Self-Culture in Emerson's Schellingian Solution to Fate

Professor of English literature, President of Yale University, and Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti (1938–1989), delighted in saying that Emerson “is as sweet as barbed wire.”1 Giamatti understood the full range of Emerson's thought, which spans the highs and lows of the human condition. Writings such as “Experience,” “Illusions,” “The Tragic,” and “Fate” demonstrate the transcending of Emerson's transcendentalism beyond any soft Romanticism or naïve idealism. They consistently assert the reality of antagonistic forces pervading human experience and nature. “The Tragic” opens with the lines: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity” (CW 10:334).2 “Fate” similarly insists: “We cannot trifle with this reality [of fate], this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts” (CW 6:11; my emphasis). Emerson was made intimately aware of the House of Pain by his own personal hardships. To name only a few, there was the death of his first wife Ellen at age 19 from tuberculosis, a rheumatic eye disease that left Emerson nearly blind for months, the terrible loss of his five-year old son Waldo to scarlet fever, the untimely deaths of his two brothers Charles and Edward in their 20s, a fire that partially destroyed the Emerson family home, and the inexorable mental decline into aphasia afflicting Emerson in his final years. Emerson further bore sympathetic witness to the hardships of his friends, family, and community. In addition, he lived through the national crisis of the American Civil War, and was a committed abolitionist willing to face head on the real evils of slavery. These experiences and others were a discipline in the tragic constitution of the world. Furthermore, they provided hints on how to make one's way through it.3In this essay, I aim to do some justice to Emerson's mature transcendentalism by examining his metaphysical-ethical co-principles of fate and freedom, or necessity and power. These co-principles are the central topic of the essay “Fate,” which appeared as the opening chapter of the book The Conduct of Life (1860). There, Emerson somewhat paradoxically admits both principles as opposing forces, and attempts to show their compatibility using a Schellingian dialectic. After presenting Emerson's understanding of fate and an interpretation of his metaphysical solution to it, I follow up on the primary ethical concern that opens the essay and book, namely “How shall I live?” (CW 6:1). To that end, I attempt to flesh out the ethical character of a life that embraces fate in terms of an Emersonian project of self-culture. My methodological approach throughout evolves progressively from the interpretation to the expansion of Emerson's ideas. Its first section examines his philosophy as an offshoot of the world-historical line of thought extending from Plato to the Neoplatonists, Eriugena, Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, among others. Later philosophers, scientists, and artists who took inspiration from Emerson's transcendentalism, including Charles Peirce, the Hudson River School painters, Wallace Stevens, and Loren Eiseley, follow the same intellectual trajectory.4 Further taking up the torch, my second section creatively amplifies Emerson's insights for an ethics of self-culture, and in this way argues for the truth of his Schellingian form of freedom.For Emerson, fate is real. It consists in the “immovable limitations” and necessary “laws of the world” (CW 6:2). These limits or laws occur in the conduct of life not so much as theoretical abstractions or remote chains of efficient causality but as impositions on our will, both from within and without. On the one hand, we are confronted by the rough and tumble of nature, the outside environment in which we live. Serious in Emerson's nineteenth century and remaining so today are the threats of drought and drying rivers, deadly hurricanes, and unprecedented snowfalls. More mundane examples of fate from without are those chance incidences affecting our daily routines: a dead car battery in the morning or the disruptive behavior of a selfish colleague.In addition to these external impositions on our will, there exist internal conditions that unavoidably shape a person's character. For example: the peculiarities of our bodies and temperaments, proclivities or tastes, and the ways in which we are products of our society, culture, and history. One person is born with a debilitating birth defect, another into an abusive family, and another into a country ravished by war. “The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not” (CW 6:8). These examples—similar to the ones Emerson provides in “Fate”6—convey an experiential sense of fate in the form of an existential antagonist of the here and now. They are Peircean seconds: brutish and irrational elements pervading lived experience that are outside our control, a not-me that we must admit and with which we must struggle. Reconceptualizing fate in this way already takes a step toward reconciling it with freedom. As we will further see below, the traditional opposition between causal determinism and voluntarism is redrawn on more compatibilist terms centered on our immediate experience.After making the case for fate as an essential factor in human life, Emerson moves in the second half of his essay to equally make the case for freedom or power.The essay “Power,” which follows “Fate” in the order of chapters comprising The Conduct of Life, is dedicated to addressing this second half of the cosmic binary.7 Reprising Immanuel Kant's “paradoxical dualism of ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within’, itself a formulation of life's two most fundamental though contrary claims on human consciousness,” the synoptic vision of Emerson's transcendentalism maintains the co-existence of fate and freedom.8 Both principles are operational in human life with neither one being reducible to the other. They constitute a “knot of nature . . . well tied,” and thus contribute to a universe that is “intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless” (CW 6:20). Providing a visual representation of the co-existence of these forces in nature is Albert Bierdstadt's Romantic landscape painting A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie. The painting joins together into a unified expression of the sublime several contrasting elements: an Eden-like valley bound by foreboding precipices, the dramatic contrast between light and dark regions of wilderness, the tumult of a receding