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Canadian Review of American Studies 35.1 (2005) 109-121



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"Nature Will Not Be Disposed of":

Emerson against Historicism

Garvey, T. Gregory, ed. The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. 264 pp.
Worley, Sam McGuire. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 174 pp.

I

The following passage from Thoreau's "Walking", powerfully illustrates the fundamentally cosmo-centric disposition of Emersonian thought:

Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce ... even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it ... If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from the bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten.
(484)

Thoreau's ascending desire, drawn by nature ("the forest") beyond the narrowness of "church and state and school," moves decisively away from the dusty tumult of human affairs, especially the "most alarming" sphere of politics. Emerson describes this same cosmocentric desire as the "far-off remembering of the intuition [that] when good is near you ... you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name" ("Self-Reliance" 271). For Emerson, the individual's quest [End Page 109] for the 'good' intimated by nature opposes the anthropocentric urge to invest meaning or value solely in human affairs: ascent toward the 'good' necessarily "takes the way from man, not to man" (271). This desire to move away from humankind inspires Emerson's philosophic quest for non-human beginnings or origins; hence his lifelong effort to "return the festival of the intellect ... to its source" in the "method of nature... and try how far it is transferable to the literary life" ( "Method"118). Emerson's essays dramatize his unceasing effort to fashion a human life in contemplative accord with the identity of the whole or nature.

With respect to the identity of the whole, Emerson observes that nature's processes "point nowhere to anything final" as they conduce not "to any number of particular ends, but [rather] to numberless and endless benefit" ("Method" 121). The ceaseless generative motion of "total nature" (121) serves no special purpose or aim but rather accomplishes "the equal serving of innumerable ends without the least emphasis or preference to any" (120). Nature, which intimates an ideal condition of neutrality, "can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end, to a universe of ends, and not to one" (120). Devoid of an egoistic or "private will" (121) that craves distinction and rank, the whole or kosmos" knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life" (120).

Emerson's effort to approximate nature's method urges the necessity of "behold[ing]" the whole "in a spirit as grand as that by which it exists" ("Method" 120). This contemplative sublimity is referred to as "ecstasy" (121) or the "ecstatical state" (125), but also as eros in the Platonic sense of "a love impersonal" (129). Nature's method is best approximated by a movement of philosophic eros that resists the temptation to rest in a particular commitment, end, or solution. A philosopher equal to nature's method must always be mindful that, "Nature hates monopolies and exceptions ... [and that] the value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil." ("Compensation" 289). Emerson's philosophic eros, like that of Plato's Socrates, cultivates a 'zetetic' scepticism that dwells serenely within irresolvable tensions, securing the philosopher against the "mischievous tendency ... to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency...

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