Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)

4. Mature philosophy

Emerson’s ‘Experience’ dominates the second series of essays (1844), building an interpretation of human experience around the writer’s grief at the death of his five-year-old son. The essay opens with the depiction of a series of stairs whose top and bottom we cannot see. This, Emerson tells us, is ‘where we find ourselves’. Like many Emersonian essays, ‘Experience’ tells the story of ‘the fall of man’ and of rebirth or renewal – not through a foreign power but through contemporary ‘men and women’. How can we make our way through ‘the system of illusions’ or the ‘train of moods’ in which we find ourselves, when there is no final, best view, no ‘anchorage’? A newly pragmatic Emerson maintains that we can learn to skate over the surfaces of life; or, in a related metaphor, to find that ‘everything good is on the highway’. The second series also includes ‘Manners’, where Emerson develops a philosophy of social relations that, anticipating Nietzsche, stresses the distance between individuals. In ‘Nominalist and Realist’ the final essay in the series, he develops a perspectival metaphysics that complements his epistemology of moods.

Emerson’s preoccupation with the heroic develops most fully in Representative Men (1850), which includes essays on Plato, Napoleon, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Goethe. The sceptic in the Montaigne essay takes a position between those of ‘the abstractionist and the materialist’, each of whom treats the world as more solid than it is. We are in fact ‘spinning like bubbles in a river… bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions’. Montaigne, the wise sceptic, develops a philosophy of ‘fluxions and mobility… a ship in these billows we inhabit… tight, and fit to the form of man’.

The greatest of Emerson’s late essays, ‘Fate’ (1860), dwells on the biological, physical and psychological forces controlling our experience. Our individual fortunes are fated, Emerson holds, in that the events that ‘seem to meet’ us are as much ‘exuded’ from our character as encountered. Yet he insists that there is also liberty or freedom, and that this liberty rests on our powers of thinking: ‘if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself’. As in all his work, from Nature onward, Emerson records both our subjection to necessity and our powers of overcoming it. The ideal life, he suggests, can be achieved through a controlled oscillation or balance between ‘Nature’ and ‘Thought’.