Essays: First and Second Series

"Yes, it was. It was published in 1841 and, typically, most of the great writings from American philosophy began as lectures. You get this sense in almost all of Emerson’s writings, that he’s talking to a group of people and he really wants them to stay awake. It is not uncommon to hear about people falling asleep in these long lectures. The poetry, the explanation, the dramatic tension, all of this was meant to serve a pedagogical function, and to keep the listeners interested. And we forget that. We forget that that is basically what philosophy is: it is teaching . That’s what you really get out of Emerson’s essays. “We forget that that is basically what philosophy is: it is teaching .” Emerson’s essays are responding to Tocqueville’s claim that America is a place inimical to philosophical interests. He said this in 1830. And then Emerson immediately—or almost immediately—in 1837 and 1838, gave two lectures: ‘The American Scholar’ and the ‘Divinity School Address’. They basically say, You are right. This is not the place for your type of philosophy. Philosophy had either been relegated to a rationalist position or an empiricist position or a hyper-formal position that Kant expresses. Emerson says, Let’s get down to the real life of philosophy . This is what you find in the first series of essays. I picked the First Series primarily because it lays out the high points of Transcendentalism that then get carried on into Pragmatism. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The first series of essays consists of many essays, but I’m going to just touch on a few. Here in the First Series , you find ‘Self-Reliance,’ where he writes that “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” This is about the drive to individualism or the drive to nonconformity that we heard in ‘The American Scholar’ but then, even more jarringly in the ‘Divinity School Address.’ Emerson is trying to separate himself off, to some extent, from the stultifying ways of the past. You hear that a lot in ‘Self-Reliance.’ When he says “trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” he’s trying to centre us on our own conscience, our own goals, and the account that we give of our own lives. This is the sort of ancient imperative that was in Plato ’s Apology . That’s right. When Nietzsche read Emerson in the 1860s, he said that one of Emerson’s strongest points was what called Nietzsche calls his “ skepsis. ” What he meant by that is Emerson’s deep scepticism about the conventions of life. He and Emerson shared that scepticism. What I will say is that there is another aspect to Emerson, even in the First Series , that balances out this individualism. I think that’s what’s really interesting in the First Series and in Emerson’s essays generally. We have ‘Self-Reliance,’ but then we have a sister essay in the same series called ‘Compensation’ which looks nothing like ‘Self-Reliance.’ Similarly, in the Second Series , you have two sister essays that reflect the same issue of power and fate. The difficulty and the challenge of reading Emerson is to read these diametrically opposed positions together or side-by-side and see them as creating a productive tension. ‘Compensation’ says that your freedom is always limited by your history. Freedom is always limited by the genealogy that you find yourself in. This too, I think, would resonate with Nietzsche. But, more specifically, Emerson says that we always operate within a wider cosmic, social and political give-and-take. There is no action without an equal and opposite reaction. And that reaction is just as real and just as connected to us as the action itself. For example, you can think about ‘Self-Reliance’ as this promethean call to activity, whereas ‘Compensation’ is this sense that we must hold back, or rather that we must hold things in reserve, or that our actions are always set within a wider context or network of relations. So, I think these two essays, with this push towards freedom and the pull towards togetherness that you see in ‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘Compensation,’ are interesting poles that create the tension that drives American Transcendentalism but also American Pragmatism. This is a fascinating question. Concord is a unique place: it is both the birthplace of the American Revolution, but also it is deeply conservative. It was conservative even in Emerson’s day. He came from a long line of ‘painful preachers’—conservative, Puritan, congregationalist ministers. Emerson’s first wife—his first real love—died of tuberculosis and, after that tumult, he returned to Concord. He came back home to the place where he was raised, but he had changed after his wife’s death. When he returned to Concord, he was not comfortable going back to old ways of life. And, in fact, the first thing he did, when invited to give the 200th memorial talk at Concord, is that he went to interview the last surviving soldier of the Battle of Concord, the last minuteman, whose name was Thaddeus Blood. Emerson thought that Blood held the key, I think, to the challenge of being American—the need to renew yourself and to engage in this continual revolution of conscience. Emerson was interested in knowing what freedom could be, other than just political freedom or freedom in name only. So, he was fascinated by the various ways individuals might exercise their freedom and how communities could facilitate that. Well let’s think about the ‘The Over-Soul’ for a minute. This is another famous essay from the first series. You see that Emerson held a metaphysical position that is oftentimes downplayed in the discussions of contemporary American philosophy. Emerson believed that there was a self and the Self. During this time, he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and had been inspired by it to write “The Over-Soul.”He believed that our own selves are usually engaged in fairly petty, mundane, superficial activities. The point of life is to get down to the elemental. In other words, it’s to strip bare the other aspects of life and to get to this Self or Soul, where we are all connected. Emerson didn’t explain exactly how to achieve that, but he believed that we are all connected. You can think of this as a type of pantheism or panpsychism which, oddly enough, has come back into fashion with David Chalmers and others recently. But Emerson was on to it in 1841."