Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment

Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call ‘the near, the low, the common’. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson’s efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his ‘aversive thinking’: his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell’s Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell’s philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson’s engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.

Kollektiv (Collective)

The idea of the ‘collective’ plays a key role in Goethe’s late work. It denotes a balance between multiplicity and unity, heterogeneity and homogeneity, which is characteristic both of Goethe’s authorship and of his literary work, above all his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). Etymologically, Goethe’s use of the term refers back to its original meaning from the Latin colligere; for him, a collective emerges when parts are gathered and arranged into some sort of ordered whole. It has formal, intellectual, and social implications. The term is semantically close to the concepts of the ‘aggregate’ and the ‘compendium,’ which are also essential to Goethe’s late poetics. The collective, the aggregate, and the compendium are all situated between mere particularity and full systematicity, in a sphere of the intermediary. Finally, Goethe’s idea of the collective found resonance primarily and early on in the United States, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

John Dewey e Ralph W. Emerson

O artigo tem por objetivo esclarecer a concepção de John Dewey acerca dos intercâmbios entre educação, arte e democracia, com o propósito de sugerir caminhos para uma crítica às tendências pedagógicas da atualidade. Para cumprir essa meta, são analisadas as teses de John Dewey acerca da produção intelectual de Ralph Waldo Emerson publicadas no ensaio “Emerson, the philosopher of democracy”, de 1903. O método utilizado para esse empreendimento é a análise retórica proposta por Perelman e Olbrechts-Tyteca. Em consonância com tais teses, as ideias de Emerson são examinadas à luz Sofística, em versão oposta à assumida por Platão, com especial atenção para as noções de percepção, poder e democracia, as quais são relacionadas com os conceitos deweyanos de experiência imediata, experiência estética e experiência democrática. O artigo conclui que as reflexões de John Dewey inspiradas em Emerson sugerem que a educação na atualidade seja guiada pelo poder transformador da imaginação.

The Influence of Vedanta on the Writings of Emerson: A Philosophical Inquiry

This article explores the insights of Vedanta in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vedanta proclaims that the ultimate reality is within us. The Vedanta propounds for the philosophical explanations of the Vedas. The absolute reality that Vedanta projects as Brahman is essentially inward, and the entire phenomenal manifestations are just the reflection of that ultimate reality. Every phenomenal manifestation is the qualitative growth of the absolute one. The ultimate reality rules everything that exists in the material world. In this way, Vedanta believes in unity between God, man and nature. These essentials of Vedanta have their influences on Emerson’s writings. His essays and poems talk about this cosmic unity. His concepts of Over-Soul and the self-reliance remain as the metamorphosis of the philosophical insights of Vedanta. His poem “Brahma” exactly reflects the impacts of Vedanta because the poem views an individual in an eternal divine form. Therefore, Emerson proves to be an American rishi (sage) in Concord who accordingly elaborates and qualifies the Vedanta with new insights. This article is exploratory and interpretive. It tries to correlate the concepts, ideas and essence of the Vedanta in the writings of Emerson. This study, in this way, makes a philosophical inquiry of Emerson’s writing with the perspective of Vedanta.

Transatlantic Exchanges and the Shifting “Geography of the Word”: Two New Letters from Emerson to Carlyle

This essay prints two previously unpublished letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle and contextualizes them against the background of the transatlantic collaboration between the two writers, shedding new light on their exchange of books and manuscripts between Boston and London during the second third of the nineteenth century.

Continuing Revelation and Institutionalization: Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charismatic Leadership in Antebellum America

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

Interlude III

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters “What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh....

The American Art of Memory

This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.