The Works of Emerson, Ralph Waldo

8/8/2019 The Works of Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

a cura di B. Soressi

[email protected]

Quaderno Filosofi & ClassiciSWIF

Sito Web Italiano per la Filosofia

www.swif.it


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B. Soressi Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quaderno Filosofi & Classici

SWIF - Sito Web Italiano per la Filosofia - www.swif.it2

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston 1803 - Concord 1882), was the fourth son of a Unitarian

pastor.

After losing his father in 1811, he studied at the Boston Public Latin School and

received his degree from Harvard College in 1821. Then he taught in the schools for

young ladies, where he remained until his entrance in the Harvard Divinity School,

from which he received his MA in 1827. Two years later he became junior pastor and

married Ellen Tucker, who died of tuberculosis only two years later. This coincides with

Emersons first important crisis, which ends with his resignations as pastor and with his

long trip to Europe, beginning from Malta and Sicily up to England. Develops a

friendship with Carlyle and meets Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Once came back to the Usa, in 1834 he begins a long career as lecturer. In the

following year he moves to a country house in Concord. He marries Lydia Jackson

(1802-92), who bears him five children. In 1838 he reads in public an appeal of the

Cherokees, who have been removed from Georgia, and pleads the same case also

through a severe letter to the Usa president Van Buren.

In 1840 comes out the first issue ofThe Dial, the transcendentalist review, which

Emerson will direct in 1842. In this year H.D. Thoreau begins to live in Emersons

house as a general handyman and a paternal figure during his friends long conference

tours. E. looks with a detached sympathy at the many experiments of communitarian

life of his time, such as the neo-Pythagorean community of his friend A.B. Alcott. He

declines the invitation to participate to Brook Farm, another famous commune. In

1843 he speaks in public his anti-slavery position, which leads him to risk his safety

during a discourse of 1861. In 1866 he receives a honoris causa doctorate at the

Harvard College, where he lectures the following year. In 1873 he is in Europe again.

The Sermons

In 1826 E. pronounces the first of his 171 Sermons, works in which, among many

ingenuities, one can notice an impressive open-mindedness on theological issues and

penetrating anticipations of his future thinking. The last sermon is The Lords Supper

(1832): here he presents his resignations as pastor, after offering a symbolistic

interpretation of the dogma of transubstantiation and after arguing against the traditional


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conception (assimilated by the Unitarians) of the consecrated bread and wine as Christs

body. Jesus is essentially seen as the supreme model of the educator, and he is spoiled

of any exclusive divine clothing. There emerges an idea of Christian spirituality as

freedom and as an invitation to live in love, opening oneself to thepossible rituals and

forms of life, and without stiffing in specific forms or rigid institutions.

Nature (1836)

In these years E., who already in Paris is fascinated by theJardin des plantes and

the Muse des sciences, enthusiastically reads the theorist of sciences and astronomer

Herschel, and writes natural history essays, essays on English literature, and

biographies. In 1836 comes out, anonymous, Nature, a little systematic treatise which is

central in the landscape of American Transcendentalism, that is a philosophical current

which in E,s and Thoreaus versions one can see as a sort of existentialism which has

pragmatist as much as idealistic and prophetic ramifications. Nature begins with an

explicit critique of post-hegelian historicism and of every retrospective attitude; a

critique that he will further develop in the following essays and which one can find

almost without consistent variations, in Nietzsches second Untimely Meditation. The

other critique, directed against forms of paltry empiricism (in E.s words), such as the

Humean ones, underlies the will to realize a form of thinking which can inspire the

future thinkers and which can invite the, to an experimental and a thinking-poietic

attitude toward life. This is also a sort of transfiguration of the famous bet of Pascal(whose Thoughts E. read already when 9 years old). If one follows this thread, and the

persistent reference of life to writing and vice versa, one would reach and without any

consistent gap to the poetical pragmatism ofNietzsche and Heidegger. In fact, these

are all distinctive traits of E.s following works. The main idea is that of preparing the

textual and spiritual soil for the coming of a future Thinker-Poet (elsewhere called

Reformer, Individual, and, as in the following paragraph, American Scholar).

The American Scholar(1837) andDivinity School Address (1838)These two essays are the fruit of years of fervid studies in education, in the

philosophy of culture and in philosophical anthropology (concentrated into a consistent

number of essays which perhaps would be worthwhile to reconsider). The essay of 1837

is the elaboration of an homonymous conference held at Harvard and defined by O.W.


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Holmes as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. Readers and scholars of any

sort are invited to build from the foundations a new authentically American culture, and

to free themselves from the eagerness to imitate at any cost the European models.

