## 1. Chronology of Emerson's Life



1803
Born in Boston to William and Ruth Haskins Emerson.
1811
Father dies, probably of tuberculosis.
1812
Enters Boston Public Latin School
1817
Begins study at Harvard College: Greek, Latin, History, Rhetoric.
1820
Starts first journal, entitled "The Wide World."
1821
Graduates from Harvard and begins teaching at his brother William's school for young ladies in Boston.
1825
Enters Harvard Divinity School.
1829
Marries Ellen Tucker and is ordained minister at Boston's
Second Church.
1831
Ellen Tucker Emerson dies, at age 19.
1832
Resigns position as minister and sails for Europe.
1833
Meets Wordsworth, Coleridge, J. S. Mill, and Thomas
Carlyle. Returns to Boston in November, where he begins a career as a
lecturer.
1834
Receives first half of a substantial inheritance from
Ellen's estate (second half comes in 1837).
1835
Marries Lidian Jackson.
1836
Publishes first book, *Nature*.
1838
Delivers the "Divinity School Address." Protests
relocation of the Cherokees in letter to President Van Buren.
1841
*Essays* published (contains "Self-Reliance,"
"The Over-Soul," "Circles,"
"History").
1842
Son Waldo dies of scarlet fever at the age of 5.
1844
*Essays, Second Series* published (contains "The
Poet," "Experience," "Nominalist and
Realist").
1847-8
Lectures in England.
1850
Publishes *Representative Men* (essays on Plato,
Swedenborg, Montaigne, Goethe, Napoleon).
1851-60
Speaks against Fugitive Slave Law and in support of anti-slavery
candidates in Concord, Boston, New York, Philadelphia.
1856
Publishes *English Traits*.
1860
Publishes *The Conduct of Life* (contains
"Culture" and "Fate").
1867
Lectures in nine western states.
1870
Publishes *Society and Solitude.* Presents sixteen
lectures in Harvard's Philosophy Department.
1872-3
After a period of failing health, travels to Europe, Egypt.
1875
Journal entries cease.
1882
Dies in Concord.

## 2. Major Themes in Emerson's Philosophy


### 2.1 Education



In "The American Scholar," delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa
Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by
nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is
always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature's
variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the
human mind: "the ancient precept, 'Know thyself,'
and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' become at last one
maxim" (CW1: 55). Books, the second component of the
scholar's education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet
much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books --
transferring the "sacredness which applies to the act of
creation...to the record." The proper relation to books is
not that of the "bookworm" or "bibliomaniac,"
but that of the "creative" reader (CW1: 58) who uses books
as a stimulus to attain "his own sight of principles."
Used well, books "inspire...the active soul" (CW1:
56). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value
derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording
such states of the soul. The "end" Emerson finds in nature
is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in "The
Poet," "the production of new individuals,...or the
passage of the soul into higher forms" (CW3:14).



The third component of the scholar's education is action.
Without it, thought "can never ripen into truth" (CW1:
59). Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes
into expressive consciousness. Life is the scholar's
"dictionary" (CW1: 60), the source for what she has to
say: "Only so much do I know as I have lived" (CW1:59).
The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others;
her words, as Emerson puts it, are "are loaded with
life..." (CW1: 59). The scholar's education in
original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to
Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its
goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to
"walk on our own feet" and to "speak our own
minds," he holds, will a nation "for the first time
exist" (CW1: 70).



Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in
"Education," an address he gave in various versions at
graduation exercises in the 1860s. Self-reliance appears in the essay
in his discussion of respect. The "secret of Education,"
he states, "lies in respecting the pupil." It is not for
the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the
pupil to discover "his own secret." The teacher must
therefore "wait and see the new product of Nature" (E:
143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of
encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new
power that is each child's gift to the world. The aim of
education is to "keep" the child's "nature and
arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points"
(E: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns.
Instead of educating "masses," we must educate
"reverently, one by one," with the attitude that
"the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil"
(E: 154).


### 2.2 Process



Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe
is fundamentally in flux and "permanence is but a word of
degrees" (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of "Being,"
Emerson represents it not as a stable "wall" but as a
series of "interminable oceans" (CW3: 42). This
metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no
final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated
in "some more general law presently to disclose itself"
(CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson
describes in "Experience," (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis
on the present throughout his philosophy.



