FATE INTO FREEDOM: EMERSON'S PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRITUAL PROCESS

The primary purpose of this study is to demonstrate that Emerson had an internally coherent philosophy of the Spirit, a philosophy that would enable men to "east" themselves and find the true Spiritual Sun. The pith of Emerson's philosophy of the Spirit is the shift from the Christian conception of worldly existence as a place of trial to the Transcendentalist perception of nature and experience as a vast organic process unfolding the infinite spiritual potential of every incarnate soul.;Great care will be taken to show that it is misleading and distorting to interpret Emerson's philosophy as a static field set up by antithetic poles. His philosophical intentions can be understood only through a paradigm of organic succession: (JMN XIV 72) "Everything is organic--freedom also, not to add but to grow and unfold." His philosophy of spiritual process turns upon the belief that elements Whicher considered to be in polar tension or to be antinomies are in fact ever involved in an organic process by which a lower truth becomes a higher. For this reason Emerson's philosophy is also described as transcendental pragmatism--experience in the pragmatic everyday world points beyond itself to and realizes finally the Transcendental intuition that all of created existence is perfectly interrelated and ultimately an Identity in Absolute Spirit.;Another focal point of discussion is Whicher's attempted proof that Emerson, at maturity, abjured his early Transcendentalism and capitulated to "skeptical empiricism." Or, to put it more subtly that Emerson abandoned hope for human freedom and resigned himself to the dictates of iron Fate. Careful exegesis of the Emersonian canon exposes the sophistry of this line of interpretation by making clear that the gravamen of spiritual process is Emerson's unequivocal assurance that the nature of life is to advance out of fate into freedom.;The last intent of this study is methodological. Borrowing insights from the field of hermeneutics and from the historicist approach of Professor R. G. Collingwood, we seek to show by example how it is a powerful critical tool to trace the assumptions that guide and constrain interpretations of a text. By reconstructing the frame of mind through which Emerson was filtered by the author of Freedom and Fate, we come to perceive the general assumptions controlling the deduction of specific conclusions. To undercut the general assumptions is to be freed from the necessity of confuting the specific conclusions seriatim. Hence this study may be read as a practical demonstration of the advantages of such a critical approach.;A secondary purpose is the exploration of Emerson's philosophical development through time. Having established the assumptions undergirding Nature (1836), this monograph analyzes the ways in which time, experience, scientific developments, and philosophical influences interacted as Emerson matured in his thinking. This secondary aim is, quite frankly, polemical. Following the publication of Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate: An, Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a tradition of scholarship has grown up which interprets Emerson's thinking in terms of polarity. Works such as Whicher's, Catherine Albanese's Corresponding Motions, and Philip Nicoloff's Emerson on Race and History all share in the pre-organic fallacy--they deny Emerson philosophical consistency and assert that his mental life merely oscillated between irreconcilable poles.