Ralph Waldo Emerson, Realist: Essays of Resignation and Renewal
We already know Emerson. He is the American transcendentalist. An Idealist. He proposed an egocentrism that threatens our moral heritage. He is that proponent of self-reliance who fell just short of the achievement known as Henry David Thoreau. And let us not neglect his compulsory five minutes in our university education -- no doubt in American History 101, not Literature.
It is interesting that in his day Emerson was criticized for not being spiritual enough and for humanizing our notions of the divine. Today, he is not real enough. Yesterday, he was criticized for taking the collapse of Christianity for granted. Today, if Emerson is not entirely useful as a mystic, he nonetheless has the practical application of padding self-help books. Fortunately, Emerson is a universalist and so it is entirely appropriate that of two bitterly opposed camps, he should find himself the universal enemy of both, ally of neither.
We do not know Emerson very well. Our modern detractors have pressed a single essay to our noses so often that we are tempted to re-title it "The Over-sold." The harm in such an emphasis is that the remaining essays continue to be undersold. Mechanist Books then, puts forth as its first title -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Realist -- for we wish to set the following essays onto the scales, as it were, as counterweight to the popular notion that Emerson was "not real enough."
The popular version of Emerson has all of its weight on one side only: "Emerson is an idealist. Our generation is made up of materialists. We are irreconcilable." Now, in order to recover that equilibrium which Emerson himself did not fail to demonstrate, we might place on the public scales a counterweight to "Emerson, author of The Over-soul." In doing so, we risk leaving the impression that we now say, "Emerson is not an idealist but a materialist." There is a difference however between presenting a balanced scale and an attempt to balance a scale by presenting a counterweight. This selection of essays risks its own objective by presenting itself as the counterweight.
We readily admit that it is an error to restrict Emerson to materialism -- but it is no less of an error to say that his transcendentalism pays no respect to the material view ... to the particular, to the worldly, to science, and to the inexorability of Fate. If he finds respect to Plato not only due but beneficial, does it then follow that Emerson "thereby" discards the senses? We would have said, "No," but for that fact that this prejudice certainly follows in the wake of public opinion. We have inherited the notion that transcendentalism is escapism, that it is a case of wishful thinking which only seeks to transcend material in order to propose a beyond. But the origin of the word "transcend" refers to a "climbing across," and if Emerson should climb across from one perspective on reality to another perspective on this same reality, it would require that we participate in this subjective struggle ourselves if we are to understand his realism. ...
