Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

The sesquicentennial of the publication of Walden was a fruitful year for Thoreau studies, even as work associated with the Emerson bicentennial of 2003 continued to appear. Of particular importance for our understanding of the Transcendentalist movement is Sterling F. Delano's publication of the first comprehensive modern history of Brook Farm. Delano's study, with its focus on George Ripley, supplements Dean Grodzins's recent biography of Theodore Parker (see AmLS 2002, pp. 21–22) to confirm the value of further study of Transcendentalism's lesser-known figures and of the "movement" itself, particularly the network of interpersonal relationships that shaped it.

i Emerson

a. Emerson in Philosophy and Intellectual History

Gustaaf Van Cromphout's discerning discussion in "Emerson on the Realization of Freedom" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 28: 69–84) deftly places Emerson's discussions of free will within the larger context of 18th- and 19th-century German idealist discourse, emphasizing Emerson's understanding of the spirit of freedom realizing itself "through continual negation of what negates it." This vitality and "perpetual 'openness' to the future" is not of course an absolute freedom but a creative freedom in which the will, through choice, shapes its circumstances within the given limits of the individual. Van Cromphout elucidates Emerson's Kantian recognition that the moral is characterized by the pursuit of universal rather than limited or personal benefit. In "Between Faith and Unbelief: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Man and God" (Amst 48 [2003]: 483–95) Elisabeth Hurth explains how Emerson's rejection of the tradition of "supernatural rationalism" and his critics' comparison of his philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "ego-theism of an extreme idealism" resulted in the "constant refrain" of charges of atheism by his critics. Hurth demonstrates, however, that even in the Divinity School Address, while defending a faith based on "inward revelation," Emerson "did not question the historical positivity of the Jesus tradition" and continued to maintain an idealism that affirmed a world "independent of the self." In his later career he did not succumb to despair or fatalism but sustained an "optimistic teleology" in which "the confidence in human potential prevails." This essay is a worthy addition to Hurth's valuable readings of 19th-century theological discourse in New England.

In a thoughtful account of his return to Emerson after some four decades, Harold Fromm in "Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson's Evolutionary Existentialism" (HudR 57: 71–95) portrays Emerson as an unacknowledged "co-father of existentialism with Kierkegaard," whose rejection of historical Christianity marked the beginning of a process of secularization and naturalization that was furthered in Heidegger and others. Fromm identifies Emerson's emphasis on becoming or process as the key to his thought and links it to the development of evolutionary theory in the 19th century. "Science in general and evolution in particular . . . generated the spiritual glue that held his worldview together." Fromm concurs with Joseph Warren Beach and Laura Dassow Walls that Emerson never assimilated the full implications of Darwinian natural selection, but he argues that Emerson was coming to see terms such as spirit and spirituality as "less and less numinous, more and more material," and was steadily redefining his "oversoul" into something more closely akin to an evolution-based "human nature." Joel Porte's Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed (Yale) is a gathering of some three decades of Porte's insightful essays on Emerson and Thoreau, marked by his insistence on the careful reading of texts in their appropriate historical contexts. Of particular interest are Porte's trenchant defense of Emerson's sustained sense of political engagement and civic responsibility, his still unanswered call for more critical attention to the strand of whimsy and humor in Transcendental writing, and his new consideration of Thoreau's botanical passions and his interest in the concept of "wildness." Vincent Colapietro, "The Question of Voice and the Limits of Pragmatism: Emerson, Dewey, Cavell," pp. 174–96 in The Range of Pragmatism and the Limits of Philosophy, ed. Richard Shusterman (Blackwell), responds to Stanley Cavell's assertion of "the differences between Emerson and Dewey" by finding an Emersonian...