Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

LISTEN. This show originally aired on July 6, 2017. Radio Open Source.

Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long.  “Simplify,” in a one-word sentence of good advice.  But then 2-million words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.  

It’s one of many odd points to notice about Thoreau at his 200th birthday: that the non-stop writer was equally a man of action, a scientist and a high-flying poet whose imagination saw that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back;” and still a workman with callused hands, at home in the wild, a walker four hours a day on average, in no particular direction.  His transcendentalism was all about the blossoming intersection of nature-study and introspection, fact and idea, detail and ideals.  In his pine grove, on his river, at his pond, the outdoor Thoreau.

N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) Walden Pond Revisited, 1942

What does a Transcendentalist do, we were asking in the first of three bicentennial Thoreau shows?  All the answers are to be found in the canoe trip that became a masterpiece, titled: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. What the Transcendentalist does is soar – between water below and sky above; between this day and eternity, between Nature, and human society.

We start our journey at the South Bridge Boat House near Thoreau’s house on Main Street in Concord, just upstream from the Concord River itself.  A naturalist philosopher in the Thoreau lineage, Alex Strong from Maine, is one of our guides.  During our trip down Thoreau’s “little Nile”,  Alex tells us about what the strapping, young 22 year old was learning on his voyage: 

He was learning about big-N Nature when he was studying the Perch, studying when flowers bloomed, where the bees were. The notes he took, the meticulous notes, weren’t just about the little details; they’re about understanding the whole picture and keeping nature sacred while understanding it, in all its finite mundane details.

Next up, the still-water Walden, a pond in Concord, Massachusetts where Henry Thoreau wrote his great book in a cabin by the shore. In 1845 Walden was a woodlot next to the new railway where the 28-year-old poet went to “suck out the marrow of life,” whatever it turned out to be. Our guide to the pond and the book, the young philosopher John Kaag had been in and out of the Walden water the other morning before we got there.

 

Photo by Michael J. Lutch

While we’re here, at Walden, we decided to stop and consider the statuesque, very tall, dark-green, almost black, pine trees all around Walden Pond, trees that Thoreau came to consider cousins, virtually human.  Richard Higgins, widely traveled in Concord today, has written a book on Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and he has no doubt that Thoreau spoke it fluently, from the heart.

Finally, we conclude with a Thoreauvian meditation on walking. Real walkers are born, not made, Thoreau liked to say.  “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”  These days the woods and the bookstores are full of such walkers.  Andrew Forsthoefel made his reputation in public radio walking 4000 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco, with a sign that said “walking to listen” and recording back-road stories. And then there’s the literary traveler Paul Theroux, of Cape Cod and Hawaii, of the Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway Bazaar. He has spent a lifetime on trains, and in kayaks, and a lot of it on his own two feet in China, in our own Deep South and specially in Africa.  In our conversation, Theroux extends Thoreau’s idea that walking is in-born, into some more than others.

See a full transcript of this show on Medium.

Guest List

John Kaag
professor of philosophy at UMass Lowell and author of American Philosophy: A Love Story

Alejandro Strong
philosophy teacher, wilderness guide and founder at Apeiron Expeditions

Paul Theroux
travel writer, novelist, essayist and author of The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Richard Higgins
author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees

Andrew Forsthoefel
radio producer and author of Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

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I Am An American Philosopher: Naoko Saito – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Naoko Saito is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Kyoto. She is the author of The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (2005) and American Philosophy in Translation (2019). She is co-editor, with Naomi Hodgson, of Philosophy as Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures (2018), and co-editor with Paul Standish of Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated (2017), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (2012) and Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy: Pedagogy for Human Transformation (2012). She is a past recipient of SAAP's Ila and John Mellow Prize and the Joseph L. Blau Prize.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

My area of research is American philosophy and philosophy of education, with a special focus on John Dewey's pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Henry David Thoreau's American transcendentalism, and Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. I feel that education in the East and the West today is in need of a language and a mode of action that can resist not only the economic tide of globalization but also threats posed by anxieties of inclusion—by this phrase I mean, for example, those tensions brought into focus by the past presidency of Donald Trump and by Brexit. In response to this need, in my publications, I attempt to reconstruct Deweyan pragmatism in dialogue with other American voices: those of Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell, all of whom show strains of Eastern thought in their work. Their moral perfectionism helps Dewey address more sensitively the problem of alterity in globalization and saves him from the limitations of American democracy.

