Ralph Waldo Emerson maintained a lifelong interest in science. His journals, from the earliest to the last, document this interest--an interest reflected in his lectures, essays, letters, and poems. Emerging from Emerson's statements on science is a coherent attitude that can be defined as his scientific thinking. The purpose of Emerson and Science is to analyze this thinking and to indicate the relationship it bears to his total thought. An analysis of Emerson's scientific thinking reveals that science, especially Goethean science, affords the means to explore and present what the book elaborates as Emerson's monistic worldview. The pervasive influence of Goethe's science on the epistemological bases underlying that view is presented at length. In addition to illuminating Emerson's epistemological position, the context of science divulges how Emerson's interest in science kept him from the extremes of Swedenborg's mysticism and from falling prey--unlike many of his contemporaries--to the pseudo-sciences of the day, including phrenology, mesmerism, palmistry, astrology, and so forth. Emerson's interest in science also played an important role in his rejection of conventional religion and helped qualify his idealism, making him sympathetic to the claims of materialism. His focus on science kept him from accepting either of the main streams of the scientific thought of his age and led him to what the book defines as Emerson's "scientific mysticism," or "spiritual science." Peter Obuchowski, a professor emeritus of English language and literature, shows how the context of Emerson's approach to science provides a new focus for considering a number of the key issues that have become the hallmarks of Emersonian criticism--issues such as Emerson's optimism in relation both to his spiritually oriented worldview and to his faith in scientific progress, as well as his attitude to evil and his so-called philosophical naïveté.

He wished to galvanize his readers, to shock them into an awareness of nature's animating energies. Offering new perspectives on Emerson's Romanticism, the study also uncovers provocative connections among science, aesthetics, and poetics.

"An important corrective to the view that scientists are "poor writers, unnecessarily opaque, not interested in writing, and in need of remediation." Arguing that scientists are "the most sophisticated and flexible writers in the academy, often writing for a wider range of audiences than most other faculty"--Provided by publisher.

In 1832, Emerson made his famous decision to pursue wholeness in his life and in his writing. The Emerson Museum shows how this undertaking transformed American literary practice by turning the legacy of European romanticism into a writing project answerable to American urgencies.

Recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as “spiritual exercise”, arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates’ call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson’s provocative style of writing, Hosseini contends that his prose is shaped by a desire to bring about psychagogia, or influencing the soul through the power of words. This book furthermore examines the evolving nature of Emerson’s thoughts on “scholarly action” and its implications, his religious temperament as an aesthetic experience of the world through wonder, and the reasons for a resounding acknowledgment of despair in his essay “Experience.” In the concluding chapter, Hosseini explores the depth of Emerson’s engagement with the classical Persian poets and argues that what we may call his “literary humanism” is informed by Persian Adab, exemplified in the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. Weaving together themes from Persian philosophy and Emersonian transcendentalism, Hosseini establishes Emerson’s way of seeing as refreshingly relevant, showing that the questions he tackled in his writings are as pressing today as they were in his time.