CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION:
EMERSON’S EDUCATIONAL IDEAL

The life of a man is in reality but one continued education, the end of
which is to make himself perfect.

Joseph de Gerardo1

Few are free, all might be.

Tis the height
Of the soul's flight.

Emerson 2

All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions To be

something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a man
must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take,
and must follow that course with vigor and persistence.

Rousseau3

In this dissertation, I set out to elicit from Emerson's major works his educational

ideal. Promoting an all-encompassing paideia, Emerson tried to cultivate excellence in the

American people; however, following Plato and Aristotle, he seemed to mainly address an

1
Self-Education, trans. and pub. Elizabeth Peabody (1830), cited in Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1995), 102; hereinafter,
"Richardson."
2
“Few are Free,” Emerson: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series), edited by Peter
Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 161.
3
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London, England: Dent, 1911), 7, 8; cited in
Richardson 86.
 2
aristocratic elite among them, and not the people generally.4 In his speeches and writings,

the gospel Emerson preached informed Americans that they possessed native resources, as

individuals, to advance toward self-realization and promote cultural progress. But he

seemed unsurprised that only a few had the quality of spirit to choose that end. The native

resources he had in mind were in essence, a single resource: The capacity to impart

meaning to existence and advance consciousness by means of primary interpretations or

‘readings’ of nature. This includes the ability to reinterpret and effectively transfigure

oneself as part of nature.

According to Emerson’s pedagogical theory, intrepid individuals engage in an

authoritative exegesis of nature that at the same time directly imparts significance to

experience; this in turn enables them to take responsibility for their education.5 The self-

reliant Emersonian scholar establishes an original or immediate relation with nature to read

nature's text; Emerson indicates that in such a reading, natural objects are treated as

symbols for something more real than the physical object.6 However, Emerson is not a

4
In ancient Greece, παιδεία, in its most basic sense, meant to teach, to instruct, to train; more
broadly, to provide instruction, with the intent of forming proper habits of behavior.
Considering it’s political implications, it referred to the education of excellent or aristocratic
character through a union of civilization, tradition, literature, and philosophy; its aim or telos was the
cultivation of excellence in youth and in the mature members of the polis. See Werner Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Trans. Gilbert Highet. 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971).
5

For a general introduction to Emerson’s aims, see Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia, 1st
ed., s. v. "Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)."
6
This thesis and my consideration of these issues is influenced by the groundbreaking work of
George Herbert Mead, whose research on symbolic interactionism raises critical questions
concerning how reality is constructed. Like Mead, Emerson does not take it for granted that reality
exists objectively, “out there” in the world. Like Emanuel Kant, Emerson seems to indicate that we
each construct reality. Beginning from different presuppositions and using different approaches,
Mead and Emerson agreed in principle that we actively create reality as we act in and toward the
world. However, unlike Mead, who called the product of this construction ‘social’ reality; for
Emerson, the reality we construct is not phenomenal or empirical, in physical nature, outside of
 3
dogmatic idealist; unlike George Berkeley, Emerson holds that objects do exist and that

they have meaning that we impart to them. Thus, Emerson regarded nature as a surface on

which we write meaning. His position resembles that of Immanuel Kant, who in his first

critique proved that we cannot have either inner or outer experience unless objects outside

of us and space itself are real. Thus, Emerson regarded intellectual forms – e.g., the soul

and the Oversoul – as primary, more real than ephemeral physical objects. In reading

nature’s text, he read a subtext between nature’s fragmentary lines; these hidden lines

beneath the surface of things imply a greater unity than can be derived by appealing to the

corporeal. For Emerson, this intellectual ideal is that against which actions and thoughts

may be measured. This foundational principle underpins Emerson’s educational ideal.

In a memorable address to the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in

1837, Emerson described the American scholar 7; in this lecture, and throughout Emerson’s

writings and speeches, an imminent critique of society and culture in the age of modernity

is evident.8 In “The American Scholar” Emerson proclaimed that regardless of its various

contingent expressions, human nature (‘man’) is an “original unit”, a singular source or

mainspring of virtue and power, albeit fragmented and commodified. Emerson

acknowledged that as it is manifest in society, human nature is “so distributed to

ourselves; objects or things are not carriers of their own meaning; reality is something that the world
derives from us, from our understanding or reason. See G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society from
the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1934).
7
The seeds Emerson’s educational ideal germinated in the soil of the United States in the nineteenth
century, and his topic in “The American Scholar” address was the state of American character at that
time and place; however, it is self-evident that this ideal embraces all of humanity; it is universal in
scope.
8
Placement of modernity in historical time varies according to the scholar’s aims or interests. For
example, the editors of Modernism/Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press) consider modernity
to extend ‘roughly’ from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century; besides historical labeling,
modernity is conceived as the web of “norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the
Renaissance” (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modernity&oldid=877692578).
 4
multitudes . . . so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and

cannot be gathered.” Echoing the critique made by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emerson

contended that while we have gained certain advantages as members of modern society,

human nature has “metamorphosed into a thing, into many things” within its institutions.

