Both of these negative aspects are addressed by the following quote:
"For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, -- re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, -- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts."
The basic idea here is that the "life of God" is a unified life -- one that sees connections, as opposed to separations, in the universe. Thus, in response to the separation of death that came from the passing of his son and his two brothers in the same year, Emerson thought that there was a deeper, universal spiritual reality of God in his son's soul, and that his own soul was somehow connected to this soul. This thought indicates that those that "die" are, in a very real way, still connected to us because they, like us, are connected to God (God, in Emerson's configuration, being the diviness of all nature, which makes the human soul and the entirety of nature one).
To Emerson, slavery is wrong for similar reasons. Before he clarified his position during the 1850s, some actually used Emerson's principle of individualism as an excuse to assert their authority over other human beings in the form of slavery. Emerson corrected them using the following reasoning:
Laws, for Emerson, had a responsibility to reflect nature -- they do not form it. Lawmakers were to discover, not create, the natural order of the universe. For Emerson, the natural order is divine unity, not separation -- and the practice of slavery was based on separation. Although Emerson believed in the divine nature of the individual spoul, he also believed that this soul embodied the entirety of the universe. Because this soul embodied the entirety of the universe, it was also connected to the divine nature of all souls. For Emerson, an individual's concept of slavery, especially race based slavery, was erroneously based on the belief that an individual's own soul was not an embodiment or manifestation of the divine nature of other souls, and was therefore wrong. Thus, slavery was an inaccurate representation of the natural order that the law should strive to represent, and should, therefore, be strongly opposed.
Do these conceptualizations work for you? Do you think Emerson's philosophy is sufficient for helping people through the most difficult losses of their lives? Furthermore, do you think Emerson's view on the law is a good one to go by in your own dealings with politics and everyday life? Why or why not? Feel free to discuss below.
I also want to clarify something regarding the "the Father, the Spirit, and the Son" passage on page two of the reading. I stated that Emerson's argument here is that all three of them are working together, implying that they all work together in the poet. I realized this might be a bit confusing, because in the very next paragraph, Emerson clearly states that "the poet is the sayer"-- which, if you follow the parallel comparison here, would correlate with "the Son." Although this is true, notice that in the second to last paragraph on the page, Emerson states that "words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words," thus blurring the lines between "Saying" (associated with Christ) and "Actions" or "Doing" (associated with the Spirit). The last paragraph on the page argues that the poet "knows and tells" and that his ability to be the Sayer is dependent on his ability to know -- which makes this Sayer a Knower (associated with the Father). So, in essence, he is strongly implying that the poet is the Father, the Spirit, and the Son -- three in one. Or, in other words, that poets are (in his own words later on) "liberating gods."
Do you give this much creedence to the poet? Why or why not?
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