thunderstorm and the reprieve of blue skies, and the infinitesimal scale of human inhabitants dwarfed by the uncanny heights of alpine peaks.Emerson's effort to grapple with a full accounting of this complex nature of reality is a testament to his authenticity as a thinker. Neither simply romantic nor cynical in perspective, he honestly admits both fundamental claims on human consciousness. Furthermore, his philosophical strength in addressing the challenging matter of reconciling these claims is revealed in his subtle Schellingian solution—with deeper roots in the Alexandrian legacy of thought—that systematizes the co-principles of fate and freedom by uncovering their deeper metaphysical continuity. Emerson had in fact read an early manuscript translation of Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809).9 The essay, Schelling explains in the preface, targets “the genuine opposition . . . of necessity and freedom, with which the innermost centerpoint of philosophy first comes into consideration.”10 Schelling's own grappling with this crucial opposition is part of an effort to avoid the perceived fatalism of Spinoza's pantheism. His greater aim is to secure a metaphysical ground of human freedom, because it alone guarantees the possibility of genuine acts of good and evil.The manuscript Emerson read was composed by his friend John Elliot Cabot, a young transcendentalist and his future literary executor. Cabot in company with several transcendentalists traveled to Germany in the early 1840s and attended Schelling's famous lectures in Berlin. Soon after returning from abroad, Cabot translated the Investigations, sharing the results with Emerson. It was not Emerson's first or last exposure to Schelling.11 However, the central effort of the essay to systematize freedom and necessity was tantamount to Emerson's own pressing philosophical concerns. In a letter to Cabot, Emerson expresses his excitement at attempting to appropriate Schelling's impressive Freiheistsschrift: I delight in his steady inevitable eye, and the breadth of his march including and disposing of so many objects of mark. I write this to say that you must set your mind at rest: I cannot for the present let any Miss [Elizabeth] Peabody or other person have the book, which has, I am sure, come just to the right reader for the present. Whenever you choose to print it, which is the best thing to do with it, or, as soon as my good will to philosophic readers overpowers my desire to understand and to appropriate it, I shall send it back. As little can I part with [your translation of the] Bhagvat Geeta.”12Higher praise of Schelling's philosophy could not have been given than a comparison to the mystical wisdom that Emerson found in the Gita. In a journal entry composed at this time, Emerson went so far as to group Schelling with Plato in the echelon of “great men” worthy of inclusion in the six working chapters of his forthcoming text Representative Men.13 For nearly a full year after receiving Cabot's translation of the Freiheistsschrift, he held onto it in order to study closely its insights on human freedom.14What exactly is Emerson's Schellingian solution to fate? How does he conceptualize an identity between fate and freedom? In short, Emerson argues for a dialectical relationship between the principles whereby they are organically linked in being functionally co-constituting of a creative universe. The solution is neither a dualism of opposing, agonistic forces eternally locked in stalemate, nor a monism of absolute idealism that ultimately annuls opposition in some higher unity. Hence, it is to be carefully distinguished from other identity philosophies, such as that of Parmenides, Hegelian idealism, and non-dual Advaita Vendanta. Rather, Emerson's identity philosophy is akin to the metaphysical framework found in Schelling's ideal-realism, as well as others in the Alexandrian lineage. For one there is an on the or between without the Emerson's identity philosophy the between two primary of being through their opposing this Emerson into freedom, and freedom into (CW 6:20). The between the co-principles closely that between Schelling's and and of one or In Schelling's and other the as the forces of light and and expansion and These forces other through their in the of and human and crucial to our acts of good and for both Schelling and Emerson, the between fate and freedom is an that is, it the of In Schelling's as read by of between not a in the of and thus itself and The of this law is an creative from the dead of well as and namely and that the metaphysical ground of the is that of an or the last and there is other but is and the has Life and Freedom for its In such Emerson have found a philosophy of nature in the same theoretical as his In with the creative of Schelling's will is Emerson's of nature. The to creative and toward a of such as we witness in the of in In addition to this of the Emerson in his journal that it is the metaphysical of acts of ethical philosophy from the or which Schelling so in man we a of of of as the of a best on a In we a a of on which to comes to that being he may have what what what what he is for not only on the of between Schelling and Emerson, but for a transcendentalist ethics in a of we will how these Schellingian of Emerson's transcendentalism shape an ethics of order to to the ethical of Emerson's Schellingian it is to understand the of the within the of fate and Neither outside of nor in opposition the is intimately at the of these It is at “the of is, there is (CW On the one hand, the is a of a in a of on the other hand, the is a of freedom creatively the In attempting to these by Schelling, Emerson argues that the through its has the and fate (CW It may on the that shall to and thus be a into (CW the through its and in the of the forces of the cosmic not a debilitating but a for more ways than the Emersonian the one by his Schellingian Charles in with the greater the Peircean is a of the and of the universe. These and both and to Emerson's co-principles of On the one hand, they as of by their to of being through and On the other hand, they as of because they are not but to to some are not absolute laws but that may be and Furthermore, some are good as they and thus can be in For the of to is a to the in a the of do not but and that shape into the by their nature a of as they their through Hence, they are for the of as in the the Peircean is a of and it the for future by and through these attempt to the ethical character of the life that embraces fate the central with which Emerson opens his essay “Fate” and