Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth, and: Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance, and: Emerson (review)

The inventors of American literature chose Ralph Waldo Emerson as the hero of their romance, naming him the fountainhead of democratic individualism. Before long, he was recast as the avatar of an American tradition of ritualistic dissent within liberal consensus. Emerson's life, once read as the story of a radical idealist's growth toward serene confidence in history as progress, was retold as a decline into cosmic Whiggery. This last has been the conventional wisdom for some time. Three books have now appeared on the two-hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birth, all solidly historicist and all meant to recuperate his radicalism while facing its limits. Together, they add up to an important reassessment of Emerson's cultural politics based on dialectical synthesis of the polarized critical positions that have gone before.

Laura Dassow Walls opens a new field of inquiry with her survey of Emerson's reading in the theoretical and applied science of his day. In Emerson's Life in Science, Walls aims to be "lyrical" and succeeds. Rather than a life narrative, she delivers a brilliantly associative intellectual biography, organized around central habits of nineteenth-century scientific thought: patterns of gnomic growth, polarity, evolution (vii). Texts by Goethe, de Sta'l, Coleridge, Dugald Stewart, John Herschel, William Whewell, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Darwin powerfully shaped Emerson's thinking, especially about the role of the secular intellectual. After resigning his pastorate, Emerson visited the Paris Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, which inspired him to announce in 1833: "I will be a naturalist." On his return to Boston, Emerson delivered his first four public lectures, all on scientific topics, then wrote Nature (1836), which declares that "the axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics." For the rest of Emerson's life, "science permeated his thought and writing at every level, from its deepest structure to his most casual analogies" (4). "‘The American Scholar,'" Walls writes, "was Emerson's attempt to rewrite [Francis] Bacon into an American idiom" (40). Likewise, the natural theology of such figures as Ralph Cudworth and William Paley shaped Emerson's sense of nature as the "art of god" and science as the discovery of divinely ordained laws. Walls is not concerned with denying Emerson's commitment to philosophical idealism or to what we now think of as humanistic knowledge; rather, she shows that in opposition to the mechanical "world of trades and manufactures and commercial enterprises . . . science and literature formed one single intellectual culture" (10). Thus, "the true man of science and the American scholar were one and the same," participants in a visionary "culture of truth," an anti-authoritarian republic of self-reliant intellectuals dedicated to the collective cultivation of moral knowledge of nature (4, 15).

Walls's sense that Emerson saw synthetic knowledge as social action also permeates Kenneth Sacks's book-length reappraisal of Emerson's 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar." Sacks reads the address not just as text but as situated performance, bringing to this task a historian's conscientious grounding in primary evidence: namely, the journals and correspondence of the New England transcendentalists and their Unitarian and orthodox Congregationalist opponents. Sacks demonstrates that rather than being at the forefront of the newness, "in 1837 Emerson, hardly their leader, was still struggling for his place" among transcendentalists whose attention was focused on radical figures like George Ripley and Orestes Brownson (2). This fact flowers into the truth that the combative rhetoric of "The American Scholar" reflects "the hesitation and ultimate courage of an...