Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)

2. Emerson as philosopher

There is no one to whom commentators, philosophers or not, are more apt to deny the title of philosopher than Emerson. Most twentieth-century discussions of his work have been by literary critics, with such notable exceptions as John Dewey’s 1903 address ’Ralph Waldo Emerson – Philosopher of Democracy’ and a series of papers by Stanley Cavell. Emerson is no system-builder in the mould of Descartes, Kant or Hegel, and his use of the essay form – inherited from his hero, Montaigne – corresponds to the radical epistemological and metaphysical openness of his thought: towards the end of his great essay ‘Experience’, he writes, ‘I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment and this is a fragment of me.’

Emerson has a broadly Kantian outlook, according to which the world is in some way our construction. But like other Romantics, he finds that the ‘lenses which paint the world’ include our passions: ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.’ These moods ‘do not believe in one another’: each comes with ‘its own tissue of facts and beliefs’. In one moment, we find ourselves bound by fate, in another real possibilities open up; in one moment we see a picture or read a book with a sense of adventure and understanding, in another we cannot see what interested us before. ‘Our life’, Emerson states, ‘is March weather, savage and serene in one hour’.

At the centre of the series of moods lies the self – or, it would be better to say, the problem of the self. Emerson, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, finds the existence of the self to be a major issue. If the mass of men are ‘bugs or spawn’ and even the great or representative person is ‘partial,’ then the achievement of a fully developed human self is an enormous task. Emerson presents himself as having undertaken this task in ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841): ‘Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.’

Emerson’s philosophy is a blend of classical and incipiently ‘postmodern’ or ‘pragmatist’ notions. With its references to the ‘Unity’ or ‘Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained’, or to ‘the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam’, Emerson’s writing exhibits a strong Neoplatonic streak. Yet in a world of shifting moods and things that ‘slip through our fingers… when we clutch hardest at them’, Emerson finds no foundations, but only ‘a house founded on the sea’. Even our language, far from reflecting permanent forms, is ‘fluxional’, ‘vehicular and transitive… good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead’. These Neoplatonic and pragmatic tendencies come together in Emerson’s statement that ‘the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul’. Whether in history, philosophy or conversation, Emerson stresses the expansions or transitions of thinking the individual undergoes. Each of his major essays offers a series of such transitions.