R.W. Emerson or the Americans’ Philosophical Method

Abstract

In 1840, the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) opened the sequel to his research on American democracy with the following statement: “I believe there is not, in the civilized world, a country in which one is less concerned with philosophy than the United States.” He then added that Americans not only did not possess a proper philosophical school, as they did not pay attention to European ones. Notwithstanding, Tocqueville did notice a ‘certain philosophical method’ pervading the minutest actions of Americans, albeit being an unwritten philosophy. What Tocqueville did not know, though, is that by the time he wrote down these reflections, an American thinker by the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) had been steadily developping a line of thought which was somehow accordant with the notions that Tocqueville envisaged as the main traits of the American philosophical method. Thus, we shall argue that concomitantly to Tocqueville’s perceptions of an original American philosophy marked by a refusal of speculative thinking, Emerson was already developping a very conscious practical and individualist philosophy very much alike what Tocqueville saw as the diffuse, for not being systematized, American philosophy. Thus, we shall take into consideration the Tocquevillean theory on the American philosophical method as developped in De La Démocratie en Amérique II in order to throw light on the concomitant Emersonian production from the late thirties to the early fourties of the XIXth century, giving special emphasis to the essay published in 1841 as Self-Reliance.