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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Emerson’s lectures in Biography (1835) and Representative Men (1850) reveal his conception of history as a dialectical process involving the heroic individual and society. The heroes of Biography play an “antithetical” role: perceiving the ever-progressive truth of the Spirit, they express that truth in and against a static and retrospective world. Their words and actions constitute the Spirit’s response to the alienation from which the Spirit suffers in society, the established “thesis.” Representative Men demonstrates Emerson’s increasing reconciliation with society in the 1840’s. His heroes are no longer inspired rebels, but instead are products of both Spirit and society. History. Emerson now shows, is not so much a matter of conflict as of synthesis. In the dialectical process rightly conceived, however, no synthesis is final—a fact which Emerson illustrates by severely criticizing his Representative Men and by showing the tentativeness and defectiveness of even their greatest achievements.
1 W. T. Harris, “The Dialectical Unity in Emerson's Prose,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 18 (1884), 195–202; Walter Blair and Clarence Faust, “Emerson's Literary Method,” Modern Philology, 42 (1944). 79 95; Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1952). pp. 112–19; Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). p. 58; Robert C. Pollock, “Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Single Vision.” in American Classics Reconsidered, ed. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. (New York: Scribners. 1958), p. 22.
2 Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1965), p. 558 et passim: Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar (Cambridge. Eng. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. 416 et passim. Hegel also knew that the conception of the dialectic as cosmic process, instead of merely thought process, had its distant ancestry in such thinkers as Heraclitus and Proclus; on this “ancestry” see also The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1903–04), viii, 180.
3 The Friend (London: Pickering, 1850), I, 118, n.
4 Philip L. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), p. 77.
5 Complete Works, n, 10; subsequent references are identified in the text by W.
6 The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959–72), ii, 3: subsequent references are identified in the text by EL.
7 The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1946). p. 262.
8 Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton. 1957), p. xviii.
9 Thomas Carlyle. Works ( 1896 99: rpt. New York: AMS, 1969). v, 2.
10 Vorlesungen iiher die Philosophic der Geschichte, Sdmt-liche Werke,\\ (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1961), 60 61.
11 Cours de philosophie: Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Pichon & Didier, 1828), dixième leçon, pp. 19 20.
12 Essays in Criticism: First Series (London: Macmillan. 1898), p. 14.
13 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Oilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al, vii (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 147.
14 I agree with McCormick that Cousin was Emerson's major source for the idea of representativeness, contrary to Sakmann's and Matthicssen's suggestions that Emerson derived the idea from Swedenborg. See Paul Sakmann. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Geisteswelt (Stuttgart: Frommann. 1927), p. 133; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 632: John O. McCormick. “Emerson's Theory of Human Greatness,” New England Quarterly. 26 (1953), 303–04, 311. Kenneth Kurtz, in his unpublished doctoral dissertation “The Sources and Development of Emerson's Representative Men” (Yale 1947). was probably first in pointing to the likelihood of Emerson's debt to Cousin in this respect: “In his tenth lecture Cousin labors the idea that great men are ‘representative’ It seems almost certain … that [Emerson's] use of the term ‘representative man’ for ‘hero’ came from this particular chapter in Cousin” (p. 76). Moreover, about a month before Emerson began lecturing on Representative Men he noted in his journal: “Swedenborg & Behmen saw that things were representative. They did not sufficiently see that men were” (Journals anil Miscellaneous Notebooks, ix. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971, 342). This statement, which seems to dismiss Swedenborg as a source of the idea that men are representative, lost some of its directness when Emerson transferred it to Representative Men ( W, iv, 8).
15 Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 432.
16 The decrease in importance of awareness is illustrated by the later Emerson's assertion that “Moral sense makes genius in spite even of disowning by genius” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1909–14, ix, 151).
17 So“ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), p. 35, n.
18 “The Hegel Myth and Its Method.” Philosophical Review, 60 (1951), 461.
19 Nineteenth Century Studies (New York: Harper, 1966), p. 44.
20 Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 318.
21 Young has shown that the skepticism Emerson ascribes to Montaigne is Emerson's rather than Montaigne's. Emerson's knowledge of Montaigne was superficial; Young points out, for instance, that Emerson altogether ignored the “Apology of Raimond Sebond,” Montaigne's longest (and most difficult) essay and his most remarkable expression of skepticism. See Charles Lowell Young, Emerson's Montaigne (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 25–26.
22 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, 1887), i, 290.
23 Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1944). p. 156.
24 E.g., Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ix. 359–60; for an examination of the more specifically Transcendentalist background of the “poet-priest” association, see Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 50–54, 40–45.
25 “Emerson and Shakespeare,” PMLA, 56 (1941), 532–43.
26 The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N. Y.: Double-day, n.d.), pp. 58–61.
27 The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 107; Heine, Samtliche Werke (Munich: Rosl, 1923), v, 394–95 and vin, 148^19; see also Heine's important letter of 15 April 1849, in Briefe, ed. Friedrich Hirth (1950 56: rpt. Mainz: Kupfer-berg, 1965; 6 vols, in 2), iii, 170.
28 Enzyklopddie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Samtliche Werke, vi (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1956), 148.
29 Though Swedenborg's inclusion seems to us incongruous, he once enjoyed an international reputation not unlike that of a Sigmund Freud or a Carl Gustav Jung. Kant found him important enough to ridicule him at great length in Trawne eines Geistersehers, erlautert durch Traume der Metaphysik (1766). Blake became a Swedenborgian visionary. Senancour's Ober-mann is given to Swedenborgian meditations. Balzac wrote Swedenborgian novels such as Séraphita and Louis Lambert. Gerard de Nerval and Baudelaire showed deep interest in Swedenborg's system. In America, in addition to Swedenborg's appeal to the mystical side of such men as Sampson Reed, there was the elder Henry James, one of his most devoted disciples. Concerning Emerson's choice of heroes for Biography, his editors state: “All of the great men selected … had in some way helped Emerson to resolve his own personal problems by furnishing examples of integrity and self-reliance” (EL. i, 95). His “subjectivity” in the thirties is also illustrated by his exclusion from Biography of Napoleon and Goethe, both of whom were very much in his mind at the time, but whom he excluded largely because of his moral objections to them. Later, when Emerson as spokesman for his age compromised with the consensus gentium, the two greatest men of the age became inevitable subjects for Representative Men.
30 Journals, viii, 62. Emerson recognized the secret of Goethe's Olympian serenity, as when he pointed out that “Goethe, as a man who wished to make the most of himself, was right in avoiding the horrors” (Journals, viii, 70). Something similar could be said of Emerson, and Nietzsche did say it when he described Emerson as “ein Solcher, der sich in-stinktiv bloss von Ambrosia nâhrt, der das Unverdauliche in den Dingen zurücklässt” (Gesammelte Werke, xvn, Munich: Musarion, 1926, 116).
31 “On Emerson,” Daedalus, 88 (1959), 712–18, rpt. in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Stephen E. Whicher (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962). p. 12.
32 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Works (Boston: Houghton, 1892), xi, 88.
33 Kritische Essays zur europaischen Lileratur (Bern: Francke, 1950), p. 120.