the term, instead describes a political theory consistent with precepts persisting into Emerson's New England culture from the era of the American Revolution. Self-reliance proves to be a variant of the classical republican concept of civic virtue, and unfolds into a theory of political action and power in which every individual is seen to realize him or herself in public action. Like the aged Jefferson, Emerson believed the town or ward to be "the unit of the Republic."