Hating is an activity which can be useful to human endeavors. This study is a Pragmatic inquiry, and, as such, attempts to answer the question: What difference can our hating make to our projects, goals, and aspirations? We treat hate as an emotion, bracketed from any moral or ethical concerns, which might cloud a philosophical investigation. At the very least, the difficulty in choosing only one ethical or moral perspective from which to examine the usefulness of hate is inconsistent with Pragmatism's pluralism. Through exploring the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, we find hate to be a strong, problematic emotion. Central to Nietzsche's philosophical corpus, hate is something felt by weak people who seek to discharge this emotion, in acts of revenge, onto stronger people - but who cannot because of their very weakness. The impotence to discharge this hate turns into ressentiment, a general hate for the world at large, on the order of rank which places the hater at the bottom and the hated at the top. Nietzsche claims that weak people of ressentiment joined together in an effort to overturn the natural order, and they created a new order where meekness and humility are virtues and where pride and strength are "wrong." This new order of values is the Christian Church, according to Nietzsche. There are solutions to the problem of hating that we find in Nietzsche's writings. The first is to hate the right enemies, that is, to hate stronger enemies. When we struggle against people who are stronger than we are, one of two outcomes are possible. We are either destroyed, or made stronger. Ergo, one way in which hate might be useful for Nietzsche is for us to hate stronger people and become stronger as a result of this struggle. This is understood in the context of the will to power, which Nietzsche claims is all life itself. The will to power wills one thing: power. For Nietzsche, an increased feeling of power brings with it an increased feeling of life. One might posit the equation: more power = more life. Nietzsche's other solution is also rooted in the will to power and is something of which we find the seeds in Concord, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche writes about something he calls sublimation. Sublimation begins when we repress an emotion and prevent its discharge. For Nietzsche, emotions exhibit a type of energy, which is expended when the emotion is discharged. He advocates that we repress some emotions in order to retain the energy and then use our rational faculties to discharge them in such a way that we thereby increase our power. This type of self-control and employment of the emotions would amount to actually using our hate to increase our power and, as such, to increase our feeling of life. William James, another thinker who was influenced by Emerson, presents us with something similar in his writings on energy and in "The Moral Equivalent of War." He claims that there are energies that enable us to act into which we can tap by means of some stimulus or act of the will - much the way that marathoners experience a second wind when they apprehend that they might overtake the lead runner. James works with the example of war, wherein a nation is able to achieve certain "manly virtues," such as strength, courage, and solidarity. He seeks some way for us to obtain the benefits of war without military conflict. In short, James claims that we can harness the energy from some stimulus and redirect this energy onto some object or toward some goal which we freely choose. To be sure, this is different from Nietzsche's sublimation precisely because of James' belief in free will. James' redirection of energies enables us not only to choose our goals - which for Nietzsche are always power - but also to choose the manner in which we will discharge this energy. There are instances wherein our hating is not something we would want to sublimate or redirect. When we hate the "correct" object, we should hate. The correct object of our hate is, in short, whatever stands in the way of our projects and goals. We examine Batman Begins and V for Vendetta, both recent films wherein the lead characters hate those who destroy their societies. Batman hates the criminals who infect Gotham City, but he lacks the conviction to do what is necessary and destroy them, since he is fettered by his own moral code, which he values more highly than the destruction of his enemies who stand in the way of the peaceful society for which he longs. V, on the other hand, has no such moral scruples. He successfully destroys his enemies (the corrupt state itself) by the end of his story, illustrating along the way Nietzsche's sublimation in his decades-long revenge and redemption.

This thesis traces the development of Calvinist hermeneutic practices and their implications for social order as they relate to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The tension in Calvinist reform between its liberating, individualistic piety and its strict, pure social order carried over into hermeneutic practice, resulting in three distinct hermeneutic traditions: the dogmatism upheld by the ecclesiastical and political elite; the subjective dogmatism of "inspired" radicals; and an open hermeneutics which emphasized receptivity to new meaning but recognized the importance of community and community of meaning and aspired to a progressive harmony of ideas. Through Puritan covenant theology, Calvinist dogmatism was transformed into American nationalism, a mode of thought with protean powers of co-opting dissent. Calvinist subjective dogmatism influenced American radicalism through Puritan antinomians. While Calvin's open hermeneutics had some influence on the Puritans, it was especially important in the writing of Emerson and Hawthorne, who were especially influenced by its development in the work of seventeenth-century English divines and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This development, paralleled in American thinkers such as Edwards, divorced dogmatic, traditional "Calvinism" from the Calvin who inspired personal experience and symbolic knowledge. In response to the authoritarian dogmatism of American nationalism, both Emerson and Hawthorne turned to the Calvinist tradition of openness to new meaning. For Emerson, this meant a continual quest for authenticity and the consequent rejection of comforting structures and habitual modes of thought. Such hermeneutics led Emerson toward relativism and pragmatism. Hawthorne too recognized in the dominant ideology a threat to the integrity of the individual, as evidenced in his early "rites of passage" stories. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne suggested the need for community as a support of meaning and a foundation for the individual in a process of long-term change.

