Great episode! I also love Emerson, wish he were more recognized beyond the self-help/romanticism niche it feels like he’s wound up in. I do as ever worry a bit about the love of nature: there’s great passage near the beginning of the section of the Confidence-Man mocking Emerson and Thoreau where the Emerson standin asks one of the incarnations of the confidence man "don't you think, that for a man to pity where nature is pitiless, is a little presuming?" referring to a biblical passage about a snake charmer being bitten by a snake, which I take to be Melville somewhat esoterically pointing out that the transcendentalist view of nature perhaps undercuts the democratic and reformist values of an Emerson. Looking forward to the next episode!
Thanks! I think today's episode addresses that. I share the view of Thoreau (who took nature and its autonomy more seriously than Emerson did) as a crypto-right-winger, almost a Schopenhauer-like figure, who sees nature as brutal and requiring an answering brutality in the realm of the spirit. Whereas Emerson, a more consistent and genuine metaphysical leftist, seems to imagine nature wholly and pacifically transformed by man through the agency of the over-soul, made tame and humane, Hegelianly domesticated. (And I understand Melville, as a true novelist rather than a polemicist or prophet, to be torn between these impulses and compelled to dramatize their conflict endlessly.)
A good selection of essays from Emerson--capturing the range of his early thought.
Great episode! I also love Emerson, wish he were more recognized beyond the self-help/romanticism niche it feels like he’s wound up in. I do as ever worry a bit about the love of nature: there’s great passage near the beginning of the section of the Confidence-Man mocking Emerson and Thoreau where the Emerson standin asks one of the incarnations of the confidence man "don't you think, that for a man to pity where nature is pitiless, is a little presuming?" referring to a biblical passage about a snake charmer being bitten by a snake, which I take to be Melville somewhat esoterically pointing out that the transcendentalist view of nature perhaps undercuts the democratic and reformist values of an Emerson. Looking forward to the next episode!
Thanks! I think today's episode addresses that. I share the view of Thoreau (who took nature and its autonomy more seriously than Emerson did) as a crypto-right-winger, almost a Schopenhauer-like figure, who sees nature as brutal and requiring an answering brutality in the realm of the spirit. Whereas Emerson, a more consistent and genuine metaphysical leftist, seems to imagine nature wholly and pacifically transformed by man through the agency of the over-soul, made tame and humane, Hegelianly domesticated. (And I understand Melville, as a true novelist rather than a polemicist or prophet, to be torn between these impulses and compelled to dramatize their conflict endlessly.)