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EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY IS IRRELEVANT TO EVERYDAY AND POLITICAL LIFE
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EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY IS IRRELEVANT TO EVERYDAY AND POLITICAL LIFE1. TRANSCENDENTALISM PLACES ITSELF ABOVE ORDINARY HUMAN EXPERIENCE Michael Lopez, Professor of English at Michigan State University, EMERSON AND POWER, 1996, p. 32. Empty, vacant—the image is invoked repeatedly in Henry James’s and Santayana’s portrayals of Emerson. For James, Emerson’s memory evoked an unforgettable series of “impressions” of New England’s cultural barrenness. “Emerson’s personal history,” he recalled, could be “condensed into the single word Concord, and all the condensation in the world will not make it look rich.” He continued, in his 1888 essay, to associate Emerson with the “terrible paucity of alternatives,” the “achromatic picture” his environment presented him. As far as James was concerned, the whole “Concord school” had, as Matthiessen notes, “enacted a series of experiments in the void.” Emerson’s “special capacity for moral experience”—which for James meant Emerson’s “ripe unconscious of evil,” his inability “to look at anything but the soul”—was the result of his coming to maturity in a community that “had to seek its entertainment, its rewards and consolations, almost exclusively in the moral world.” The “decidedly lean Boston” of Emerson’s day was self-enclosed, an island above the extremes of common human experience. 2. EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY IGNORES THE EVILS OF THE REAL WORLD Michael Lopez, Professor of English at Michigan State University, EMERSON AND POWER, 1996, p. 32-33. Emerson’s limited moral world was, like the “New England (of) fifty years ago,” sealed off, perpetually untested by the “beguilements and prizes” of experience. Boston existed serenely, James writes (and he means Boston to stand for Emerson), “like a ministry without an opposition.” It was no surprise, then, that his eyes were “thickly bandaged” to all “sense of the dark, the foul, the base,” and no surprise that there was “a certain inadequacy and thinness in (Emerson’s) enumerations” and “quaint animadversions.” “We get the impression,” James concludes, “of a conscience gasping in the void, panting for sensations, with something of the movement of the gills of a landed fish.”
George Santayana, philosopher, EMERSON: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1962, p. 31. This effect was by no means due to the possession on the part of Emerson of the secret of the universe, or even of a definite conception of ultimate truth. He was not a prophet who had once for all climbed his Sinai or his Tabor, and having there beheld the transfigured reality, descended again to make authoritative report of it to the world. Far from it. At bottom he had no doctrine at all. The deeper he went and the more he tried to grapple with fundamental conceptions, the vaguer and more elusive they became in his hands. Did he know what he meant by Spirit or the “Over-Soul”? Could he say what he understood by the terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, Benefit, or Beauty? He could not, and the consciousness of that incapacity was so lively within him that he never attempted to give articulation to his philosophy.
George Santayana, philosopher, EMERSON: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1962, p. 35. Mysticism, as we have said, is the surrender of a category of thought because we divine its relativity. As every new category, however, must share this reproach, the mystic is obliged in the end to give them all up, the poetic and moral categories no less than the physical, so that the end of his purification is the atrophy of his whole nature, the emptying of his whole heart and mind to make room, as he thinks, for God. By attacking the authority of the understanding as the organon of knowledge, by substituting itself for it as the herald of a deeper truth, the imagination thus prepares its own destructing. For if the understanding is rejected because it cannot grasp the absolute, the imagination and all its works—art, dogma, worship—must presently be rejected for the same reason. Common sense and poetry must both go by the board, and conscience must follow after: for all these are human and relative. Mysticism will be satisfied only with the absolute, and as the absolute, by its very definition, is not representable by any specific faculty, it must be approached through the abandonment of all. Epicurus Epicurus was a Greek philosopher born around 341 BC, he grew up in the Athenian colony of Samos, an island in the Mediterranean Sea. He was educated at home by his father, who was a schoolteacher. He was also be taught by various philosophers over the course of his life. At the age of 18 he went to Athens to join the military service. After a brief stay in the military, he joined his father in Colophon, where he to began to teach. Epicurus founded a philosophical school in Mitilíni on the island of Lésvos about 311. It was two or three years later