Some of Emerson's most striking ideas about morality and truth
follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or
eternal, all being "initial," (CW2: 187); that truth is a
matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes
in "Intellect," "between truth and repose,"
but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of
genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls "the
newness" (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a "certain
brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the
market, in some place, at some time..." (CW1: 213). This is
an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place
or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life,
Emerson finds, is that one can only "see" certain pictures
once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with
pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.



Emerson's basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis
on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present:
"God is, not was" (CW1:89). In contrast, what Emerson
calls "historical Christianity" (CW1: 82) proceeds
"as if God were dead" (CW1: 84). Even history, which seems
obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the
servant of the present: "The student is to read history actively
and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the
commentary" (CW2: 5).


### 2.3 Morality



Emerson's views about morality are intertwined with his
metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life
has the goal of passing into "higher forms" (CW3:14). The
goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are
all "initial" (CW2: 187). The word "initial"
suggests the verb "initiate," and one interpretation of
Emerson's claim that "all virtues are initial" is
that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as
those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian *junxi*. Emerson
does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the
context in "Circles" where his statement appears he
presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often
must be abandoned rather than developed. "The terror of
reform," he writes, "is the discovery that we must cast
away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same
pit that has consumed our grosser vices" (CW2: 187). The
qualifying phrase "or what we have always esteemed such"
means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to
which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a
virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established
modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to
survey the virtues is the 'new moment' -- what he
elsewhere calls truth rather than repose (CW2:202) -- in which
what once seemed important may appear "trivial" or
"vain" (CW2:189). From this perspective (or more properly
the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear,
but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.



Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of
morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of
virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In
"Circles" the vices are "forms of old age,"
and the hero the "receptive, aspiring" youth (CW2:189). In
the "Divinity School Address," the villain is the
"spectral" preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he
has ever lived. "Self Reliance" condemns virtues that are
really "penances" (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of
abolitionists who display an idealized "love" for those
far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).



Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or
"aversion" of the virtue of "self-reliance."
We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols
of status, when we show "the foolish face of praise" or
the "forced smile which we put on in company where we do not
feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest
us" (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own
past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the
present. This is the context in which he states that "a foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen, philosophers and divines" (CW2: 33). There is wise
and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent
if that interferes with the "main enterprise of the world for
splendor, for extent,...the upbuilding of a man" (CW1:
65).



If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most
of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls
"self-reliance." The phrase connotes originality and
spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of
nonchalant boys, "sure of a dinner...who would disdain as
much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one..." The
boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a
free, "irresponsible" condemnation of those they see as
"silly" or "troublesome," and praise for those
they find "interesting" or "eloquent." (CW2:
29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson's characteristic
combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the
classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the
place of lords or nobles).



Although he develops a series of analyses and images of self-reliance,
Emerson nevertheless destabilizes his own use of the concept.
"To talk of reliance," he writes, "is a poor
external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because
it works and is" (CW 2:40). 'Self-reliance' can be
taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may
rely. The "self" on which we are to "rely" is,
in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating.
Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo,
"becomes what it is."



For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and
independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson's ideal society
is a confrontation of powerful, independent "gods, talking from
peak to peak all round Olympus." There will be a proper distance
between these gods, who, Emerson advises, "should meet each
morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together
should depart, as into foreign countries" (CW 3:81). Even
"lovers," he advises, "should guard their
strangeness" (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving
such distance in the cool confession with which he closes
"Nominalist and Realist," the last of the *Essays,
Second Series*:



> 
> I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show
> my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long....
> Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they
> existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of
> life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to
> see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any
> claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145).
> 



The self-reliant person will "publish" her results, but
she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius
that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is
available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld
genius with its expression. "The man," Emerson states
"is only half himself, the other half is his expression"
(CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in
"Experience," who promise "a new world" but
never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius
"within the actual horizon of human life" (CW 3:31).
Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from
one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social.
The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts
turn out to be "the most acceptable, most public, and
universally true" (CW1: 63). And the great "representative
men" Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the
world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even
Napoleon-are "ploughed into the history of this world"
(CW1: 80).



Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian
virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a
"wise skepticism." There are times, he holds, when we must
let go and trust to the nature of the universe: "As the traveler
who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and
trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do
with the divine animal who carries us through this world"
(CW3:16). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires
a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls
"wise skepticism" (CW4: 89). His representative skeptic of
this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in
*Representative Men* is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong
sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for
knowledge. He wants "a near view of the best game and the chief
players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and
events; but mainly men" (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is
perilous and uncertain, "a storm of many elements," the
navigation through which requires a flexible ship, "fit to the
form of man." (CW4: 91).


### 2.4 Christianity



The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity
School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he
offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in
the "Divinity School Address," flowing from a line of
argument he establishes in "The American Scholar." If the
one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious
institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by
that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens
rather than activates the spirit. It is an "Eastern monarchy of
a Christianity" in which Jesus, originally the "friend of
man," is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity
true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire "the
religious sentiment" -- a joyous seeing that is more likely
to be found in "the pastures," or "a boat in the
pond" than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity
for a nation to suffer the "loss of worship" (CW1: 89) he
finds it strange that, given the "famine of our churches"
(CW1: 85) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the
Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of
their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and
to remember "that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men
value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to
be caught up into the vision of principles" (CW1: 90).


### 2.5 Power



Power is a theme in Emerson's early writing, but it becomes
especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as
"Experience," "Montaigne, or the Skeptic"
"Napoleon," and "Power." Power is related to
action in "The American Scholar," where Emerson holds that
a "true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as
a loss of power" (CW1: 59). It is also a subject of
"Self-Reliance," where Emerson writes of each person that
"the power which resides in him is new in nature" (CW2:
28). In "Experience" Emerson speaks of a life which
"is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy" (CW3: 294);
and in "Power" he celebrates the "bruisers"
(CW6: 34) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their
way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more
artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a
characteristic passage from "Power," he states:



> 
> In history the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be
> a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening
> sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed
> over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the
> world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still
> flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got
> out by ethics and humanity. (CW6: 37-8)
> 



Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like
"a bird which alights nowhere," hopping "perpetually
from bough to bough" (CW3: 34). Moreover, we often cannot tell
at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily
we sometimes find that much is accomplished in "times when we
thought ourselves indolent" (CW3: 28).


### 2.6 Unity and Moods



At some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates,
or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in
"The American Scholar" of an "original unit"
or "fountain of power" (CW1: 53), of which each of us is a
part. He writes in "The Divinity School Address" that each
of us is "an inlet into the deeps of Reason." And in
"Self-Reliance," the essay that more than any other
celebrates individuality, he writes of "the resolution of all
into the ever-blessed ONE" (CW2: 40). "The Oversoul"
is Emerson's most sustained discussion of "the ONE,"
but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict
between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate
metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of
unity be reconciled?



Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both
suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a
nontemporal "One" or "Oversoul" is the only
reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in
the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or
nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as
an unchanging "ONE," but as a process or succession: a
"growth" or "movement of the soul" (CW2: 189);
or a "new yet unapproachable America" (CW3: 259).



Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through
what Stanley Cavell calls his "epistemology of moods."
According to this epistemology, most fully developed in
"Experience" but present in all of Emerson's
writing, we never apprehend anything "straight" or
in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life
is "a train of moods like a string of beads," through
which we see only what lies in each bead's focus (CW3: 30). The
beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the
"Lords of Life" which govern all human experience. The
Lords include "Succession," "Surface,"
"Dream," "Reality," and
"Surprise." Are the great visions of unity, then, simply
aspects under which we view the world?



Emerson's most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity,
or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the *Essays,
Second Series*, entitled "Nominalist and Realist."
There he speaks of the universe as an "old Two-face...of
which any proposition may be affirmed or denied" (CW3: 144). As
in "Experience," Emerson leaves us with the whirling
succession of moods. "I am always insincere," he
skeptically concludes, "as always knowing there are other
moods" (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the
succession of moods, and he ends "Nominalist and Realist"
with the "feeling that all is yet unsaid," and with at
least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).


