“America, you have it better”, once wrote Goethe, among whose admirers was the American essayist and poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, of a younger generation. Emerson was also convinced that America was better off than the European continent. The sigh of the Weimar privy councilor, not properly expressed in the poem dedicated to “The United States of America” in 1827, encouraged the follower in the New World, intent on independence:
“America, you have it better / Than our continent, the ancient one / You have no ruined castles / And no basalts. / Don’t bother inside / In living times / Useless memories / And futile conflicts.”
In 1827, Emerson, born in Boston in 1803, had just received his license to practice theology. Above all, America has no middlemen of its own, he found, no”Intellectual audiencesSo the pastor’s son from the city of Concord, in the state of Massachusetts, plucked up his courage and leapt into the breach: Strengthened by many readings of Western philosophy and intellectual history, as well as a first voyage across the Atlantic, he decided of he himself writes essays on the eternally great topics he writes – about beauty, friendship, history, love, art or the spirit of the world. But above all about nature and its influence on human life. The journalistic masterpiece is successful: in 19th century American non-fiction, Emerson was the undisputed leader a.
source of revelation
What Emerson brought with him from the “old continent” was above all his admiration for German idealism and his affinity for European romanticism. Throughout his life he collected thoughts, impressions and experiences in a large number of diaries and notebooks, which served as the basis for lectures and later for essays. With all recognition of the achievements of European culture, he sought an independent path for the spirit of America, “this bright corner of the universe.”
For Emerson, this path led into nature. In the midst of a pioneering and commercial society on the move, he has propagated a return to the strength of a lifestyle in harmony with nature. The pantheist Emerson, who saw the phenomena of nature as the source of divine revelation, opposed Francis Bacon’s teaching of man’s dominance over nature and thus a purely mechanistic view of nature as a raw material for exploitation.
In “Nature”, his first essay published in 1836, the 33-year-old writes: “While we fully submit to the permanence of the laws of nature, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the general effect of culture on the human mind , (…) to lead us to regard nature as appearance and not as substance; to ascribe necessary existence to the mind; to see nature as an accident and an effect.”
“The wonder of the visible world,” a saying of Jean de La Bruyère, can also apply to Emerson’s view of nature. His philosophy was tied to the earth. On long walks around Concord he tried to unite vision and thought: “In this pleasant and penitent forest life God grant me, I will record my honest thoughts day after day, looking neither forward nor backward, and ringing with the buzzing of insects. “
matter and spirit
This diary was kept for life and has 8,500 pages in the American edition. Now a larger German edition has appeared for the first time: 900 pages, carefully selected, translated and commented by Jürgen Brôcan. A detailed insight into the world of Emerson’s thoughts and feelings is conveyed. His education is impressive. He notes that reading the late antique philosopher Proclus is “like taking opium. It stimulates my imagination.” From the Neo-Platonists he gets the idea of a unity of matter and spirit, a congruence of nature and of the “supersoul”, as he calls the spirit of the world in an essay.
The diaries also record many daily encounters and observations. In 1855 he noted: “The artisans and peasants of our Concordia are very hesitant about culture and will oppose you; however I notice that everyone wants to send their children to dance school”.
“Nature is the mediator of thought,” he writes in the essay “Nature” and therefore praises the pictorial language: “The direct dependence of language on nature, this transformation of an external appearance into a kind of something inherent in human life, does not never loses the strength to move us”. And more clearly: “The power of a person to connect his thoughts with the proper symbol and thus to give them expression depends on the impartiality of his nature, that is, on his love of truth and his effort to express it without loss. The decay of a People is followed by the decline of the language.”
But Emerson, as always, remains optimistic: “But wise men see through this corrupt language and reattach words to visible things.” It is all the more regrettable that the most common German translations of his essays are written in an awkward, often complicated to incomprehensible style.
Everything Emerson ascribes to nature is driven by a metaphysical need. Calling for transcendental idealism, he gathered like-minded followers in Concord, including the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and the forlorn, radical young rebel Henry David Thoreau, who continued Emerson’s call to flee society into a brick-built cabin. house in the woods and later, as a state and tax reject, in his acclaimed call for civil disobedience.
Emerson was cut from a different cloth: from the crooked wood of Kant’s humanity. The thinker was aware that the individual cannot develop without community: “By embodying a personal ego, we obviously always tend to prefer to follow personal rules, obey personal impulses, to the point of excluding the universal being”. He therefore invoked the right balance between society and individuality in order to guarantee the country’s future.
His acute North American sense of reality also expressly included the achievements of technology. “Fear assails the building of the railroad, but when it is finished it will be American strength and beauty,” he wrote in his diary in the summer of 1843.
In his essays, especially programmatic encouragement to “Self-sufficiency“, he tried to appeal to the best in the way of life of his compatriots. “Self-confidence” – this was what Alexander Mitscherlich later called “education in the strength of the ego.” Emerson recommended the virtue of nonconformity to the his Americans and lived out: he denounced the injustice of slave ownership and against black discrimination, he lectured across the country (after a juvenile miscalculation.) A free, self-responsible, life-oriented lifestyle nature remained the maxim of the transcendentalists, from which then essential impulses for the liberation of slaves, the emergence of the women’s movement and the conservation of nature.
Emerson’s impact outside the United States began early. Even during the author’s lifetime, Friedrich Nietzsche was enthusiastic about the American. It was not only the emphasis on individual independence that attracted him, but also the criticism of overestimating the past and underestimating the present, as well as the emphasis on an active and strong personality as a representative of the spirit.
The inner decay of American society, as it finally opens up, becomes clear from the high standards of Emerson’s standards and warnings. Since its founding in 1776, the United States has proven to be an ever-evolving democracy in which conflicting ideas and interests have always rested on a common basis. But now they run the risk of betting this democracy at the roulette table of political bettors. Power-hungry sellers of lies and melters of truth unscrupulously betrayed the founding ideals of their community, of which Emerson was one of the most authoritative and eloquent supporters.
rest in yourself
In his essay “Self-Reliance” he says of the threat of a mass uprising: “The sour faces of the masses rise and fall as the wind blows and as a newspaper dictates. Yet the discontent of the masses is more terrible than that of the Senate or of the Faculties. It is easy enough for a strong man who knows the world to bear the wrath of the educated classes. But when their gentle wrath is joined with the indignation of the people, when the ignorant and the poor are incited, when brute force ignorant, resting on the soil of society, is forced to grumble and grimace, it takes an attitude of magnanimity and pious duty to treat it like a god like a petty thing.” Here too the influence of the ancient Stoic school is evident.
On the whole, W. Somerset Maugham was mild in his judgment of Emerson: “I recognize his charm and kindness. Anyone who reads his journals can only be struck by the thoughtfulness he possessed from a young age, and the dexterity with which he handled .” But he also found it disrespectful: “Maybe he would have been a better writer if he hadn’t been a good person.”