Moreover, it is suggested Gramscian ideal of a total, organic intellectual, one who can

unite both thinking and acting. The scholar must be rather than a reader of books an

observer of reality, of even the most ordinary and humble everydayness. The essay of

1838 draws a certainly not new image, but one which is still, in its extreme simplicity,

scandalous for theologians and conservatives: that of a Jesus as teacher-democratizer

of the divine status, one who teaches to each and all how to become those divine beings

that they potentially are. What is denied is the idea that the regal privileges of the divine

status would belong only to Jesus Christ or any other divinized being. This claim for an

exclusive divine status is seen as the base of the universal decay and now almost death

of faith in society.

Essays, I series (1841)

TheEssays represent one of the richest and most mature works of E. Self-Reliance

is the center of E.s thinking and not wrongly his most famous essay: it is the modern

version of the ancient Socratic and Stoic credo in the individual, in the resources of the

soul, and in a mind, or soul, which is at once individual and universal. This implies the

need to express, or at least to carefully follow, our latent conviction, our rejectedthoughts, even those that we would consider as most stupid or insignificant. Hence it

follows the option for the wandering writing style of Montaigne, the one philosopher

that E. feels as most next to him. It is an intermediate form between aphorism and

treatise, that is the Essay. So E. abandonsNatures residual systematical purposes, and

relies more and more on his Journals, that may be considered as the foundation of his

philosophical work, as they contain many cardinal intuitions which will appear first in

the lectures, and finally in the published works. In the Journals one can find personal

intuitions and observations beside quotations and translations that go from Goethe toNovalis, from Milton to Coleridge, from Plato to Plutarch and Plotinus, to Swedenborg,

from Vedic and Classical Indian thought to Confucian thought, to Persian poets, to

Trascendentalists such as Sampson Reed or that aunt of him, Mary Moody E., who has

also been a fundamental parental figure for E.


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In Self-Reliance and Circles it is evident a particular mode of thinking, which

Stanley Cavell calls aversive thinking, and which is a thinking and a theory of

individuation through a self-education to abandonment. This implies a perfectionist

ethics and the acceptation of forms of external inconsistency below which, however,

there is the consistent rout of a character, of a personality. These two essays express

what is perhaps the most radical thesis of intellectual non-conformism ever expressed

before Nietzsche. But in E. the somehow Nietzschean harshness is inscribed into a

clearly democratic attitude, which is therefore distinct from that of the German

philosopher both because less resented and less obsessed by its polemical targets, and

because E. never worries too much about setting hierarchies, and never makes

distinctions between classes of men unreachably superior and other classes of incurably

degenerate subjects. Each one is different because each one participates in his own way

of the common-wealth of humanity. But all are potentially equal because they can

participate of this patrimony, of this common-wealth. Even us, as Dewey did, can so

discover in E. a sort of American Nietzsche who is a stimulating educator in a

democratic society.

In History E. invokes the need to join together individual life and universal

history. He invites us to read history while identifying ourselves with the men of the

past and empathically, with our imagination, re-living their lives to the point of

overcoming space and time. History is, first of all, the product of single human lives andof what is universal in them. For this reason it has to be a mean of discovery of what the

universal that unites us, and therefore a mean of discovery not only of what has been,

but also of what we all are and can be in the future.

What results is an amor fati that had been expressed through a sentence which is

also Nietzsches quotation-homage to E. (title page ofTheGay Science): To the poet,

to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable,

all days holy, all men divine.

Intellectsheds light on two pre-Heideggerian aspects of Emersons philosophy: anemotional theory of knowing and a conception of thinking as a pious reception

(something already present in Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul). Compensation and

Spiritual Laws illustrate part of E.s vision of ethics and justice, which is founded on a

supposed omni-present and inviolable order of nature. Here is evident a compensatory


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anthropological theory: man is seen as a being who acquires new arts, and loses old

instincts.

Essays, II series (1844)

The Poetpresents a prophetology marked by a democratic attitude which seems to

imply already the work of Whitman (who attended the homonymous lecture), and

suggests a theory of social transformation through poetry. In a re-reading of Platos

Myth of the Cave, Emersons Poet is seen as a liberating god and the one who can

realize the ideal of philosophical, scientific, and poetic revolution that is promoted in

Circles.

The sense of the possibility of a scientific-cultural revolution is even stronger in

the reader of Experience, which is considered as the height of the Emersonian

skepticism. E. presents here an epistemological theory which levels the aspirations of

the previous epistemologies and opposes the previous conceptions of empiricism,

which tend to flatten on a poor form of experience such as the merely sensorial one (v.

