Emerson And Other Minds

In Emerson and Other Minds, Michael J. Colacurcio traces the long arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. While Emerson's seldom argues academically in his essays, he intends the essays to be primary acts of philosophy. The essays are also highly wrought literary performances, and so they need to be closely read in the New Critical manner. Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity's central writers on the question of privacy: the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another's process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of self-reliance, but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship. Colacurcio's close reading results in a two-volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays--both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense--that are certainly worth reading closely and with new eyes. --Eric Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

In Emerson and Other Minds, Michael J. Colacurcio traces the long arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. While Emerson's seldom argues academically in his essays, he intends the essays to be primary acts of philosophy. The essays are also highly wrought literary performances, and so they need to be closely read in the New Critical manner. Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity's central writers on the question of privacy: the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another's process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of self-reliance, but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship. Colacurcio's close reading results in a two-volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays--both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense--that are certainly worth reading closely and with new eyes. --Eric Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

Recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

A collection of essays from the father of the American transcendentalism, including “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “Love,” and “Art.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “Nature” declared that understanding nature was the key to understanding God and reality, and laid the groundwork for transcendentalism. His legacy of boldly questioning the doctrine of his day and connecting with nature will resonate with today’s readers in search of meaning and enlightenment. Essays include “Nature” (1836) and Emerson’s first series, published in 1841: “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,” “Spiritual Laws,” “Love,” “Friendship,” “Prudence,” “Heroism,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “Intellect,” and “Art.” Nature and Other Essays joins Gibbs Smith’s best-selling Wilderness series. Standing beside the works of his protégée Henry David Thoreau, as well as John Muir, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Jack London, these essays are reissued to encourage and inspire philosophers, travelers, campers, and contemporary naturalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) was a famous lecturer, philosopher, poet, and writer. He led the transcendentalist movement of the 1800s, mentored Henry David Thoreau, and was a pioneer of multiculturalism in American writing.

EMERSON’S ESSAYS have become the signature writings of the famous American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not only did these essays turn heads and open eyes in the mid nineteenth century, but they are still doing the same today. His spiritual insights can be seen most profoundly in New Thought and the work of Ernest Holmes and the Science of Mind philosophy. So much so, that specific essays are required reading in New Thought introductory classes. One teacher who has earned the esteem of spiritual leaders throughout New Thought, Dr. Carol Carnes has now provided readers with the specific essays that influenced Ernest Holmes the most: SELF-RELIANCE, THE OVER-SOUL, SPIRITUAL LAWS, COMPENSATION, and CIRCLES. Each chapter includes an essay and Carol’s commentary along with her insightful questions for the reader. The entire book has been edited to allow each reader to easily understand and grasp these concepts on a personal level in the world of today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dementia, an ordeal that marked his final two decades, has never been a secret among those who study Emerson's life. Still, few have focused on the period of Emerson's decline. Thus, his later thinking has succumbed to a process of critical forgetting too often ignored by scholars if not excluded from his oeuvre altogether. And yet Emerson's late output, composed as his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly, stages a reconsideration of interests that had preoccupied him for decades: the continuum of human thought and the rest of nature, the bearing of the individual toward the collective, the mind's relationship with the body. Emerson's Memory Loss presents an archive of texts documenting Emerson's intellectual, affective, and associative states during his late phase, along with the varying forms of shared connection from which these works emerge. It is also about the way such texts connect Emerson with a stream of thought in America, coursing through the works of other nineteenth-century writers and thinkers adjacent to Emerson, that emphasizes the aggregate over the singular, the social over the solipsistic, the engaged over the distant, and the many over the one. Hanlon attends to manuscripts and publications marking Emerson's collaborations with others which Emerson himself articulated as his most important work-texts written even as his ability to do so independently waned. Hanlon measures its resonance across broader strains of U.S. culture familiar to Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and more.