Emerson was not a proto-Marxist, but like Marx he observed that human beings have

become as much the victims as the beneficiaries of society, insomuch as alienation is

endemic in modern life. Revealing the spiritual atrophy in the underside of an otherwise

prosperous nineteenth-century America, Emerson made the following observations:

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered

amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking
monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a
man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is
seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He
sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the
farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever
gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his
craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form;
the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope
of the ship (emphasis added).

Emerson bemoaned that,

In this distribution of functions [sic] the scholar is the delegated

intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate
state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking (emphasis added).

Implicit in this cultural degeneration is what Emerson viewed as Americans’ dependence

on “the learning of other lands.” Nonetheless, he aspired to hope that their cultural
 5
apprenticeship to the Old World was ending and asserted that Americans were on the verge

of a new dynamic age in which the American mind would blossom:

The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that
must be sung, that will sing themselves.

In this new age, Americans would exchange mistaken finite expressions of virtue for the

ideal itself; they would quit their servile dependency on physical icons of culture and

perceive the ideal behind all outward forms.

A year before he delivered the American scholar address, Emerson wrote that his

countrymen still looked to Europe for cultural virtue.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the
sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on
entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that
these structures are imitations also, - faint copies of an invisible
archetype.9

In the essay entitled “Nature,” Emerson asserted that the physical artifact cannot take the

place of the ideal pattern which it imitates. He urged Americans overawed by European

culture to realize that they have direct access to the invisible archetype behind cultural

forms; he argued that Europeans’ proximity to ancient cultural monuments gives them no

advantage over Americans in the New World. Whether the thing being observed is the

verdant American wilderness or venerated artifacts in the Old World, the physical object is

not mistaken for the invisible form by the best students of nature; these seek virtue beneath

9
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York, N. Y.: Penguin Books, 1982),
48; hereinafter "Ziff."
 6
or above the surface of things (this refers neither to the quantum or macro realms but to the

noumenal). In so doing they extend the reach of reason and energize the soul.

A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best
answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so
communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid soul.10

Emerson’s idealism is based on experimental practice and experience; it moves beyond

dogma and existing paradigms which purport to comprehend reality. Emerson insists that

intuition plays a critical role in the ongoing task of constructing the world. Instead of

being content with passively apprehending reality; he tries to construct it, and thereby gain

insight.

The role which a strong or critical reading of nature plays in Emerson’s pedagogy

is grounded in the conviction that natural phenomena point to metaphysical reality. Unlike

the exegesis of written texts in conventional scholarship, which merely curate existing

knowledge, the strong, creative reading of nature’s text implicit in Emersonian pedagogy

implies the ability to perceive order or unity, intelligence, and purpose in a intelligible

world that we apprehend through reason, grounded in experience.

While strong reading has a revolutionary potential and an immanent critique of

society and culture is inherent in it, Emerson acknowledges that education necessarily

includes a healthy dose of socialization. However, when taken beyond what is necessary,

he reasoned that socialization becomes passivity or acquiescence before conventional

wisdom, and this enslaves the soul. Consequently, besides intuition Emerson championed

instinct and resisted its eradication. His educational ideal presupposes that humans can
10

"Nature," Ziff 77.

 7
attain their stature as children of nature if they are not so stymied by an awareness of past

failures that they can no longer envision what might be possible. In the face of doubt,

Emersonian scholars construct provisional meanings as purposeful actors and shapers of

history.

It is possible to detect an element of uncritical or apolitical quiescence in Emerson;

his preference for the heights of metaphysical reality may be read as a philosophical retreat

from life, as it is lived in the flesh. But his forays into political action belie the charge of

quietism. He felt the pull of history. The Civil War and the evil of slavery finally

compelled him to descend from the mountaintop to enter the fray of political activism.