## 3. Emerson on Slavery and Race



Massachusetts ended slavery in 1783, when Chief Justice William
Cushing instructed the jury in the case of Quock Walker, a former
slave, that "the idea of slavery" was "inconsistent" with the
Massachusetts Constitution' guarantee that "all men are born free and
equal" (Gougeon, 71). Emerson first encountered slavery when he
went south for his health in the winter of 1827, when he was 23. He
recorded the following scene in his journal from his time in
Tallahasse, Florida: 



> 
> 
> A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The
> Treasurer of this institution is Marshal of the district & by a
> somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of
> the Society & a Slave Auction at the same time & place, one
> being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard.
> One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other
> was regaled with "Going gentlemen, Going!" And almost without changing
> our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid
> for "four children without the mother who had been kidnapped
> therefrom" (JMN3: 117).
> 
> 
> 



Emerson never questioned the iniquity of slavery, though it was not a
main item on his intellectual agenda until the eighteen forties. He
refers to abolition in the "Prospects" chapter of *Nature* when
he speaks of the "gleams of a better light" in the darkness of history
and gives as examples "the abolition of the Slave-trade," "the history
of Jesus Christ," and "the wisdom of children" (CW1:43). He condemns
slavery in some of his greatest essays, "Self-Reliance" (1841), so
that even if we didn't have the anti-slavery addresses of the 1840s
and 1850s, we would still have evidence both of the existence of
slavery and of Emerson's opposition to it. He praises "the bountiful
cause of Abolition," although he laments that the cause had been
taken over by "angry bigots." Later in the essay he
treats abolition as one of the great causes and movements of
world history, along with Christianity, the Reformation, and
Methodism. In a well-known statement he writes that an "institution is
the shadow of one man," giving as examples "the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition of
Clarkson" (CW2: 35). The unfamiliar name in this list is that of
Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), a Cambridge-educated clergyman who helped
found the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Clarkson travelled on horseback throughout Britain, interviewing
sailors who worked on slaving ships, and exhibiting such tools as
manacles, thumbscews, branding irons, and other tools of the trade.
His  *History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment
of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British
Parliament* (1808) would be a major source for Emerson's
anti-slavery addresses.



Slavery also appears in "Politics," from the *Essays, Second
Series* of 1844, when Emerson surveys the two main American
parties. One, standing for free trade, wide suffrage, and the access
of the young and poor to wealth and power, has the "best cause" but
the least attractive leaders; while the other has the most
cultivated and able leaders, but is "merely defensive of property."
This conservative party, moreover, "vindicates no right, it aspires to
no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it
does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster
religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate
the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant"
(CW3: 124). Emerson stands here for emancipation, not simply for the
ending of the slave trade.



1844 was also the year of Emerson's breakout anti-slavery address,
which he gave at the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery in
the British West Indies. In the background was the American war with
Mexico, the annexation of Texas, and the likelihood that it would be
entering the Union as a slave state. Although Concord was a hotbed of
abolitionism compared to Boston, there were many conservatives in the
town. No church allowed Emerson to speak on the subject, and when the
courthouse was secured for the talk, the sexton refused to ring
the church bell to announce it, a task the young Henry David Thoreau
took upon himself to perform (Gougeon, 75). In his address, Emerson
develops a critique of the language we use to speak about, or to avoid
speaking about, black slavery:



> 
> 
> Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous
> holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what
> negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are
> producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of
> sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers
> of comfort and luxury for the civilized world.... I am heart-sick
> when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their
> case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their
> brothers (*Emerson's Antislavery Writings*, 9).
> 
> 
> 



Emerson's long address is both clear-eyed about the evils of slavery
and hopeful about the possibilities of the Africans. Speaking
with the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass beside him on the
dais, Emerson states: "The black man carries in his bosom an
indispensable element of a new and coming civilization." He praises
"such men as" Toussaint [L]Ouverture, leader of the Haitian slave
rebellion, and announces: "here is the anti-slave: here
is man; and if you have man, black or white is an
insignificance." (Wirzrbicki, 95; *Emerson's Antislavery
Writings,* 31). 



The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 effectively nationalized slavery,
requiring officials and citizens of the free states to assist in
returning escaped slaves to their owners. Emerson's 1851 "Address to
the Citizens of Concord" calls both for the abrogation of the
law and for disobeying it while it is still current. In 1854, the
escaped slave Anthony Burns was shipped back to Virginia by order of
the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, an order carried
out by U. S. Marines, in accordance with the new law. This
example of "Slavery in Massachusetts" (as Henry Thoreau put it in a
well-known address) is in the background of Emerson's 1855 "Lecture on
Slavery," where he calls the recognition of slavery by the
original 1787 Constitution a "crime." Emerson gave these and other
antislavery addresses multiple times in various places from
the late 1840s till the beginning of the Civil War. On
the eve of the war Emerson supported John Brown, the violent
abolitionist who was executed in 1859 by the U. S. government after he
attacked the U. S. armory in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. In
the middle of the War, Emerson raised funds for black regiments of
Union soldiers (Wirzbicki, 251-2) and read his "Boston Hymn" to
an audience of 3000 celebrating President Abraham Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. "Pay ransom to the owner," Emerson
wrote, "and fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is
owner. And ever was. Pay him" (CW9: 383).



