Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Mystic and the Self-made Saint
- 2 Politics and Ecstasy
- 3 The Text of Experience
- 4 “Here or Nowhere”: Essays: Second Series
- 5 The Eclipse of the Hero: Representative Men
- 6 The Old and New Worlds: English Trait
- 7 “Work Is Victory”: The Conduct of Life
- 8 “Plain Living and High Thinking”: Society and Solitude
- 9 Toward a Grammar of the Moral Life
- Notes
- Work Cited
- Index
- Titles in the series
7 - “Work Is Victory”: The Conduct of Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Mystic and the Self-made Saint
- 2 Politics and Ecstasy
- 3 The Text of Experience
- 4 “Here or Nowhere”: Essays: Second Series
- 5 The Eclipse of the Hero: Representative Men
- 6 The Old and New Worlds: English Trait
- 7 “Work Is Victory”: The Conduct of Life
- 8 “Plain Living and High Thinking”: Society and Solitude
- 9 Toward a Grammar of the Moral Life
- Notes
- Work Cited
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
FORMS OF POWER
“All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world”
(W, 6:56).In placing Emerson at the head of an American pragmatist tradition, Cornel West has described him, tellingly, I believe, as an “organic intellectual,” one whose intellectual career expresses itself through an engaged commitment to the guidance and healing of society and its constituent individuals. As West frames the issue, Emerson's connection to American pragmatism is less a question of doctrinal continuity than of ethical orientation – to what moral or political end is my thinking? Emerson is therefore crucial for the way he “enacts an intellectual style of cultural criticism.” The decade following the second English journey of 1847–8 is perhaps the most crucial for Emerson's testing and enactment of the public role of the intellectual. Not only was his public stature higher then, but his concerns were fundamentally directed toward the moral questions of social life. His increasing orientation toward the ethical and pragmatic, catalyzed, as we have seen, by the antislavery crisis, became the focus of his lecturing in the 1850s. These concerns are captured in the title of the book he published on the eve of the Civil War: The Conduct of Life (1860).
Emerson calls attention to the shift in intellectual orientation that the title signifies, in an ironically self-reflexive opening comment: “It chanced during one winter a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the Age.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emerson and the Conduct of LifePragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work, pp. 134 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993