How did you become an American philosopher?

Over the past thirty years I have been working as a mediator in cross-cultural settings, especially between Japan and Anglo-American and European cultures. My academic research, international research activities, teaching and professional work are inseparable from these experiences. My area of specialization is philosophy of education and American philosophy, especially insofar as this relates to intercultural understanding and education for citizenship in a globalized world.

These interests derive in part from my first degree, when I majored in American Studies. Postgraduate studies with Israel Scheffler and Hilary Putnam at Harvard led me to a deep interest in philosophy of education, especially in Dewey's democratic philosophy of education. Later studies with Cavell furthered my interest in the transcendentalism of Emerson, culminating in my Ph.D. from Columbia University in October 2000.

Since 2001 I have been working closely with Paul Standish at UCL IOE, which has enabled me to expand my research activities into continental philosophies and connections with European scholars. Most recently, I have developed close research connections on American philosophy with Richard Bernstein at the New School for Social Research and with Sami Pihlström at the University of Helsinki. These international connections are at the heart of my research and teaching activities in cross-dialogue in philosophy and education.

How would you describe your current research?

My book, American Philosophy in Translation (2019), is the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy. Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean – and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own. I came to the idea of this book, and to thematizing these issues in terms of translation, partly through a sense that there was something still to be released in American thought and pragmatism, and that an outsider's viewpoint might actually be beneficial. It is through the experience of standing on the precarious border between inside and outside that I hit upon the related ideas of translation, transcendence and transformation—following Henry David Thoreau's closing remarks in Walden:

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The account offered in my book is driven by my strong attraction to the best assets of American culture, assets that seem, to this outsider's eye and ear, to have been stifled in stereotypical forms of American discourse. The book is an endeavor to attend in a fresh way to the voices of Dewey, Emerson, Thoreau and Cavell.

What do you do when you're not doing American philosophy?

I suppose my "hobby" is international networking. Before the spread of COVID-19, I was traveling abroad to see people and organize conferences, involving people from different fields and across generations. Since traveling abroad has become difficult, I have been organizing and attending international meetings online.

What's your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

Definitely Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau! For example, Thoreau's Walden, and Cavell's The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979) and The Senses of Walden (1992).

Saito-Interview-FinalDownload

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-naoko-saito/

America's Philosopher

I couldn't put this book down! The story of Locke in America is about so much more than just John Locke. It's about the needs, ideals, and questions that have transformed intellectual life in America and continue to animate us today.

A 🧵on Claire Arcenas' beautiful book https://t.co/xLfAEmoaKt
(https://twitter.com/miss_glory/status/1549082850883842048?s=02)

Agnosticism and pragmatic pluralism

William James wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic (Part 8, of an 8-part series beginning with Part 1: "A Religious Man for Our Times")

"The most important thing about a man," wrote Chesterton, "is his philosophy." William James agreed. He was fond of quoting the saying. Our philosophy, or "over-belief", shapes our "habits of action", which is to say our ethos – who we are becoming. Pragmatism, the philosophy of "what works", is taken to be James' philosophy. And yet, his pragmatism is different from that of his confrères.

Pragmatism is often associated with deflationary accounts of truth. Truth, with a capital T, is a pipe dream, it implies. No fact, rule or idea is ever certain – nor is even the possibility of facts, rules and ideas. Philosophy and science can make progress, but only in relation to current experience. "Truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate", wrote one pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey Charles Sanders Peirce. Or as Richard Rorty pithily averred: "Time will tell, but epistemology won't." When it comes to religion, such pragmatism implies that theologians are more like poets than metaphysicians. They are aestheticians – conjuring meaning with their descriptive powers, as opposed to capturing Truth in their formularies.

It's called ironic pragmatism. "There is an all" is inverted to "that's all there is." Such a stance requires the philosopher, or scientist, to be committed to finding the truth as it if existed, though it probably doesn't. It's truth as a "regulative ideal", to use another phrase. So, if James is a pragmatist, what of his religious quest? Is he condemned to perpetual agnosticism – longing for more and never finding it? It's a big debate amongst Jamesian scholars. But I think his ethos, his philosophy, can be summarised like this.