Emerson's magisterial essay "Fate," published in *The Conduct of
Life* (1860) is distinguished not only by its attempt to reconcile
freedom and necessity, but by disturbing pronouncements about fate and
race, for example: 



> 
> 
> The population of the world is a conditional population, not the best,
> but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the
> steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to
> another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in
> history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and
> Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and
> Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like
> the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We
> follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how
> much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.... The
> German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano
> in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over
> America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie
> down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie (CW6:
> 8-9).
> 
> 
> 



The references to race here show the influence of a new "scientific"
interest in both England and America in the role that race--often
conflated with culture or nation--plays in human evolution. In
America, this interest was entangled with the institution of slavery,
the encounters with Native American tribes, and with the notion of
"Anglo-Saxon liberties" that came to prominence during the American
Revolution, and developed into the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon
race (see Horsman).



Emerson would not be Emerson, however, if he did not conduct a
critique of his terms, and "race" is a case in point. He takes it up in
a non-American context, however: in the essay "Race" from *English
Traits* (1856). Emerson's critique of his title begins in the
essay's first paragraph when he writes that "each variety shades down
imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race
begins or ends." Civilization "eats away the old traits," he
continues, and religions construct new forms of character that
cut against old racial divisions. More deeply still, he
identifies considerations that "threaten to undermine" the concept of
race. The "fixity ... of races as we see them," he writes, "is a weak
argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our
historical period is a point" in the long duration of nature (CW
5:24). The patterns we see today aren't pure anyway:



> 
> 
> though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of
> pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of
> races, and strange resemblances meet us every where, It need not
> puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar
> should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human
> form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that
> some spray sprinkles us from the antidiluvian seas.
> 
> 
> 



As in *Nature* and his great early works, Emerson asserts our
intimate relations with the natural world, from the oceans to the
animals. Why, one might think, should one of the higher but still
initial forms be singled out for separation, abasement, and slavery?
Emerson works out his views in "Race" without referring to
American slavery, however, in a book about England where he sees a
healthy mixture, not a pure race. England's history, he writes,
is not so much "one of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or
Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is
an anthology of temperaments out of them all.... The English
derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities.... The
Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their
mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead
still" (CW5: 28). Still, it is striking that Emerson never
mentions slavery in either "Fate" or "Race,"
both of which were written during his intense period of public
opposition to American slavery.


## 4. Some Questions about Emerson


### 4.1 Consistency



Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world
is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists
the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our
imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our
experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new
place only to find the same " sad self" we thought we had
left behind (CW2: 46).



Emerson's "epistemology of moods" is an attempt to
construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem
contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means
to "accept," as he puts it, "the clangor and jangle
of contrary tendencies" (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible
to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at
the end of "Circles," he writes that he is "only an
experimenter...with no Past at my back" (CW2: 188). In the
world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable
to be responsible to: "every moment is new; the past is always
swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred" (CW2:
189).



Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in
Emerson's essays and among his ideas. To take just one example,
the idea of the "active soul" - mentioned as the
"one thing in the world, of value" in 'The American
Scholar' - is a presupposition of Emerson's attack
on "the famine of the churches" (for not feeding or
activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in
his understanding of a poem as "a thought so passionate and
alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an
architecture of its own ..." (CW3: 6); and, of course, it
is at the center of Emerson's idea of self-reliance. There are
in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson's
philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education,
self-reliance, and the present.


### 4.2 Early and Late Emerson



It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are
important differences between early and late Emerson: for example,
between the buoyant *Nature* (1836) and the weary ending of
"Experience" (1844); between the expansive author of
"Self-Reliance" (1841) and the burdened writer of
"Fate" (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such
differences when he writes in "Fate": "Once we
thought, positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or
circumstance, is half" (CW6: 8). Is "Fate" the
record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing,
concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have
no control -- plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old
age -- constrain self-reliance or self-development?



