Questions

1. Emerson is often thought of as the man who created “a truly American, self-governed, self centered, absolutely independent style, ... knowing no law but its own sovereign will and pleasure,” in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Certainly Holmes saw a discrepancy between the way Emerson actually lived his life and this perceived ideal, but is this near-legendary Emersonian style still an important part of the American national character?

2. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men—that is genius.” So Emerson wrote, probably aware that others defined that kind of belief as madness. What do you think? Is Emerson’s genius crazy?

3. A contemporary of Emerson‘s, James Margh, wrote that his lectures “contain with scarcely a decent disguise nothing less than an Epicurean Atheism dressed up in a style seducing and to many perhaps deceptive.” Margh is referring to the stoic philosophy of Epicurus, who believed that events are the product of chance, and that the greatest good, therefore, is to be found in the avoidance of pain and suffering, or in their acceptance as inevitable facts of existence. Is there any evidence in the Essays of this Epicurean Atheism?

4. The historian Louis Manand wrote of Emerson that “his thought plays continually with the limits of thought, and his greatest essays are efforts to get at the way life is held up, in the end, by nothing.” This characterization of Emerson’s writing makes him seem very modern, a kind of Samuel Beckett. Is Menand going too far, or can you pinpoint evidence of the void behind Emerson’s apparent optimism and idealism?