Philosophers and literary critics have recognized for many years the profound recalcitrance of Emerson's thought to any kind of systematic formulation. It is the contention of this thesis that this recalcitrance is one of the main pointers to the nature of his philosophy, which is here described as "process" philosophy. All attempts to reduce Emerson's thought to a static system with definable terms is doomed from the beginning, since Emerson's universe was dynamic, fluid, processive, and therefore fundamentally indefinable. Chapter I ("Emerson's Quarrel with the Eighteenth Century") seeks to place Emerson within the Romantic tradition, emphasizing his reaction against the mechanical philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. The image of the Great Chain of Being is seen as typical of this philosophy, and Swedenborg's theory of "correspondence" is seen as workable only within this context. Emerson's philosophy, however, was organic and processive, and therefore beyond the explanatory power of "correspondence." Chapter II ("Nature as Process") works out Emerson's understanding of Nature as dynamic and processive. Nature, for him was a system of interaction, a processive flow of objects into and out of themselves. Moreover, Emerson saw material reality as an "emanation" of the Divine, a process of spirit manifesting itself in material forms. At the same time, he saw Nature as "evolving" from material forms towards higher levels of spirit. Emerson managed to hold both views at once, seeing "emanation" and "evolution" as reciprocal transactions, so that the deevelopment (or un-folding) of the universe was simultaneously evolution and emanation. Chapter III ("The Process of the Soul") concentrates on Emerson's unifying center, the Soul. He thought that the Soul was the center of a web of interaction, a process or activity in which the world became unified through the mind and eye of man. Moreover, the Soul for Emerson was both a transaction with the divine Over-Soul and a dynamic process by which the seer and the thing seen, the subjective self and the objective world, are unified in a bilateral transaction. Chapter IV ("The Process of Art") applies Emerson's philosophy of process to one (of several) fields of human activity, artistic creation. Emerson understood art as activated initially by inspiration, a flowing of the Divine into man; and he understood art to be a kind of incarnation, an embodiment of spirit in matter, idea in form. Moreover, he maintained that beauty consisted of dynamic form, that is, form capturing the processive or fluid quality of life and nature. Furthermore, the appreciative process consisted of an observer investing artistic form with his own imaginative spirit. The final chapter ("Emerson and the Twentieth Century") attempts to relate Emerson's philosophy specifically and Romantic thought generally to such twentieth-century developments as relativity, emergent evolution, biological ecology, and transactional psychology. It becomes apparent that Emerson has numerous analogues in modern thought and that he was very close indeed to processive, non-categorical, descriptive approaches to reality and man's place in it. Because Emerson substituted a descriptive, transactional approach to reality rather than an explanatory, static approach, he ultimately moved beyond abstract philosophical speculation into pragmatic humanism. His transcendentalism was meaningful in terms of life and activity in the concrete situation. His processive descriptions ultimately invested the universe with life and incarnated man with the divine, allowing man to assume his central place in the universe. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1954 B34 / Master of Science

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-335). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1905. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Alayne Sullivan. Dissertation Committee: Lucy McCormick Calkins. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-182).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 656-677).

Thesis (M.A.)--Cleveland State University, 2009. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Sept. 8, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-95). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center and also available in print.

Thesis (PH. D.)--Columbia University, 1905. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1904. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [105]-107.

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.