The Spinozan Strain identifies a group of American modernist writers who use elements of Spinoza’s metaphysics, mediated by the writings of the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as the basis for an aestheticized monism that explores what Spinoza’s thought makes possible affectively, socially, and politically, rather than philosophically. These monistic modernists use Spinoza and Emerson to disrupt a host of binary oppositions that were important sites of contest in modernist culture, such as life and death, time and eternity, and interiority and exteriority. They imagine these oppositions as derivative effects of a single, self-differentiating force that they portray alternately as an inorganic vitality, a structure of interlinked causes, or a universal blur. In its anti-binarism, monistic modernism offers a middle path between object-oriented and subject-centric or psychological accounts of the modernist movement. The first chapter of this project examines Djuna Barnes’s and Wallace Stevens’s recasting of life and death in terms of flows of affect, by which they articulate a mode of subjectivity that challenges the distinctions between performance and reality, activity and passivity. The second chapter argues that Thornton Wilder and William Carlos Williams advance a critique of progressive or teleological conceptions of time and history that depends on a vision of eternity as an emergent structure of interwoven temporalities, rather than a timeless transcendent state. The final chapter focuses on modern technology and speed, arguing that Hart Crane and Langston Hughes devise a Spinoza-like understanding of the body as a relation of speeds and slownesses in which the body and its surroundings blur together; this sense of corporeality allows them to examine the ways that speed becomes an ambivalent source of political power in modernity that demands—and makes possible—new strategies of political resistance.

The influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is well known; equally well known are the traces of the Transcendentalist philosophy concerning nature. But Whitman expands upon both these influences as he developed his own individualism based on solidarity rather than independence. Whitman's take on individualism permeates all parts of Leaves of Grass, including the aesthetics. The aesthetics were up for much contemporary debate as the book seemed to lack traditional poetic structure and form. However, this was not the case as this study shows. In light of the sociopolitical climate in America when Leaves of Grass was first published, there was a demand for change from within literary circles. This need to create a new American spirit was called for by Emerson among others. Leaves of Grass was the response. In his book of poetry, Whitman develops a new American spirit with the intention of encouraging the American people to seek individual solitude; although, in this innovative individualism there is a paradox revealed: one must connect with each other and find social belonging at the same time as being self-reliant to have true liberating individualism. Also, the aesthetics in Leaves of Grass does show traces of traditional structure. However, the form is altered to represent Whitman's new innovative individualism. Thus, this study shows that the influences of Emerson and the transcendentalists are evident, but Whitman develops his own individualism in support of America, and in this lies a paradox. Whitman's first-person "I" becomes a representation of this paradox in Whitman's individualism, as well as a symbol for his solidarity towards his people: the united American people.

N/A / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No description available.

No description available.

This paper discusses what Ralph Waldo Emerson believes to be the aim of education and how he thinks the aim is to be reached.

Emerson frequently illustrates his philosophy with complementary scientific examples that clarify his ideas. This study examines Emerson's enumeration of the laws and powers of Intellect in conjunction with twentieth-century science, illustrating his ideas in the method he often employs. The physiological model of the two hemispheres of the brain parallels the two intelligences Emerson ascribes to man--understanding and reason. Hemispheric theories describe an analogue to the Emersonian epiphany-- hemispheric integration--and help to distinguish the epiphany from other experiences associated with altered states of consciousness. Quantum physics and relativity theory illustrate the vision of the unity of nature perceived during the epiphany. Using modern science to illustrate Emerson's ideas in this way makes us apprentice to a rhetorical technique used and advocated by him.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Timothy A. Dayton / Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early life and education led him to focus on self-development and social concerns. His subsequent individualism and concern for society were not just characteristics of his own personal behavior, but of his vision for the world. The individual and the social form a symbiotic relation critical to understanding this vision. Once Emerson had fully established this vision, he sought to make it known in an attempt to improve American society, which he felt was degenerate and in decline. Emerson suggests that the source of his rejuvenating vision can be found in the principles and ideas of the American Revolution. Emerson appeals to ideals and practice common during the Revolution and immediate post-Revolutionary period. Americans slowly drifted away from practicing these Revolutionary ideals. Emerson appropriates Revolutionary ideals and characteristics to create individual and social change in the America of his day. While this program for change seems clear and straightforward, it becomes problematic when actually applied.