While not the topic of this dissertation, I would point out that Emerson publicly objected on

moral grounds, both to slavery and to the U. S. policy regarding the war with Mexico. And

in an 1838 letter to President Van Buren, he expressed outrage at the U. S. government's

displacement of the Cherokee nation from its ancestral lands.11

Nevertheless, for Emerson, entering history as an active agent primarily meant

something other than engaging in overt political action. In his view, the Emersonian

scholar advances human progress by subtle means that do not wholly depend on public or

private institutions. Critical readers act as independent agents of change - as geniuses who

elicit nature’s favors. As he put it, nature willingly bends "her lines of grandeur and grace

to the decoration of [these] her darling” children.12 However, the did not imagine that the

American scholar could direct history or dominate Fate (i.e., contingency). As a

descendent of the Calvinist tradition, Emerson understood that our freedom as humans is

11
“Letter to Martin Van Buren” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed. 1820 -
1865 Volume B (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007) 1268–1271.
12
"Nature" (1836) in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1940), 12; hereinafter
"Atkinson.”
 8
limited; will or volition is relatively, not absolutely free. Nonetheless, he indicated that the

limited freedom we enjoy is real and significant. While he acknowledged that Fate (or

Fortuna) plays a role in determining history, he also maintained that human will is a part of

Fate. Thus, he considered history to be a species of biography. He way be seen as a

forerunner of analytical pragmatists, such as John Dewey or William James; and a fellow-

traveler of aesthetic pragmatists, people like Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. None of

these diverse geniuses believed that individuals dictate with impunity the course life will

take; they understood that we are relatively free to exercise our will.13

Emerson regarded the contest between will and fate (or determinism) as an eternal

struggle and conformed (i.e., limited) his philosophical, epistemological, and moral

aspirations accordingly. Thus, we may plausibly depict him as both an idealist and a

pragmatist. To begin to do this, I elucidate the contrast between the arch and telos of

Emerson’s career and that of Henry Adams, the historian and descendent of American

presidents and statesmen. In chapter 5 (“Emerson’s Response to Modernity”) I argue that

the attempt to dominate fate or historical contingency was implicit in Adams’

historiographic practice, and that Adams, following Machiavelli's advice, attempted to

master Fortuna by producing ‘scientific’ or value-neutral history. By contrast, Emerson,

has more respect for Fate; he is willing to challenge it, as did Macbeth, but knows that he

may fail in the attempt. Fearing that Banquo, one of his generals, might sire a rival

dynasty, Macbeth challenges fate to a fight to the death:

13
Below I present evidence from Emerson’s works to support my contention that Emerson struggled
with the issue of the degree to which freedom is real or an illusion. He conceded that our actions, if
not our moral freedom, are circumscribed by the laws of nature. As an intellectual descendent of
Calvinists and Puritan divines, Emerson appreciated the difficulty of the issue. I venture to guess
that he had read Jonathan Edwards’ important essay, Freedom of Will, i.e., “A Careful and Strict
Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will which is supposed to be
essential to moral agency, vertue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame,” in Classics of
Protestantism, ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 198 – 242.
 9
Rather than so, come fate into the list,
And champion me to th’ utterance!14

Similarly, Emerson pits will against fate but does not try, by gathering all the facts or data

of history, to dictate an ‘objective’ meaning onto it, as did Henry Adams, by attempting to

unlock history’s secret sense using only value-neutral facts. Emerson concedes that

historical time (depicted as ‘monster-like fate’ in Shakespeare) is a monster hard to

catch.15 Instead of attempting to dominate fate by extracting meaning from the discrete

facts of history, Emerson’s American scholar tries to infuse history with redemptive

purposes. Mr. Emerson (as his second wife used to call him) habitually read coherence

into actions and events, whether these be momentous or mundane. Unlike Henry Admas,

he refused to allow the disorienting pace of history during the nineteenth century to

disorient and dishearten him.

It is fair to say that Adams was an unpoetic savant; he was never able to draw forth

any sort of basic unity from history; by his own tacit admission, his reductionistic

historiography yielded only multiplicity and entropy from the historical past.

