Emerson

SPECIAL! Eduardo Briceno on Hope and Mindset (about Dr. Carol Dweck's important book //Mindset//): 12 minute video - reflects some of Emerson and Locke's key ideas about how humans are capable of great development by taking control of one's attitudes. (Optional) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ofTn3N3zY4


 * Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist and Philosopher **

Excerpts from IEP (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) intro: In his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most widely known man of letters in America, establishing himself as a prolific poet, essayist, popular lecturer, and an advocate of social reforms who was nevertheless suspicious of reform and reformers. Emerson achieved some reputation with his verse, corresponded with many of the leading intellectual and artistic figures of his day, and during an off and on __#|again__ career as a Unitarian minister, delivered and later published a number of controversial sermons. Emerson’s enduring reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like [|Friedrich Nietzsche]) and a quintessentially American thinker whose championing of the [|American Transcendental movement] and influence on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and others would alone secure him a prominent place in American cultural history.
 * Required reading from here to end: **

Transcendentalism in America, of which Emerson was the leading figure, resembled British Romanticism in its precept that a fundamental continuity exists between man, nature, and God, or the divine. What is beyond nature is revealed through nature; nature is itself a symbol, or an indication of a deeper reality, in Emerson’s philosophy. Matter and spirit are not opposed but reflect a critical unity of experience. Emerson is often characterized as an idealist philosopher and indeed used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it simply as a recognition that plan always precedes action. For Emerson, all things exist in a ceaseless flow of change, and “being” is the subject of constant metamorphosis. Later developments in his thinking shifted the emphasis from unity to the balance of opposites: __#|power__ and form, identity and variety, intellect and fate.

Emerson remained throughout his lifetime the champion of the individual and a believer in the primacy of the individual’s experience. In the individual can be discovered all truths, all experience. For the individual, the religious experience must be direct and unmediated by texts, traditions, or personality. Central to defining Emerson’s contribution to American thought is his emphasis on non-conformity that had so profound an effect on Thoreau. Self-reliance and independence of thought are fundamental to Emerson’s perspective in that they are the practical expressions of the central relation between the self and the infinite.To trust oneself and follow our inner promptings corresponds to the highest __#|degree of__ consciousness.

From the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Emerson also drew the notion of “bildung,” or development, calling it the central purpose of human existence. The concepts of “unity” and “flux” that are critical to his early thought and never fully depart from his philosophy are basic to Buddhism: indeed, Emerson said, perhaps ironically, that “the Buddhist. . . is a Transcendentalist.” From his friend the social philosopher Margaret Fuller, Emerson acquired the perspective that ideas are in fact ideas of particular persons, an observation he would expand into his more general—and more famous—contention that history is biography.

Emerson’s work possesses deep original strains that influenced other major philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche read Emerson in German translations and his developing philosophy of the great man is clearly influenced and __#|confirmed__ by the contact.

From Emerson's essay "Nature": Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. // Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? // 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? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, // why should we grope among the dry bones of the past //, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also…

Excerpts from Emerson’s essay titled “Self-Reliance”:
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. // To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. // Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but // what they thought //. // A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. //Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, // because it is his. //

// In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts // : they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that // envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion //; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

// Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. // This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

// Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. // Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny…

// Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. // He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

// It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; // it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd k eeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Class lecture notes (PowerPoints): Emerson & Transcendentalists Emerson excelled as a preacher and pastor in a progressive Protestant church, but left to become an independent lecturer and scholar Gave a speech entitled [|//The American Scholar//] in 1837, which was called “America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Chief ideas: I[|ndividuality] [|Freedom] The ability for humankind to realize and achieve almost anything The relationship between the Soul, which is a part of Nature, and the surrounding world. Compare Rousseau, who said that children are corrupted by the unnatural world of civilization.

Food for thought: In what way was Emerson like Heraclitus? In what way was he unlike Descartes?

He influenced: Thoreau (author of Walden; a pioneer in civil disobedience) Walt Whitman (Emerson endorsed his poetry and began his fame) At any given time in the world, someone is reading one of Emerson’s Essays.

Takeaways for Emerson: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” “We must be our own before we can be another's.”

Find and read his essay “Self-Reliance” []

Emerson Quotes: []

Whitman bio: []

Was WALT WHITMAN a Philosopher? From Preface to Leaves of Grass, his vast personal poem: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, Have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men— go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families— Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”