Customer Reviews

Emerson

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lawrence Buell has written a capacious, sensitive, insightful, and vigorous book on the many facets of the thinker, poet, and activist, who most clearly showed North Americans a way past our provincialisms and a path toward a deeper alignment with the depth-powers of nature. I have studied and walked with Emerson for decades, and have, of course, read a number of biographies and critical studies of his endless multi-chambered mind. Like many I came up through those interpretations that focused on the real or alleged transformation that overtook Emerson with the untimely death of his son. After reading Buell's account of Emerson's trajectory, I have changed my views on just what Emerson was trying to tell us in his later essays like "Experience" and "Fate." These essays point more toward a seasoning of self-consciousness than toward a downward sinking into an eclipse of sacred energies. They augment and reshape the essays of the 1830s rather than force an abjection upon them.
In particular, Buell carefully works through the potential and actual correlations between Emerson and nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, especially the pragmatism of James and Dewey (but less so Peirce) and the later thought of Wittgenstein. He is, of course, aware of the writings of his colleague Stanley Cavell who highlights the, for him, fruitful interaction of Emerson and Wittgenstein. My own approach would stress the correlation between Emerson and a radicalized neo-Platonism (also discussed by Buell). Further, he goes into some detail about Nietzsche's multi-layered appropriation of Emerson's "Essays: First and Second Series." There has been much buzz about the Emerson/Nietzsche link and it is refreshing to see how Buell brings some precision to this rather astonishing historical nexus. Of special note are the detailed analyses of Emerson's political statements (and actions) during the 1840s and 1850s. Buell gives us an Emerson who was braver than often realized, yet who was at the same time often reticent to plunge full throttle into the battles around him. Both are true and both sides get ample treatment in this book.
Finally, I want to say a word about the writing style of this book. I am a philosopher, not a literary critic, and thus am used to stylistic expressions that can be, in turns, limpid, crystalline, or gnomic by comparison. I can report that Buell's literary style, and careful use of framing metaphors, is highly compelling and adds immensly to the verve and moving architecture of the book. I now have a revivified Emerson after reading this book--and that is as Emersonian a gift as one could wish for.

The general reader may well be overwhelmed by the many references to philosophers from Plato to John Dewey and William James. The author, a professor of English at Harvard University, writes in a highly academic style that the general reader must slog through with a collegiate dictionary, but the chapter "Social Thought and Reform: Emerson and Abolition" should appeal to a broad audience, as well as the first chapter, "The Making of a Public Intellecual", and the material covering Emerson's relationship with Henry Thoreau in "Emerson as Anti-mentor" is quite interesting. The general reader may feel gratified to have read the entire book, but may struggle to comprehend much of it. If you are an erudite academic with degrees in philosophy and Western literature, you might even enjoy it.

In contrast to the obtuse style of writing in "Emerson" by Professor Buell, I would point the interested reader to "Understanding Emerson" by Kenneth Sacks, professor of History at Brown University. Professor Sacks writes with a clarity that would be appreciated by any reader, and I highly recommend "Understanding Emerson" for both general readers and the more specialized student of American thought and literature.

Prof. Buell has written a senstivie and fascinating study of Emerson. I have found it very helpful. It is seriously marred, however, by the fact that for all of his quotations of Emerson's works he cites to the volume and page number of Emerson's collected works, thereby making it impossible for a reader without access to the multi-volumned collected works (such as this reader) to know to which specific writings by Emerson the quoted statements belong. Thus, sadly and I am sure unintentionally, this study actually blocks a reader's ability to turn to Emerson himself, which I found as I read the book quite frustrating. Scholars, whatever their eminance, should know better than this. If the quotation comes from "Self-Reliance," please say so--don't just give volume and page number of the CW.

at first mr. buell's style can seem a little choppy and pedantic, only in the use of word choice.
but once groove was caught, i found myself not wanting these essays to end.
if you are at all interested in emerson the man as well as his meaning, especially in his times,
and not just the quotable emerson, than this book is for you.
his insights are as inspiring as emerson himself, causing invisible paths to open.
in my case, thoreau, whose canon, i now feel, i barely know.
a great read to influence more great reads...

