All History Biography: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Philosophy of History

• Published in: Australasian journal of American studies 2021-07, Vol.40 (1), p.5-32
• Main Author: Mohseni, Aryan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1838-9554

Emerson’s philosophy of history is not amenable to analysis removed from the Continental influences that so strongly influenced his way of thinking. This essay traces the German Romantic origins of the metaphysical assumptions that underpin Emerson’s conceptions of time, subjectivity, and interpretation. Emerson’s emphasis on the role of intuition in history, part of his broader project to integrate mind and world and evade the sceptic’s privileging of reason over intuition, has a distinctly Idealist character. Yet Emerson also grafted onto that German historiographical tradition a profound realism with respect to the proper role and nature of history. If history is but a creative product of the present mind, it is necessarily imbued with all the passions of the present. For Emerson, this was something to be embraced. His conception of history as a struggle between the present and past, guided by intuition, reflects the Kantian idea of beauty and the sublime that pervaded Romantic thought in Emerson’s time. To see history as a reassertion of the present’s universality, and in terms so strongly focused on affect over reason and creation over discovery, looks forward to a modern historical realism that found its standard-bearers in Nietzsche and Weber. This shows that Emerson’s interaction with Continental philosophy was, to some extent, one of cross-fertilization.