Emerson's Life in Science: Life Narrative and the Good

by Laura Dassow Walls

Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later 19th-century science.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2003

Reviews

[Christopher Porzenheim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walls argues that "Modern America owes largely to Emerson its faith in science as a bulwark of truth against the tides of history and the storms of war." (4) To evidence this thesis, she reads literally every scientific work Emerson ever did, shows that he was immersed in the science of his day and regularly translated the concepts and metaphors from it into his writings.

The science informed nature of Emerson's thought has been ignored or forgotten, mostly because:

"Emerson, like most intellectuals of his day, was perfectly at ease folding scientific truth into moral truth, reading literature and science together as a part of a common intellectual culture. He took scientific literacy so much for granted that his scientific metaphors sink out of sight; worse, from his time to ours, the divorce between "the two cultures" of literature and science has made his deep debt to science virtually invisible." (3)

Walls knows her stuff, writes clearly, and doesn't beat around the bush with her arguments. Thus, if you are even remotely interested in Emerson's relationship to science, this is essential reading.