Scholarship on Emerson to date has not considered Spinoza’s influence upon his thought. Indeed, from his lifetime until the twentieth century, Emerson’s friends and disciples engaged in a concerted cover-up because of Spinoza’s hated name. However, Emerson mentioned his respect and admiration of Spinoza in his journals, letters, lectures, and essays, and Emerson’s thought clearly shows an importation of ideas central to Spinoza’s system of metaphysics, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. In this essay, I undertake a biographical and philosophical study in order to show the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Emerson and how this changes the traditional understanding of Emerson’s thought.

Univ., Diss.--Tübingen, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [923] - 945.

Scholarship on Emerson to date has not considered Spinoza’s influence upon his thought. Indeed, from his lifetime until the twentieth century, Emerson’s friends and disciples engaged in a concerted cover-up because of Spinoza’s hated name. However, Emerson mentioned his respect and admiration of Spinoza in his journals, letters, lectures, and essays, and Emerson’s thought clearly shows an importation of ideas central to Spinoza’s system of metaphysics, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. In this essay, I undertake a biographical and philosophical study in order to show the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Emerson and how this changes the traditional understanding of Emerson’s thought.

Thesis (doctoral)--Hessische Ludwigs-Universität zu Giessen, 1929. / Includes bibliographical references.

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.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis--University of Michigan. / Without thesis statement. Bibliography: p. [252]-256.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis explores Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical becoming throughout decades of reflection and experience, particularly regarding death and slavery. Emerson was a buoyant writer and speaker, but the death of his five-year-old son and protégé, Waldo, challenged the father’s belief in Nature’s goodness and the reality of maintaining a tenaciously optimistic outlook. As he was grieving in the mid-1840s, slavery was threatening the Union, and Emerson was compelled to turn his attention to the subject of human bondage. He began his career indifferent to the plight of slaves, but as legislation about the issue brought it closer to his personal sphere, he was gradually yet firmly gripped by the tragedy of human bondage. These simultaneously existing spheres of sorrow – Waldo’s death and slavery – joined in refining Emerson’s personal philosophy toward greater utilitarian and humanitarian conduct. His letters, journals, essays, and lectures reflect the inward changes caused by outward events, and the conclusions herein are supported by modern grief studies as well as numerous philosophers, literary specialists, and historians.