Episode 17: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Part 2 idealinthewest.com /episode-17-ralph-waldo-emerson-part-2 Stream audio The first thing we have to say respecting Emerson as a subject for writing about the Ideal is that we are aware of the irony. He spent his whole life trying to convince us that each of us is the Ideal, individually wrapped, and yet we persist in thinking it’s about him. But he himself used the examples of Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe and other “representative men” to make his points, so I feel safe in doing the same.¹ Just remember to look at the moon, not his pointing finger. I’ve already quoted from his essay The Transcendentalist in which he makes explicit his connection to the Idealist tradition, and certainly I encourage you to read the entire essay. But another excerpt here would serve as valuable distinction between it and materialism, to show Emerson’s appreciation of consciousness as the prior reality.
The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as Engraved from a drawing by Samuel the “other end,” each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact Worcester Rowse, (1822-1901) which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, “Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive.” What more could an idealist say?
This was written in 1842, but as we’ve seen his experience of the Ideal goes back much further, and permeates his first published work Nature, which, as Robert Richardson says in Emerson: The Ideal in America, “…was his effort to get it all into one statement, and he does in under a hundred pages. And it still has this electric jolt.” Early on, he gives an account of one of those moments where the Ideal passes from the theoretical into actual experience, or rather he passes from the material into the Ideal.
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — 1/4