For biography, try Robert Richardson's "The Mind on Fire." If you wish to know more about the literary dance that goes on in the minds of authors, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists about Ralph Waldo Emerson, this is the book..His popularity has fluctuated since his death in 1882, but unless someone can inform this reviewer otherwise, Emerson is still the most quoted of all American authors..Since he was born in 1803 (May 25th), this is the year of his bicentennial..The book informs us that he reached the peak of admiration around the time of his centennial, 100 years ago.After that,it diminished quite a lot,and these days he may be making a comeback..The last word in the last chapter tells us that Emerson "inspires." And a previous chapter tells us that he was concerned with "values that stand the test of time and unite the world."

Most scholars think that Robert Richardson's "Mind on Fire" is the current definitive biography of E., so why the need for Lawrence Buell's "Emerson?" Early in the book, Buell states that he wanted to concentrate on a few but intensive examinations of key moments and thoughts of Emerson, rather than a chronological narrative. That being said, this book could have used at least a few more biographical pages about E.'s early years, to set the stage. Secondly, Buell wanted to emphasize Emerson as a national icon, and icon-describing can come perilously close to hagiography.

Over and over again, either Emerson himself, or Buell portraying Emerson, liked to stress his uniqueness, his originality, in-dependence from the writings of his predecessors and contemporaries, as summarized by the phrase "Self-Reliance" but total independence is an illusion. I refer back to John Donne, that 'no man is an island.' Whether we positively reformulate ideas with which we agree, or use the thoughts of the past as a negative foil for our thought, we are dependent to some degree on our ancestors, as the reviewers of this book are dependent on Buell and Mr. Emerson. We are dependent on our parents for the gift of language. The self-reliant Emo followed his brother out of the ministry, and depended on his first wife's inheritance. Paradoxically, by being influenced by Emo's theory of self-reliance, that reader is then relying on Emerson. Pure self-reliance sounds awfully close to Sartre's 'hell is other people.'

On p. 17, Emerson avers that "freedom is the essence of Christianity." I demur; as important as freedom is in Christianity, its essence is love. Buell notes on p. 63 that Emo could sound like a "patrician snob," and believed in a "natural aristocracy." On p. 37, Buell cites E.'s use of the word "imbecility" to desribe "sectarian bigotry" as how he felt about the various denominations; sounds pretty bigoted to me. Self-reliance becomes crude egotism on pp. 25-26, where Emerson compares himself to "Shakespeare, Franklin and Aesop."

On p. 160, Buell admits that "we [university] professors are a thoroughly secularized lot," which candidly illustrates why the vast majority of Americans, who are not intellectually secularized, have always decried the academy's ivory towers. On p. 158, Buell states that E. had to be "rescued" from religion. The word "rescue" seems to connote a sub-conscious, a priori bias against religion, which is fine, as long as one admits it. On p. 196, Buell refers to "sectarian tribalism [that, a pejorative code word], and "the still-tenacious hallucination that Protestant Christianity should define the religious culture of the United States." If Buell thinks "tribalism" and "hallucinations" to be bad, fine, but he shouldn't just present them as infallible dogmas. Can people who agree with Buell and/or Emerson also have intellectual hallucinations? On p. 165. Buell generalizes about Christian believers, who believe that God is 'personal,' as believing that God is thought of by the pious as a "long-haired gentleman in flowing robes." But no one thinks that, so this is a straw-man argument.

One can agree with William James and John Dewey on p. 224, that we "question authority," as long as we begin with questioning the authority of Messrs. James and Dewey. Most of the imperfections in this book are not those of Lawrence Buell, but those of RW Emerson, who thought and wrote that Napoleon Bonaparte was in some way, shape or form a positive example of "self-reliance," and that he was never "weak or literary." Would that he had been.