Emerson’s Schellingean Natures: Origins of and Possibilities for American Environmental Thought

Abstract

Emerson was not a close reader of the history of German idealism, yet his work is pervasively influenced by this idealism. Charles Peirce often argued that ideas have their own lives and that the best thinkers see what is next implied in a historical trajectory. This seems an apt way to think of the relationship between Emerson and Schelling. In some ways, Emerson is quite directly influenced by Schelling’s writings, especially those writings to which he was exposed by Frederic Henry Hedge. In other ways, Emerson simply moved into the spirit of Schelling’s transcendental idealism. Some of the specific Emersonian ideas attributable to Schelling’s influence are the “Over-Soul,” natural divinity, fate, and nature as a living organism. In his two essays on nature, then, Emerson reveals traces of Schelling’s thought and puts these traces to work in an American setting. My specific goal in the short essay that follows is to show what some of the consequences of Emerson’s Schellingeanism were for later American conceptions of the natural environment.