In the Varieties, he had found that the higher religious emotions – those associated with profound conversions and saintly lives – commonly give rise to a monist view of ultimate reality. (There is an all, and it is One.) But he wondered about such absolutism. What he disliked about it was its reifying tendency. He feared that the abstract language it fosters forgets the "thickness of reality". He wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic. In this sense, he was an empiricist, and a "radical empiricist" to boot – as in "rooted". He believed our experiences are rooted in reality, for all that we will misunderstand what's real, and get it wrong.

The process was captured in one of his many pregnant phrases: "stream of consciousness". The flowing waters of our experience – with its eddies, torrents and occasion pools of stillness – are steeped in the wider waters of consciousness that surround us. We perceive things from our point of view, sure. But that is not to say we cannot glimpse a fuller perspective too, as we're touched by other flows.

It's the usually unseen reality that spiritual virtuosi detect – the "more". But while we can hope that our experiences participate in these truths, our understanding of them must always be hedged with doubt: no-one ever perceives the whole of reality – the dream of the monist. We live piecemeal, in what he came to call a "pluralistic universe". (His final theological position is not contained in the Varieties, but in A Pluralistic Universe – the book of his Hibbert lectures of 1908.) To put it another way, truth is found in the quest itself. This is what his pragmatism means.

Ludwig Wittgenstein read James, and he offers an illuminating reflection on this quest in the Philosophical Investigations. He imagines James listening to some music and, whilst knowing that it's glorious, not being quite able say why it's glorious. "Our vocabulary is inadequate," he has James conclude, which raises the possibility that a richer vocabulary might contain a word for the way in which the music is glorious. Only, that's not the point, Wittgenstein notes. It's not that we don't have the words. It's that language itself is inadequate.

For much of his life, James devoted his imaginative energies to finding words that might better capture the superabundance of our inner lives. In the Principles of Psychology, his major work before the Varieties, he'd revolutionized the vocabulary used by the discipline. But there is always the more that lies beyond words too – the ineffable quality of the music. And so this opens up a second dimension to James' pragmatism. If truth is in the quest, the quest is never over too.

In another inventive phrase, James wrote that he was "ever not quite" at home with the existence of God. He couldn't easily live with belief in God. But he couldn't quite live without it either. It could never be otherwise for him. It's implicit in his perspectival empiricism.
It's a religiously-inclined agnosticism that demands an ethos of toleration coupled to curiosity. James wrote an essay entitled "On a certain blindness in human beings", that blindness being a tendency to forget that different people see the world in radically different ways. It leads to the mutual misunderstandings that lie at the root of so much human discontent, warfare and strife. Toleration is the necessary corrective to this blindness.

And we can recognise our blindness – which is why curiosity is a virtue too. By respecting another's point of view we might not only save ourselves the embarrassments of narrow-mindedness, but open ourselves to the unexpected and new. "Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer," he writes in the essay, "although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands."

"Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe," he affirms. That is to remain committed to the reality of the ineffable about which we'd speak, and to admit we'll never be able completely to capture it in our words. But our best mutterings will address us body and soul. Our deepest musings will "hover around" deeper insights. There's reason to have faith. As Wittgenstein observed: "The unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered."

Mark Vernon

Guardian

John Lachs

John Lachs is 88 today. I've tweeted a bit in appreciation of him over the years.

My favorite page in “John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy,” just out. Like JL, my late father loved life, valued honesty, and faced “chill reality” forthrightly. pic.twitter.com/OZI4T2mOcb

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 24, 2018

Frank Pajares

 UKY WJ site…

Frank Pajares was an Education scholar at Emory. When he died a few years ago his WJ site migrated to UKY. He linked the site to my blogs...under Bibliography you can click on my book and get this:

Sentiment of Rationality 2

"James ends this extraordinary essay, which is a call for a whole new philosophy of mind based on what mind actually is and does, by saying, provocatively, “The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails,” and he appeals for an example to Whitman: “Even the least religious of men must have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning that ‘Swiftly arose and spread around him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth’. . .To feel ‘I am the truth’ is to abolish the opposition between knowing and being.”6"

