New England Transcendentalism [addendum]
The transcendentalist departure from Unitarianism was bolstered by the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who suggested in The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782/1833) both that the Bible is a human poetic construction, and that works just as authoritative can still be written. This was precisely Emerson's standpoint at the opening of Nature (1836), where he asked, "Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" (1971–, 1:7). In his controversial "Divinity School Address" (1838), Emerson urged Harvard graduates to find redemption in the "Soul," not in an "eastern monarchy of a Christianity" that proceeded "as if God were dead" (1971–, 1: 82, 84).
In "Experience" (1844), Emerson developed most fully and creatively the Kantian idea that there are forms through which we acquire experience. Stating that the universe "inevitably wear[s] our color," Emerson developed a categoreal scheme that he called "the Lords of Life"—including "Temperament," "Surface," "Succession," "Surprise," and "Illusion." Against this background he set out an epistemology of moods, according to which moods are like beads strung on the iron wire of temperament, each showing "only what lies in its focus" (1971–, 3: 30). Emerson stated in "Circles" that "our moods do not believe in each other" (1971–, 2: 182)—a statement showing that moods contain beliefs and at the same time indicating their radically inconsistent outlooks.
Emerson's ethical thought centered on "self-reliance," which is both a positive search for the best in oneself—our "unattained but attainable self," as he put it in "History" (1971–, 2: 5)—and, in its negative moment, an "aversion" to "conformity." Emerson characterized society as "in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members" (1971–, 2: 29)—a conspiracy all too effective in producing individuals who "skulk" and "sneak" through their lives, or gather together like "bugs" and "spawn." Emerson's critique was thus directed not so much at specific actions as at a manner of living. He gave an existentialist twist to a passage from René Descartes's Meditations when he wrote, "Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage" (1971–, 2: 38). For Emerson, as for his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, thinking and existing are not just given; they are risky ventures. Emerson's heroes manifest a sense of command and overflowing worth, as well as a tendency toward spontaneity and whim. Friendships of such heroes are alliances of "large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared" (1971–, 2: 123).
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854/1989), produced a work of ethical and political philosophy that, like Plato's Republic, considers the necessities of life. On the basis of his "experiment" of living at Walden Pond for two and a half years, Thoreau concluded that he can survive for a year on six weeks of labor. This left him time to "own" the landscape by sitting in it, sound the depths of the pond, watch the spring come in, talk with the occasional visitor, and, more generally, "improve the nick of time." Guided by the Greek and Roman philosophy he read as an undergraduate at Harvard College and by his readings in Indian and Chinese thought, Thoreau understood philosophy as the search for "a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." In this sense, he observed, "there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers" (p. 14).
In the "Economy" chapter of Walden, Thoreau considered human life as a precious commodity: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run." He concluded that people pay a high cost for the lives they lead, that their lives are modes of strange "penance," and that a "stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind" (p. 8).
Although he portrayed himself variously as growing beans, peering through the ice of the pond, walking and sitting and "suddenly finding himself neighbor to the birds," the main outcome of Thoreau's time at Walden Pond was the book in which he recorded his life there, a book that, in the chapter "Reading," offered a theory of itself. Thoreau contrasted with the "classics" of every great culture a popular series of books called "Little Reading": books, as he put it, that "we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to." After he finished Walden, Thoreau began to think of his immense journal as just such a book, perhaps even closer to nature, with "each page … written in its own season & out of doors" (1993, p. 67).
Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) was a response to his night in jail for not paying the poll tax, and served as a source for the nonviolent resistance practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau argued that the citizen has no duty to align his conscience with the state, and a responsibility to oppose its immoral actions. He wrote, "I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also" (1973, p. 67). The country could rid itself of slavery, he argued, if large numbers of people refused to pay their taxes and were willing to go to jail. Later, as Thoreau and Emerson became more agitated about slavery, Thoreau supported violence to end it. In "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859), he stated, "A man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave" (1973, p. 132).
Margaret Fuller's death in a shipwreck in 1849 deprived the transcendentalists of a powerful journalist and feminist writer. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision of her essay "The Great Lawsuit" (1843), she maintained that masculinity and femininity are intertwined, that there is "no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman." Women's free self-development, she argued, is necessary for the renovation of society, including marriage. "Union," she wrote, "is only possible to those who are units" (Myerson 2000, pp. 418, 419).
Influences on Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche read Emerson at three critical points in his life, transcribed passages from Emerson's essays in his journals, and wrote, "Emerson.—Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home" (Goodman 1997, p. 160). Emerson's ideas about nobility, history, friendship, overcoming self-inertia, and self-reliance presage Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A sentence from Emerson's "History" is the epigraph to the first edition of Nietzsche's Gay 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" (Emerson 1971–, 2: 8).
In the United States, Emerson's stress on action and the future, his humanistic or Kantian portrayal of the role of the self in forming the world, and his focus on the individual chimed with central emphases of William James's pragmatism. John Dewey considered Emerson "the one philosopher of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato," and found in his writings an anticipation of his view that ideals are present in our "immediate experience." Emerson and Thoreau are central to Stanley Cavell's investigations of "reading," "aversive thinking," and "moral perfectionism," and to his related discussions of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Senses of Walden (1981), Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003), and other works.
Cavell, Stanley; Conscience; Descartes, René; Dewey, John; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Emotion; Heidegger, Martin; Herder, Johann Gottfried; James, William; Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye; King, Martin Luther; Neo-Kantianism; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Plato; Pragmatism; Thoreau, Henry David; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Robert B. Spiller, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson's Antislavery Writings, edited by Joel Myerson and Len Gougeon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by William H. Gilman, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–.
Fuller, Margaret. Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846, edited by Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Fuller, Margaret. "These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, edited by Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Myerson, Joel, ed. Transcendentalism: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Thoreau, Henry David. Journal, edited by John C. Broderick, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–.
Thoreau, Henry David. Reform Papers, edited by Wendell Glick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (1854). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Thoreau, Henry David. A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851, edited by H. Daniel Peck. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993.
Secondary Sources
Baumgarten, Eduard. "Mitteilungen und Bermerkungen über den Einfluss Emersons auf Nietzsche." Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 1 (1956): 93–152.
Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Cavell, Stanley. Emerson's Transcendental Etudes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. Exp. ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
Conant, James. "Nietzsche's Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator." In Nietzsche's Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Goodman, Russell B. "The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self." In Nature in American Philosophy, edited by Jean De Groot, 1–18. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004.
Goodman, Russell B. "Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 43 (1997): 159–180.
Packer, B. L. "The Transcendentalists." In The Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, 2: 329–604. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Versluis, Arthur. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Von Frank, Albert J. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
This is the complete article, containing 1,690 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).