"Experience" is a key transitional essay. "Where do
we find ourselves?" is the question with which it begins. The
answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of
dislocation and obscurity, where "sleep lingers all our lifetime
about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the
fir-tree" (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not
disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old
son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an
example of an "unhandsome" general character of
existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little
boy.



"Experience" presents many moods. It has its moments of
illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an
"Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or
seam" (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about "skating
over the surfaces of life" and confining our existence to the
"mid-world." But even its upbeat ending takes place in a
setting of substantial "defeat." "Up again, old
heart!" a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of
the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope
and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive
passages in Emerson's writing. The "true romance which the
world exists to realize," he states, "will be the
transformation of genius into practical power" (CW3: 49).



Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson's
assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his
writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life
than in the early work, "The American Scholar," where
Emerson states that "Men in history, men in the world of to-day,
are bugs, are spawn, and are called 'the mass' and
'the herd.' In a century, in a millennium, one or two men;
that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every
man" (CW1: 65). Conversely, there is no more idealistic
statement in his early work than the statement in "Fate"
that "[t]hought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the
mind up into a sphere where all is plastic" (CW6: 15). All in
all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human
possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were
poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still
hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger
sense of the dumb resistance of the world.


### 4.3 Sources and Influence



Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of
writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary,
philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at
categorizing them.



Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson's
philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through
Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally
important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which
Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge's
*Biographia Literaria*). Emerson read avidly in Indian,
especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also
multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from
Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton's
physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy.
Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St.
Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus,
Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and
Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Stael and
Emanuel Swedenborg.



Emerson's works were well known throughout the United States and
Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of
Emerson's essays, copied passages from "History" and
"Self-Reliance" in his journals, and wrote of the
*Essays*: that he had never "felt so much at home in a
book." Emerson's ideas about "strong,
overflowing" heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and
relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in
Nietzsche's writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition,
the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the
writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and
John Dewey.



Stanley Cavell's engagement with Emerson is the most original
and prolonged by any philosopher, and Emerson is a primary source for
his writing on "moral perfectionism." In his earliest
essays on Emerson, such as "Thinking of Emerson" and
"Emerson, Coleridge, Kant," Cavell considers
Emerson's place in the Kantian tradition, and he explores the
affinity between Emerson's call in "The American
Scholar" for a return to "the common and the low"
and Wittgenstein's quest for a return to ordinary language. In
"Being Odd, Getting Even" and "Aversive
Thinking," Cavell considers Emerson's anticipations of
existentialism, and in these and other works he explores
Emerson's affinities with Nietzsche and Heidegger.



In *Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome* and *Cities of
Words*, Cavell develops what he calls "Emersonian moral
perfectionism," of which he finds an exemplary expression in
Emerson's "History": "So all that is said of
the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to
each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable
self." Emersonian perfectionism is oriented towards a wiser or
better self that is never final, always initial, always on the
way.



Cavell does not have a neat and tidy definition of perfectionism, and
his list of perfectionist works ranges from Plato's
*Republic* to Wittgenstein's *Philosophical
Investigations*, but he identifies "two dominating themes of
perfectionism" in Emerson's writing: (1) "that the
human self ... is always becoming, as on a journey, always
partially in a further state. This journey is described as education
or cultivation"; (2) "that the other to whom I can use the
words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend--a
figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its
instigation and accompaniment" (*Cities of Words*,
26-7). The friend can be a person but it may also be a text. In
the sentence from "History" cited above, the writing of
the "Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist" about
"the wise man" functions as a friend and guide, describing
to each reader not just any idea, but "his own idea." This
is the text as instigator and companion.



Cavell's engagement with perfectionism springs from a response
to his colleague John Rawls, who in *A Theory of Justice*
condemns Nietzsche (and implicitly Emerson) for his statement that
"mankind must work continually to produce individual great human
beings." "Perfectionism," Rawls states, "is
denied as a political principle." Cavell replies that
Emerson's (and Nietzsche's) focus on the great man has
nothing to do with a transfer of economic resources or political
power, or with the idea that "there is a separate class of great
men ...for whose good, and conception of good, the rest of
society is to live" (CHU, 49). The great man or woman, Cavell
holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy:
"essential to the criticism of democracy from within"
(CHU, 3).