that he became head of a school in Lampsacus (now Lâpseki, Turkey). Returning to Athens in 306, it was there that he settled permanently and taught philosophy to a body of devoted followers. Often instruction took place in the garden of Epicurus’ home, and because of this his followers were known as “philosophers of the garden.” Both women and men frequented his garden, students from all over Greece and Asia flocked to Epicurus’ school, attracted as much by his charm as his intellect. Epicurus was a prolific author, but almost none of his own works survived. This is probably because the Christian authorities’, which were largely in control, viewed his ideas as ungodly. Diogenes Laertius, who probably lived in the third century, wrote a 10-book Lives of the Philosophers, which included three of Epicurus’ letters in its recounting of the life and teachings of Epicurus. These three letters are brief summaries of major areas of Epicurus’ philosophy. The Letter to Herodotus “summarizes his metaphysics”, while the Letter to Pythocles “gives atomic explanations for meteorological phenomena”, and the Letter to Menoeceus “summarizes his ethics.” The Letter to Menoeceus also includes the Principal Doctrines, which is comprised of 40 sayings that deal mainly with ethical matters. The absence of Epicurus’ own writings means that we have to rely on later writers to reconstruct Epicurus’ thought. Two of these most important sources are the Roman poet Lucretius and the Roman politician Cicero. Lucretius was an Epicurean who wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), “a six-book poem expounding Epicurus’ metaphysics.” Cicero was an adherent of the skeptical academy, who wrote a series of works setting forth the major philosophical systems of his day, including Epicureanism. Another major source is the essayist Plutarch who was a Platonist. However, both Cicero and Plutarch were very hostile toward Epicureanism, so they must be used with care, since they often are less than charitable toward Epicurus, and may skew his views to serve their own purposes. Although the major outlines of Epicurus’ thought are clear enough, the lack of sources means many of the details of his philosophy are still open to dispute. Epicureanism’s essential doctrine is that the main goal of life is pleasure or the supreme good. In this view intellectual pleasures are valued above sensual ones, which tend to disturb peace of mind. Epicurus taught that true happiness is the serenity that comes from conquering our fear of the gods, of death, and of the afterlife. The ultimate end of Epicurean speculation about nature is to facilitate the end of these fears. Epicurus believed that the universe was infinite and eternal, consisting only of bodies and space. The bodies according to Epicurus are either “compound or atoms the indivisible stable elements of which the compounds are made up of.” “The world, as seen through the human eye, is produced by the whirlings, collisions, and aggregations of these atoms, which individually possess only shape, size, and weight.” In biology, Epicurus predicted the modern doctrine of natural selection. He postulated that natural forces give rise to organisms of different types and that only the types able to support and propagate themselves have survived. Epicurean psychology is very materialistic. It argues “sensations are caused by a continuous stream of films or “idols” cast off by bodies and impinging on the senses.” All of these sensations are believed to be absolutely reliable; error exists only when a sensation is not interpreted properly. “The soul is regarded as being composed of fine particles distributed throughout the body.” The conclusion of the body in death, Epicurus taught, leads to the conclusion of the soul, because it cannot exist apart from the body. Since death means total extinction, it has no meaning either to the living or to the dead, for “when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.” The prime virtues in the Epicurean system of ethics are “justice, honesty, and prudence, or the balancing of pleasure and pain.” Epicurus preferred friendship to love, because in his view it was less distressing. His personal “hedonism taught that only through self-restraint, moderation, and detachment can one achieve the kind of tranquility that is true happiness.” Despite his materialism, Epicurus believed in the freedom of will. He suggested that even the atoms are free and move spontaneously on occasion. Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods, but he emphatically maintained that as “happy and imperishable beings” of supernatural power they could have nothing to do with human affairs, although they might take pleasure in contemplating the lives of good mortals. Epicurus' ethics is a form of “egoistic hedonism,” or more simply, he says that “the only thing that is intrinsically valuable is one's own pleasure, anything else that has value is valuable merely as a means to securing pleasure for oneself.” Epicurus does however recommend a virtuous, moderately abstinent life as the best means to securing pleasure. 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