Prophetically, Emerson had warned that such an approach as Adams followed is “apt to

cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the

student of the manly contemplation of the whole.16 In “Prospects” Emerson observed

that, "there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and

14
Macbeth, Act 3, Scene I, lines 70-71. “List” refers to the arena of contest; “champion me”:
contend with me as an opposing champion; “to th’ utterance”: to the end [French a outrance], i.e.,
until I perish or fate is thwarted. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1974).
15
In his dramas and histories, the Bard confronts many intractable political, historical, and moral
questions – issues not formally dealt with by philosophy proper until centuries later. It is no surprise
that Emerson often refers to Shakespeare. See Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare
as Philosopher of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002). Heller
sheds light on Shakespeare’s philosophical insight and understanding of history and politics.
16
"Prospects," Ziff 74.
 10
infallibility;" among these was the courage to hazard a guess; he wrote that "a guess is

oft17 Emerson ventured the largest of guesses: that above the chaotic and disconnected

moments of prosaic history there is an ordered whole – an Ideal which travels on a parallel

course beside the slaughter bench of history18

Whereas Adams experienced a sense of failure as a would-be Master of History,

Emerson stands assuredly in sound relation to historical experience; he drew a salutary

horizon on historical consciousness. In Nietzschean terms, Adams abused history; in

pursuit of ‘scientific history,’ his method (his historiography) resulted in a dilated historical

consciousness, solipsism, and despair.19 Emerson’s selective (I dare say affirmative)

reading of history draws material from the deepest wells of the Past and from its surfaces to

construct “a new, yet unapproachable America”20; this term represents Emerson’s re-

conceptualization of Manifest Destiny; it points to historical vistas and educational ideals

that transcends the American experience.

Even a casual reading of The Education of Henry Adams (Henry Adams’

intellectual autobiography) discloses the depth to which Adams was traumatized, even

paralyzed by the breakdown of a homogeneous culture in America, owing to

‘multiplicity’. Adams used of the term ‘multiplicity’, not ‘modernity’ indicated that

historical moment which he and the entire American republic were experiencing in the

17
Ibid. 74.
18
In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel raised the type of normative question which
most interests the Emersonian scholar: “But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which
the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised
[sic] — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous
sacrifices have been offered” (emphasis added). G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (trans.
J. Sibree). Though he longed for meaning, Adams worked assiduously to produce value-neutral
history, refusing to admit that an ultimate question matters; this being, ‘what is the telos, or final
purpose of history?’
19
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, 2nd. rev. ed. (New
York, N. Y.: Macmillan, 1957).

“Experience” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Spiller et al,
20

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Volume III, 1984), 41.

 11
nineteenth century, a period when the rapid onset of irrational and uncontrollable forces

threatened to drive humanity to oblivion. Adams suffered (endured) multiplicity when

he wrote his magnum opus in the late nineteenth century. Foreseeing the crisis that

Adams was to confront, Emerson came to terms with modernity or multiplicity; he was

not paralyzed by the collapse of certainty, nor riven by the inscrutability of history. His

educational ideal does not imply or prescribe a simple way to resolve the incoherencies

brought on by modernity; instead, it affirms that a future for post-enlightenment America

is rationally possible through a type of cultural (i.e., educational) revival.

Cultural revival, Emerson insists, must entail the recovery of moral and aesthetic

prowess in the individual. Unlike Rousseau or Plato, who each proposed a certain set of

external political and social arrangements to complement their educational programs,

Emerson denies that any set of political or social institutions can advance human culture.

Instead, he held that redemption and renewal proceed from the liberation and

enlightenment of individuals. Individuals, he maintained, are not fixed or permanent, but

malleable, and only they can reshape the world and themselves. To self-reliant

individuals the world is not immovable but fluid. Emerson’s educational ideal considers

it as axiomatic that fluidity, or change is an intrinsic characteristic of nature; hence,

individuals as natural beings must remain plastic or adaptable in relation to nature.

Instead of a literal Western frontier, the America scholar travels toward a new, yet

unapproachable America that is open and undefined. The American scholar embraces

the possibility that a future which breaks with past models may be forged.