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/46keh29

The Sentiment of Rationality

"28. The Action of Consciousness ABOUT A MONTH AFTER he sent off his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” James sent off, in January 1878, an article called “The Sentiment of Rationality.” He later described it as “the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize,” and he noted ruefully that it might better have been called “The Psychology of Philosophizing.” We may, at this distance, prefer the original title, if only for its fresh and unorthodox, not to say brash, announcement that rationality is at bottom a feeling. Not a matter of logic or math, not reasoning or ratios, not induction, deduction, or syllogism, not something higher than and detached from the senses, not the opposite of a feeling or emotion—rationality is itself a feeling or emotion. He might even have called the essay “The Feeling of Rationality.” He begins by asking how we recognize the rationality of a conception, and he answers, “By certain subjective marks, that is, a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest.” He amplifies, saying, “This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness—the absence of all need to explain it, account for it or justify it—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.”1 James simply sidesteps the long history of reason, right reason, pure reason, and practical reason, walking right past the conventional notion that rationality means abiding by set rules of reasoning. James is not really interested in the history of philosophy or the taxonomy of logic; he is interested in how particular minds actually work. His starting point is not Greek or medieval philosophy but modern scientific or experimental knowledge of the functions of the brain and the senses. “All logical processes,” James says in another piece written at this same time, “are today hypothetically explained as brain processes.”2"

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/5zjnn6I

An interview with Cornel West on American pragmatism - Vox

As William James said, pragmatism is a house with many rooms. And there's a Rortian room. And that Rortian room is that of a Cold War liberal who's concerned about getting beyond the subjectivism and the solipsism of Descartes. It's all about a move toward community. And community for him was all about solidarity. We begin with a "we," not an "I." That's pragmatism…

https://www.vox.com/2022/6/5/23143285/vox-conversations-cornel-west-american-pragmatism

