Emerson on Plato: The Fire's Center

Abstract

THE IDEALISTS DISMISS EMERSON as pragmatist and the pragmatists dismiss him as an idealist. It is safe to say that one is wrong, but it is safer to say that both are right. Newton Arvin's remark that Emerson is a polarized, contradictory, writer' echoes Robert Pollock's statement that he resists easy classification.2 Yet he has been classified, and all too readily classified, but what does the reader do when he discovers that two exactly opposite philosophies claim him, and not as minor, second-rate spokesman, at that, but indeed as great forerunner of their respective heresies? brushes him off as befuddled thinker, sincere but befuddled. It only depends on how you choose your quotations, as James was well aware when he chose his.3 Here is then: what he offers with his right hand, an emphasis on the vertical otherworldly, his left hand withdraws with an emphasis on the horizontal worldly. For every step forward there seems to be one backward for, as F. 0. Matthiessen points out (and our attitude has not changed significantly since the American Renaissance), He did not want his idealism to be divorced from the material facts of his age.4 Emerson foresaw, as he did so many other things, how the modern student would reply: And thus, 0 circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim. . . .5 Which did Emerson consider superior, asks Frederic Carpenter, deeds or thoughts; actions or ideas?6 Didn't Melville spot the same polarity in The Confidence1The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense, Hudson Review, XII, 5I (Spring, I959). 2A Reappraisal of Emersorn, Thought, XXXII, 86 (Spring, 1957). All these passages appealed to James as celebrating 'pragmatism,' or 'the superiority of action.' But he found these mixed with other passages which declared 'the superiority of what is intellectualized.' Therefore he indexed the two contrasting series of statements, and referred specifically to certain paragraphs which contained 'both close together' ; Frederic I. Carpenter, William James and Emerson, American Literature, XI, 43 (March, 1939). 'New York, 1941, p. II. 6 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-1904), II, 317; hereafter references are in the text. 6 William James and Emerson, p. 44.