book The Conduct of Life, “How shall I live?” (CW 6:1). In other “How shall I with Emerson that the an because of its existential on the the on the of the others within his community. His on fate in that was the of his essay the same on the fundamental it to I to is the of what I that any of my or is for and hints and are to out of the The is of given our in the of our in the linked to this our is not reducible to As John argues in an Emersonian we exist in a of is an part of the to which we are to the of our we are by a of conditions and further any of personal in these conditions and not in others. Emerson his that of the age has for a (CW 6:2). there are ethical at are of a not from are on the for one of life that embraces fate toward freedom may first to more than the of However, may be a first of freedom, it is not the only condition. not I to Emerson's for a philosophy of is such is on a and to one's a way of life a by the laws and in the greater order of The ethical here is an of it may have the of the of fate and in in a of it does little for In the essay “Power,” Emerson our to the fact that any of or mental of genuine acts of power. Rather, in the is in of mind and and thus . . . with a or (CW Emerson's to the of his essay the is to a for not to be with or to our to on the of The first to the conduct of that some with a of the Emersonian as and in The the second half of a theoretical whereby the is a or a in absolute There is a here that as much the reality of a as the reality of any that the and shape its character. an of a in a of whereby is, what you may do. There is much you may not” (CW there is the conduct and does the or a it is a it a In “Fate,” Emerson it as a of let man his of his and show his by and on the scale of nature. his as with the of No shall make up his A man to with a an or a shall have not the the and the of . . . is only and there the creative (CW fate is not a creative of fate but a of forces to It is Peircean as the of irrational these at best with Emerson to a more of to in his of “the creative is fate more than the It is not a but an toward and to power. is more than or a it is a of the the same time, is in way an of nor a of It is that Emerson fate as he on the well the real limits of their and such limits are not because they can be and The person who and fate thus of (CW as in have in one were (CW for Emerson, the of the does not an but a primary one in the creative to which it is the is than “the which and of and (CW Emerson in on the Schellingian of this law is an creative between and its metaphysical Emersonian of must this to the of or on which the of can further flesh out the creative of fate and thus what freedom or comes to by examining the of in a project of self-culture. an Emersonian perspective, I see two ways this can one personal and one the limits of the in its of that is, in the personal proclivities and the of a among these are the . . . the and in both of these that person's on the their to the way we these a of or of in order to their our and for being toward of one's that is to is the strength of one's as it to making a to a solution acts of may have beyond the they acts of blind which the of any at the of the are a good of the The an external not of their own and thus the of the to an future by on its to one's and personal and must beyond a to who we It is not the by is a of to and to of the of are it is the one for the that our is to that this personal of does not the form of Emerson that of and on (CW One with is that it the in from the a most contrary to the of it at the of nature. On the other hand, without a to the of the its for an ethical to However, the is one a to the truth of who we are and who we may which is not the same as a blind to of a crucial because from the we are of are in in our environment our and these must be and the of personal limits will in the form of or final of These the or of the as some of these from an of they will a with there are with of the explains human are . . . as their as a on a shape and character. It is the of in one's to as those may and may throughout the of the of a human both of from which we must and those toward which we to conduct of life be The neither have a ground from which to nor an toward which to out of Schelling argues just this in his text to his freedom essay The of the that neither have which to ground itself nor a or that it be a and not an as an or of in the with a moral sense of good and The (CW with its of an moral in the throughout Emerson's addressing the of human at the or we see it consistently his For it is his on the American Civil and his for as an absolute necessity by the laws of nature. and for the of are at best the and at of a “Fate,” Emerson this crucial of his ethics to the freedom of the is not will, nor is is and in . . . There must be a of these two to the of (CW of the personal conditions that at any the is a necessary but ground for fate into power. is on moral of human As a of its with other the is to at moral throughout its life it has the real possibility to do good and it on its are of the moral more than of and or they or limits of what is right and These to both our with others and our with that is, with our present and future time, the can and do into ethical both and they further to on how to as fate into the by the moral not but for making moral in the with its real possibility to follow a of good or is the of a in Schelling's as a will the of for making a on their As in the Emerson a line of causality from the to the ethical conduct the that [of the being secure may have what what what what For or for for the of its moral character. Its ground is within and its moral acts are can to this study of Emerson's fate with its by a at the essay in and in after “Fate,” it follows up on several ideas. Emerson the moral at in a universe of the will, which can which is by and threats or these to and its into a and is never itself the is it is and and its (CW is not the of the . . . but the with with at the in to the As of the of its threats and as is not a but a creative of is not a but a of the moral from fate or to it, its in the The of so understood is a form or of we Emerson a Schellingian between fate and freedom the of an moral universe. On those we a of freedom for a philosophy of self-culture. Freedom not in the of a not in an effort to from by and not in a to Rather, fate into is the project of the limits of the for and to a of in a of and acts of freedom the personal character of the that is out of a of good and

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