More hopeful than Rousseau’s educator, represented in the Émile, the personage

envisioned in the American Scholar address breaks the shackles of history. Emerson was

convinced that the "man of nature” could emerge from man in society, who is usually
 12
subjugated and alienated21 Emerson regarded ‘fate’ – representing contingency or

chance – as the main obstacle preventing this transfiguration; and he believed that will or

volition, not fate, could write the book of history. Although harsh, impersonal forces, like

the flaming sword of the cherubim, prevent man from returning to an Edenic paradise,

Emerson held out hope that the histories of individuals and nations are not wholly

determined by conditions, institutions, or tradition. In the essays “Nature” and “Fate" he

shed light on that part of human nature which is commensurate with the divine and argued

that besides the empirical self, there is infinite mind, a being that "uses and is not used" 22

Those endowed who a greater portion of moral sensibility and reason (i.e., mind or spirit)

and who are thus set apart from unconscious, “animal spirits, flocks23 may yet find their

way back to the Garden. Emerson, somewhat like Hegel, understood mind to be an

unrestricted essence – of one substance "with the maker, not of what is made;" it is "not in

us, but we are in it"; here Emerson seems to echo the apostle, who in his address to the

philosophers on Mars Hill, declared that ‘In him we live and move and have our being’

(Acts 17:28). Forthrightly, Emerson proclaimed that this Being is self-existent, “dating

from itself."24

In these propositions, we hear echoes of Emerson’s Judeo-Christian heritage;

however, besides that source, Indian thinking informed his consideration of transcendental

or theological themes; this is evident in many of his essays, poems, letters, and journal

21
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York, N. Y.: Basic
Books, 1978), 253; hereinafter "Émile." I examine some of the contrasts between Emerson’s
educational theory and that of Rousseau in chapter four (infra).
22
"Nature," Ziff 77.
23
"Fate," Ziff 376.
24
"Fate," Ziff 376. This is as close as Emerson came to being an evangelist. In the address

recorded in Acts 17, Paul likely quoted Epimenides of Crete. The Holy Bible: English Standard

Version. (2016). Crossway Bibles.

 13
entries. He first read Indian philosophy and mythology in The Edinburgh Review between

1820 and 1825 and cultivated this interest throughout his career. Sardars Anwaruddin

observes that “the concept of Brahma plays a central role in [Emerson’s] works and

ideas.”25 In chapter six I briefly discuss Emerson’s debt to Hinduism and Buddhism;

Vedic literature was a primary source for many of his ideas and he made the effort to learn

Sanskrit so that he could access this material in the original.

Advances in molecular biology during his day also led Emerson (amazingly) to

surmise that the distance between brute, physical nature (the ‘not me’) and the ideal is not

absolute; he drew the inference that reality consists in a confluence of the ideal and the

material joined in an ontological relation. Even as Kant had argued in the generation

before him, Emerson held that the material world is an expression of the divine – that

matter has no substance or being apart from mind or spirit.26 {Add a sentence or here,

before proceeding to the next sentence; reference the almost identical concept that Kant

made in the first critique.} As evidence of this, he cited developments in the “new

molecular philosophy” which demonstrated that “astronomical interspaces” exist “betwixt

atom and atom” and show that “the world is all outside; it has no inside.” 27 The social and

anthropological lesson he drew from this was that people are both earthlings and spiritual;

he called human nature 'ta stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the

Universe."28 At one extreme, there is the substantive ideal; at the other, the material world,

which is mostly empty space, a sheet placed over a façade. Nevertheless, he regarded the

essence of human nature, that 'tstupendous antagonism,” as lying beyond the phenomenal –

in the realm of the noumenal or spiritual. On the surface, man seems to be just another
25
Sardar M. Anwaruddin, “Emerson’s Passion for Indian Thought,” International Journal of
Literature and Arts. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20130101.11.
26
Citation needed from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
27
Ibid., emphasis added.
28
"Fate," Ziff 373-374.
 14
superficial tenant of the globe, like his fellow creatures, “flox and woodchuck, hawk and

snipe and bittern;” both man and beast, “when nearly seen,” that is, when examined

closely, appear to be mere quanta of matter. But Emerson was sane enough to

acknowledge that we are more than dust in the wind; we are rational and spiritual beings.

Although we are part of nature, which is irrational, chaotic, and unconscious, we are

endowed with innate knowledge and equipped with the intelligence required to harness or

have dominion over nature’s entropic forces. Thus, Emerson regards man’s rationality and

self-consciousness as special cases within the prevailing entropic cosmological principle

operative in the nature. Consistent with this anthropology, Emerson advances the bold

hypothesis that the creative activity shown by strong readers dissolves and reorganizes

matter "by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic"29 Thus, while

individuals cannot absolutely master fate or contingency they can exert their will to

overcome the inertia of social history and their own biography; in other words, for

Emerson will and character are the keys to cultural advancement.30 This is the principle

that grounds his educational ideal.

