![]() ![]() Dogmatic assertions about the nature or intentions of the deity could only impede if not preclude it. This quest, to which each enlightened person was dedicated, enacted human freedom. To define this God in and through the world in which he manifested himself was to attain the real and the moral insofar as human cognition could grasp them, and (since cognition was not an end in itself, but a means to action), human agency could engage them. God was a necessary conception of the mind, the authorizing force of both phenomenality and morality. To a maturing race, however, the equation of human with divine personality was scandalous. Formerly, this doctrine had been presented as the commandments of a paternal deity. The goal of the mind was, first, self-recognition as a moral agent, and, secondly, the discovery of that self as reflected in the moral doctrine of Nature. To organize the wash of phenomenal experience was a necessary task, but only a preliminary one. ![]() Natura naturata was something for mature consciousness to penetrate and transcend, even as it remained materially dependent on it. On the one hand, the child fed on the world as his natural sustenance on the other, the adult who did so was merely cloddish. The question Emerson could not settle was whether Nature enclosed or disclosed moral reality. If it was not exactly the case that there were sermons in stones, it was nonetheless true that sermons were inefficacious without them. One had to pass through sensory experience to find the moral substratum of the cosmos, and, since morality was fulfilled only in action, one had to return to it. To Emerson, the rejection of material phenomena left one prone to “subtility and moonshine,” or, worse, solipsism. For Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Kantian idealism enabled the mind to dismiss mere “impressions of external nature” and embrace Spirit directly. What anchored Emerson’s thought-and, to his recurrent irritation, also fettered it-was the natural world. For Emerson, however, reality was precisely that which could be affirmed, and affirmation was simultaneously a cognitive, a constitutive, and a moral act. Kant had tried to have it both ways by conceiving the worlds of essence and experience as separate realms. The error of traditional metaphysics, as Emerson saw it, was to posit reality as an out-there or an in-here. ![]() What might seem contradiction in Emerson was thus to be understood as truth-in-progress reflected from a variety of angles, and what sometimes appeared as smugness was a faith in the essentially moral character of knowledge. Reality was inseparable from experience, which in turn consisted of an ever more finely-graded series of perceptions, which, since they unfold not logically but intuitively, as the unpredictable stages of a history of moral growth, reflexively illumine and redefine one another. What Emerson insisted on, then, was the necessary interpenetration of self and world, soul and God. Doubt, for him-what he called the “noble doubt,” common to all sensitive minds, as to whether the material universe had objective existence-was not a condition to be transcended, but the ground of all knowledge. He took himself as both the starting-point and the final destination of his philosophy. For Emerson, however, the notion of straddling frontiers was temperamentally alien. ![]() The post-Kantian sublime emerged as the borderland where the artist and the mystic might test the boundaries of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. Kant had shown the mind imprisoned in its own perceptions, with reality an unguessable surmise. Emerson was a crucial point of reception for post-Kantian idealism in America, and his response to the challenge it posed for the vestigial Calvinist orthodoxy and moral meliorism that dominated early nineteenth-century American thought was to shift the basis for philosophy in Europe as well as the United States. The native tradition in philosophy begins with Emerson, whom Jeffers pointed to as one of his formative influences and whom he continued to ponder to the end of his career. ![]()
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