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Damn it! I put my reading time aside. And made it two pages before Emerson took me down an unescapable rabbit hole.

“Every man of strong will, like Pisistratus or Cromwell” - Emerson’s Polotics

I had to open up my Herodotus (Book 1 : 59)
It did not disappoint. Will to power is so important. Politics is simple when men of strong will are on the march. What a perfect example of such.

The Poet:
“The young man reveres men of genius because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.

“Poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organised that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down. […] The poet knows well that [it] is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you.

The Over-Soul:
“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in par-ticles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.“

Divinity School Address:
He speaketh, not spake […] Zoroaster“

Emerson reduce’s everything back to a ‘ONE’. And states whilst the law of The One can be found in everything, the perception of differences, separation and gradation is important.

(Monism maybe?)

His arguments are propositional. And though he advocates philosophical self reliance I am unsure from whence his philosophical inferences come.

In my final review, I will focus on the morals and dogmas of the man.

One of Emerson’s continual devices is something of a reductionist or animist chain.

Eg. “Art is The Creation of Beauty” 84.
“Beauty is The Perception of Nature” 79.
“Nature is [In a relatively abstruse way] God’s”

This can be seen throughout all his essays (On ‘Friendship’, Or ‘Love’, Or the many vicissitudes of ‘Nature’ but despite a seeming causal chain his philosophy is unsystematic

The idea that Emerson decided (On meeting Wordsworth and Coleridge) that they were ‘Ordinary’ and asked himself; “If great men should be so ordinary. Why should ordinary men not be great?” I would find this sacrilegious, if it weren’t so fallacious.

Emerson is a Pantheist, but more importantly, he wants men to innovate their own religion. So when I inevitably review the book I intend to focus on this idea.

i’ve read 5 pages and this is already one of my favorite things ever. however, i am starting in the middle (with his Nature essay, that explains why i love it so much) which is throwing me off.