A suggested above, Emerson argued that human beings have paid for the new

powers they have acquired in modern civilization by the loss or diminution of primitive

resources they once possessed. Nevertheless, he held that human nature still possesses

something of its original potency. What we are, essentially does not consist in "sack and

sack, belly and members, link in a causal chain, nor any ignominious baggage;" instead,

“the . . . Lightning which explodes and fashions planets" is in us."31 Thus, for Emerson

29
"Fate," Ziff 377.
30
"Nature," Ziff 48; cf. "History," Ziff 158.
31
"Fate," Ziff 373-374.
 15
an affirmative potential latent in human nature opens expanded possibilities for

individual development in the modern period.

In "Literary Ethics," an address he gave at Dartmouth College, he articulated a

vision of what individuals might achieve. But first, he delivered the negative

assessment: Americans had thus far failed to realize their potential (they should have

already “sired a brood of Titans, who should laugh and leap in the continent, and run up

the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love”32). Instead, he lamented

that a "certain grace without grandeur" characterized American culture; Americans

seemed chained to the thoughts and emotions of their age, prisoners "of a despotic

genius." Diffidence seemed to have crept over the American mind and individuals were

ill-disposed to innovation, preferring antiquity, or “any usage, any livery productive of

ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought." Instead of serving thought,

individuals served "the despotism of the senses.”33

Emerson’s idealism was not facile or naive; he does not dismiss all that is apparent,

all that is not ultimate as excess baggage, dream, and illusion. A pragmatic sense of

historical and social development is evident in he thought. And yet his pragmatism was

tempered by moral or theological sensibilities; he perceived a deep mystical unity

underlying the heterogeneity of nature. The practical significance of this attitude is seen in

the fact that he strove to reconcile the contradiction between theory, or ideals, and practice,

or things. In thulis connection I argue that the Emersonian scholar is a transcendental

intelligence inherent in the universe, but a construct of human genius manifest concretely,

though imperfectly, in individuals. Such genius perceives unity amidst the whirlwind of

nature.
32
Literary Ethics: An Oration Delivered Before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth college, July 24,
1838,'t in The Collected Works of Ralph Valdo Emerson, ed. R. E. spiller and A. R. Ferguson
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. l, 100; hereinafter
"Spiller and Ferguson."
33
Ibid.
 16
In ways that roughly but interestingly correspond to certain arguments advanced by

David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature and by William James in his Gifford lectures

on the varieties of religious experience, Emerson indicates that individuals show genius by

placing externally sensible objects and internally (i.e., psychologically) sensible ideas in the

same field of vision and action. As in religious or mystical experience, this enables the

reader of nature to draw links between the separate units of perception and the whole. To

explicate this, I highlight certain correspondences between Emerson’s thought that of Hume

and James. While all three would admit that the universe, when analyzed though a purely

empirical lens, appears to be a mass of discrete and disconnected quanta (matter/energy),

that chaos is transformed into ‘percepts’ – i.e., impressions of perception (Hume) when we

experience the world. As rational beings we perceive a universe and not a chaotic

multiverse. Thus, I argue, Hume, Emerson, and James, each in his own way, held that

human nature experiences and reflects the Ideal behind nature’s varied outward forms as

One.

Hume would hardly say that the Ideal pervades everything; and yet he admitted that

the construction of reality, though false, is a ‘salutary truth’. Similarly, James and Emerson

advanced the proposition that any humanly sensible conception of reality comprehends and

gives form to nature’s heterogeneity. As men of science, all three admitted that unity is not

apparent to the senses (these perceive only chaos or multiplicity, not unity, pace Henry

Adams), but each also held that our ability to experience the world is the essence of human

nature. Brilliantly explicating this aspect of Emerson’s thought, Larzar Ziff states that “the

spirit that is present behind nature does not act upon us from without but acts within us.”34

Unlike sensory awareness, that spirit (in the form of intuition), “acts within us . . . telling of

34
Ziff, 17; see the discussion of intuition, infra, chapter 2.
 17
the ideal”; this Ideal “unites the elements in the natural world to one another and to

ourselves.”35

Although Emerson often speaks of an Ideal beyond the discrete units of experience,

for him the distinction between the derivative forms manifest in the world and Spirit is a

formal or academic distinction. These categories suggest an enmity between Spirit and the

