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Emerson's Logic in Friendship

Introduction

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher, essayist, and poet was the leading figure in American transcendentalism. He set the logical tone of New England letters in his own time and represents the starting of a genuinely American voice in literature and thought. Born in Boston and educated at Harvard (graduated 1821), Emerson was pastor of the Unitarian Second Church in Boston for a few years before moving to Concord, Massachusetts and launching a public career of publishing and lecturing. His friends and acquaintances included Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Carlyle. The influence of his original expression of American philosophical pragmatism is evident in such thinkers as William James and John Dewey. Across the Atlantic, Friedrich Nietzsche carried a well-marked copy of Emerson's essays with him for years. Emerson died in Concord and is buried there near Thoreau.

Emerson's friendship logic is part of a extensive project of attempting to add up to his thought as a whole by outlining the paths of consistency through it. These paths separate into two types: the "master-tone" or the consistent articulation of a view.

Here in this paper we will consider Emerson's logic in "Friendship" essay in different ways: to map the track of its argument, to outline its links with other Emerson's writings, and to explore the theoretical links between friendship and also some other Emerson's ideas as defined in the self-reliance essay (Emerson, p.31).

Discussion

In the first series, he depicts the way friendships start on. They have nothing to do with worldly comings and goings, efforts or physical looks, he declares; however are rather subjects of affinity or attraction. The terms for the arts experienced by Emerson are disparaging: they are considered to be "abortive births," and to add only a "mean" concept of human creativity and resources. Thus, Friendships, seen by Emerson is unforced and spontaneous.

Friendship comes out in a rather diverse framework in "The Divinity School Address," where Emerson criticizes that Christianity has mislaid the indispensable friendliness of Christ's message (The Divinity School address, p.115). He further criticizes that the language that portrays Christ to America and Europe is not the style of enthusiasm and friendship to a noble and good heart, however is formal and appropriated, coats a demigod, as the Greeks or Orientals would describe Apollo or Osiris. A time is near-term when all men will witness, that the reward of God to the soul is not a overpowering, vaunting, excluding holiness, however a natural and sweet goodness that is a goodness like mine and thine, and that so call upon mine and thine to be and to raise. Christ is the celestial friend of celestial women and men, Emerson says. Jesus is a god who is not distant but very near and as near as our friends in our finest moments together. He says that the friendly message of Christ has been taken over, or we can say hijacked and changed into a message of hostility, alienation, and fear. ...