Philosophy as Poetry (Page-Barbour Lectures) by Richard Rorty

From lec.1-

"GETTING RID OF THE APPEARANCE-REALITY DISTINCTION COMMON SENSE DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN THE APPARENT color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are really real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. That distinction has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. We should do our best to get rid of it. If we did so, we should no longer wonder whether the human mind, or human language, is capable of representing reality accurately. We would stop thinking that some parts of our culture are more in touch with reality than other parts. We would express our sense of finitude not by comparing our humanity with something nonhuman but by comparing our way of being human with other, better, ways that may someday be adopted by our descendants. When we condescended to our ancestors, we would not say that they were less in touch with reality than we are, but that their imaginations were more limited than ours. We would boast of being able to talk about more things than they could. Parmenides jump-started the Western philosophical tradition by dreaming up the notion of Reality with a capital R. He took the trees, the stars, the human beings, and the gods and rolled them all together into a well-rounded blob called "Being" or "the One." He then stood back from this blob and proclaimed it the only thing worth knowing about, but forever unknowable by mortals. Plato was enchanted by the notion of something even more august and unapproachable than Zeus, but he was more optimistic than Parmenides. Plato suggested that perhaps a few gifted mortals might, by replacing opinion with knowledge, gain access to what he called "the really real." Ever since Plato, there have been people who worried about whether we can gain access to Reality or whether the finitude of our cognitive faculties makes such access impossible. Nobody, however, worries about whether we have cognitive access to trees, stars, cream, or wristwatches. We know how to tell a justified belief about such things from an unjustified one. If the word "reality" were used simply as a name for the aggregate of all such things, no problem about access to it could have arisen. The word would never have been capitalized. But when that word is given the sense that Parmenides and Plato gave it, nobody can say what would count as a justification for a belief about the thing denoted by that term. We know how to correct our beliefs about the colors of physical objects, or about the motions of planets, or the provenance of wristwatches, but we have no idea how to correct our beliefs about the ultimate nature of things. Ontology is more like a playground than like a science. The difference between ordinary things and Reality is that when learning how to use the word "tree" we automatically acquire lots of true beliefs about trees. As Donald Davidson has argued, most of our beliefs about such things as trees and stars and wristwatches have to be true. If somebody thinks that trees are typically blue in color, and that they never grow higher than two feet, we shall conclude that whatever she may be talking about, it is not trees. There have to be many commonly accepted truths before we can raise the possibility of error. Any of these truths can be put in doubt, but not all of them at once. One can only dissent from common sense on a particular point if one is willing to accept most of the rest of what common sense says. When it comes to Reality, however, there is no such thing as common sense. Unlike the case of trees, there are no platitudes accepted by both the vulgar and the learned. In some circles, you can get general agreement that the ultimate nature of Reality is atoms and void. In others, you can get a consensus that it is God—an immaterial, non-spatio-temporal, being. The reason quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of his favorite things and claim ontological privilege for them. Despite the best efforts of positivists, pragmatists, and deconstructionists, ontology is as popular among contemporary philosophers as it was in the days of Democritus and Anaxagoras. Most analytic philosophers still take the question of whether the human mind can get in touch with the really real with perfect seriousness. My hypothesis about why ontology remains so popular is that we are still reluctant to admit that the poetic imagination sets the bounds for human thought. At the heart of philosophy's quarrel with poetry is the fear that the imagination goes all the way down—that there is nothing we talk about that we might not have talked of differently. This fear causes philosophers to become obsessed by the need to achieve direct access to reality. Direct, in this sense, means "unmediated by language"—for our language, we are uneasily aware, might well have been different. Before we can rid ourselves of ontology we are going to have to get rid of the idea of nonlinguistic access. This will entail getting rid of faculty psychology. We shall have to give up the picture of the human mind as divided into a good part that puts us in touch with the really real and a bad part that engages in self-stimulation and autosuggestion. To get rid of this cluster of bad ideas we need to think of reason not as a truth-tracking faculty but as a social practice—the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of marks and noises, thereby making it possible to use words rather than blows as a way of getting things done. We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical, is to do something new and to be lucky enough to have that novelty be adopted by one's fellow humans, incorporated into their social practices. The distinction between fantasy and imagination is between novelties that do not get taken up and put to use by one's fellows and those that do. People whose novelties we cannot appropriate and utilize we call foolish, or perhaps insane. Those whose ideas strike us as useful we hail as geniuses. On the account of human abilities I am suggesting, the use of persuasion rather than force is an innovation comparable to the beaver's dam. Like the beavers' collaboration in getting the dam built, it is a social practice. It was initiated by the novel suggestion that we might use noises rather than physical compulsion to get other humans to cooperate with us. That suggestion gave rise to language. Rationality, thought, and cognition all began when language did. Language gets off the ground not by people giving names to things they were already thinking about but by proto-humans using noises in innovative ways, just as the proto-beavers got the practice of building dams off the ground by using sticks and mud in innovative ways. Language was, over the millennia, enlarged and rendered more flexible not by adding the names of abstract objects to those of concrete objects but by using marks and noises in ways unconnected with environmental exigencies. The distinction between the concrete and the abstract can be replaced with that between words used in making perceptual reports and those unsuitable for such use. On the view I am sketching, expressions like "gravity" and "inalienable human rights" should not be thought of as names of entities whose nature remains mysterious but as noises and marks, the use of which by various geniuses gave rise to bigger and better social practices. Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past. Beaver dams improved over the millennia as gifted beavers did novel things with sticks and mud, things that were then incorporated into standard dam-building practice. The arts and the sciences improved over the millennia because our more ingenious ancestors did novel things not only with seeds, clay, and metallic ores but also with noises and marks. What we call "increased knowledge" should not be thought of as increased access to the Real but as increased ability to do things—to take part in social practices that make possible richer and fuller human lives. This increased richness is not the effect of a magnetic attraction exerted on the human mind by the really real, nor by that mind's innate ability to penetrate the veil of appearance. It is a relation between the human present and the human past, not a relation between the human and the nonhuman. The view that I have just finished summarizing has often been called "linguistic idealism." But that term confuses idealism, which is a metaphysical thesis about the ultimate nature of reality, with romanticism, which is a thesis about the nature of human progress. William James put the latter thesis forward in the following passage: "Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitations by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world." In that passage, James is echoing Emerson, whose essay "Circles" is perhaps the best expression of the romantic view of the nature of progress. "The life of man," Emerson writes there, is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. . . . Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. . . .There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. . . . In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations. . . . Men walk as prophecies of the next age. (Emphasis added) The most important claim Emerson makes in this essay is that there is no "inclosing wall" called "the Real." There is nothing outside language to which language attempts to become adequate. Every human achievement is simply a launching pad for a greater achievement. We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative redescription will become pointless. There is no destined terminus to inquiry. There are only larger human lives to be lived. As James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets."

— Philosophy as Poetry (Page-Barbour Lectures) by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/bEt8LMx