The seed of the world: Emerson’s transatlantic transcendentalist first philosophy

Greenham, David

Abstract

Taking seriously the ‘deep time’ of American literature and the current importance of the Anthropocene, this chapter investigates an often overlooked transatlantic origin for Emerson’s conceptualisation of nature, which I also argue is a crucial marker in the genealogy of the Anthropocene: the binary distinction between man and nature that emerged in the writings of the pre-Socratics, whose work Emerson sees as the ‘Seed of the World.’ Emerson scholars have unearthed numerous Transatlantic strata of Emerson's thought and writings, whether Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Puritan, Empiricist, Scotch Common Sense, Eclectic or Romantic (e.g., Miller [1940], Matthiessen [1941], Wellek [1943], Cameron [1945], Bercovitch [1975], Chai [1987], Manning [2001], Greenham [2012], Harvey [2013], Urbas [2016]). However, amidst this archaeology, this earliest pre-Socratic layer, which provides a philosophical origin story to the distinction between matter and spirit that divides man from nature, has remained largely undisturbed, even though it represents the deepest and perhaps most stable layer of Emerson's intellectual evolution. As I show, the pre-Socratics’ a give shape and structure to an Anthropocenic conception of man’s place in the cosmos that Emerson inherits, exploits, and bequeaths to nineteenth-century American literature and culture through his symbolic literary theory and practice.

• Online Publication Date: Jul 18, 2024
• Publication Date: Jul 4, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 6, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 5, 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 86-104
• Book Title: Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Chapter Number: 6
• ISBN: 9780192894373
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894373.013.30
• Keywords: Transcendentalism, transatlantic studies, pre-Socratics, influence studies, Anthropocene, American philosophy, nineteenth-century American literature, American Renaissance
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11490544
• Publisher URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-9780192894373?q=Oxford%20Handbook%20of%20Ralph%20Waldo%20Emerson&lang=en&cc=gb
• Contract Date: Dec 1, 2023