Nature, 1836). The image of human experience becomes more complicated; to the point

that we become spectators of a proliferation of the criteria of knowledge, which are no

longer limited to Aristoteles or Kant categories. As with Heidegger, the moods and

other aspects of reality (such as surprise) come into play. These constitute criteria of

knowledge of the world, a way through which a world can reveal itself to us.

Representative Men (1850)

This collection of essays shows in a first instance, what could be the scope and

goal of our knowing the works and the life of the great men: they are worth not so

much in that they are exemplars we have to servilely imitate, but as they are stimulating

figures because representative of the potential inside each human being: Plato will

speak to the Plato that is in us, and analogously Shakespeare, and so on. One needs to

put himself in dialogue with these voices, but he also needs to use them well, avoidingbeing subjected by their authoritative influence.


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The Conduct of Life (1860)

After the Essays, I and II series, this is the collection of essays that deals most

directly with anthropologic-philosophical themes, and, according to some studies, it is

one of the works that mostly inspired Nietzsche. In it there is an emphasized pragmatic

and ethical instance, a more realistic approach which also implies a more open

confrontation with the civilization of E.s own time. Emerson is here ever more oriented

toward the foundation of a philosophy of the conduct of life centred on a culture of non-

conformity and very high ethical ideals (for example, the essay Worship, which insists

on the absolute priority of the ethico-moral quality of existence, at intervals seems to be

a modern re-writing of Platos Gorgias). In Fate E. attempts to find the points of

convergence between human freedom and determinism, and, in a more or less direct

way, deals with the problem of slavery as a historical fact. In Powerhe underlines the

importance of vital energy and of the sentiment of power as a criterion of validity, and

in Wealth he extends these themes to that of economic power.

Society and Solitude (1870) andNatural History of the Intellect

The first volume contains the homonymous essay, one of the best essays of the

later E., which portrays an individual who is divided between an indispensable but

fatal society and a liberating but impracticable solitude. In Domestic Life he

sketches a philosophy of the house and a thinking of hospitality. In 1870 E. heldlectures at Harvard (beside teachers of the caliber of C.S. Peirce who declared himself

somehow indebted to, though critic of - Transcendntalism). These are known asNatural

History of the Intellect. Here E. originally intended to propose the transcendentalist

study of mind on philosophically and scientifically rigorous bases (a kind of study

which could already be found in Kant and in German Idealists such as Schelling and

Hegel,

an author whom E. read through J.B. Stallos interpretation). E., with this project,

which never completely satisfied him, aimed at rendering himself more respectable inan academic environment while remaining accessible also to the non-specialists. The

result is a refined poetic-psycholoic exercise of analysis of different possible metaphors

of mind, beginning from the idea of the tree, and passing through that of electricity, up

to the psychoanalytic image of the sea, and to images which clearly anticipate William


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James stream of consciousness (James had been much more indebted to E. than he

recognized).

The Last Published Essays

In 1875Letters and Social Aims comes out, collecting essays written in different

periods, such as Poetry and Imagination (where he intends to follow the Provencal

conception of poetry as the gai science), Quotation and Originality (where clearly

emerges both the idea of the social genesis of culture and the tireless attempt to free

oneself from the mere repetition of the others discourse, something Heidegger will call

gossip). In Immortality E. investigates the possibility of conceiving new forms of

intra-worldly immortality.Miscellanies comes out in 1878: it consists of many essays,

including a part of the impressive number of historical, civil and literary addresses held

by Emerson.


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Essential Bibliography on Emerson

Cavell, S., Emerson Transcendental Etudes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. This is a

collection of all the essays written on Emerson by his most profound philosophical

scholar.

Kateb, G., Emerson and Self-Reliance. Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1995. Emersons

democratic individualism.

Richardson, R.,Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley:U of California Press, 1995. The

most up to date biography. And the author is extraordinarily careful about the textual

origin of Emersons thinking.

Stack, G.J.,Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992.

Soressi, B., Ralph Waldo Emerson. Il pensiero e la solitudine. Roma: Armando, 2004.

An introduction to Emersons philosophy through Cavells interpretations and from a

European perspective.

Urbinati, N., Individualismo democratico. Emerson, Dewey e la cultura politica

americana. Roma: Donzelli, 1997.

Whicher, S., Freedom and Fate. An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950. A classical text on Emersons life and works.

Worley, S., Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic. Albany: SUNY

Press, 2001.Book reviewed in SWIF.

The Works of Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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