World which does not actually exist. In Emerson’s historiography and eschatology, cultural

progress must entail a reconciliation between Spirit and the world. He cites a parable, from

the Vedas, in which progress, as the Ideal, is pursued throughout time, even as it exists

above time. Vishnu pursues Maya, in all her ascending forms: "from insect and

crawfish . . . until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god."36

Emerson draws the moral lesson: Genius must follow the ideal through all its

transformations just as Vishnu followed Maya; likewise the scholar who possesses genius

must not lose sight of the unity above nature’s ephemeral forms

Despite being radically modern and skeptical, Emerson's skepticism merges with

piety; he seems to struggle against skepticism with the goal of forging an edifying and

humane aesthetic vision. He does this in many ways, as in his insistence that individuals

have the capacity to transform raw materials (material stuff as well as texts and ideas) into

previously unknown and useful forms. Only in "the absence of spirit," Emerson argues, is

nature insentient; but nature responds to the spiritually active reader who continues to

recognize new aspects of nature and the self. Only by thus reading or reconstructing nature,

Emerson argues, is it possible to build a livable, spiritual home in the middle region

between relative and absolute existence. Such a home is inhabited by the transcendental or

absolute self and by actual living persons, relative selves who are constrained by nature.

35
Ibid.
36
Fate, Ziff 372.
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Emerson's "program" for refining virtue acknowledges this; which is to say that his

educational ideal is informed by practical historical awareness.

Emerson refuses to subdivide goodness into social and divine forms of virtue, as

Rousseau did. According to Rousseau, goodness in man is love of his fellows, and the

goodness of god is the love o or er; or it is by order that he maintains what exists and links

each part with the whole."3 While Emerson's notion of virtue leans toward th e di vine, • h

e IS • also concerned •th finding 'ta general standard of Geedom for all, not just for an

educated elite."29 For him, individuals cannot achieve the balanced temperament which

characterizes the virtuous soul, unless they embrace all aspects of the human project, the

individual

25. "Nature," Ziff 48.

26. Émile 285.
27. Richardson 103.
and the social. For this reason Emerson recommends that individuals occasiona y return

from their separate tasks to embrace other individuals and the common uman project.

Emerson treats the problem of alienation both in social or economic terrns an in

psychological or cognitive terms. He addresses the issue of the reduction of individuals to

commodities and the subjugation of thought beneath contingent categories an prejudice.

There are correspon ences between Emerson s perspectives and those of Rousseau.

Rousseau argued that all individuals are orn free and yet all are in chains. According to

Emerson, individuals can be free as intellectually self-sufficient beings who can maintain

their integrity, unlike society, which, Emerson argues, "is servile from want of will, and

therefore the world wants saviors and religions." Only self-reliant readers can avoid

subjugation, w ic or
 19
Emerson is like slow suicide.31

Emerson's Educational Vision as an Experimental Practice

Emerson emphasizes that individuals must lay claim to a higher order of

psychological identity and political sovereignty. The divided personality and sovereignty

which are the common characteristics of individuals as members of society and political

commonwealths are, in his view, too thin to be enjoyed. Like

30. Emerson, "Fate" Ziff 378.

31. Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley, Ca:
University of California Press, 1988), 205.

the people of America's revolutionary moment, and especially the designers of the

American political system, Emerson believed in America's potential for remaking of the

world and, by implication, human nature. Like the founders, he hoped the

American experiment would initiate the beginning of a new, advanced civilization.

However, beyond social and technological development and material prosperity, Emerson

argued that progress must entail moral reconstruction. From his perspective, this can hardly

be accomplished through crude exertions of mechanical skill or a materialistic analysis of

human nature and history. However, w • e e thinks that mind is more than disembodied

spirit; he also thinks mind is instantiated in history, i.e., made manifest in and through the

world. Although he is an idealist, Emerson realizes that individuals live a social and

historical context; and that human virtue is necessarily relative -- a mean between pure

idealism and crude self-interest. This implies that individuals, as self-reliant mora agents,

must be ready to invent new formulations of virtue that take into account historical

circumstances and a transhistorical standard. This work requires both political and moral

genius.
 20
The work of the founders Of the United States (in this work we study the

contributions made by James Madison and his cohorts, the authors of the Federalist

papers) demonstrates moral and political genius. The new political science outlined in the

Federalist begins with a reformulation of the theory of human nature and virtue. Madison

argues that civic virtue can be derived from

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Any excess of emp asis on one part would be
corrected, and a just balance would be ma e.

33. "Fate," Ziff 362.