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Emerson and Whitehead
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952, pp. 15, 20.
2 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1945), pp. 828–836.
3 Morton G. White (ed.), The Age of Analysis (Boston, 1955).
4 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926), p. 27.
5 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903–04), I, 10—hereafter cited as Works.
6 Science and the Modern World, pp. 27–28.
7 Works, i, 21, 24, 44.
8 Emerson's Angle of Vision, p. 16.
9 Modes of Thought (New York, 1938), pp. 204–205.
10 Thoreau (New York: William Sloane Assoc., 1948), p. 105.
11 Science and the Modern World, p. 157.
12 Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1949), pp. 246–247.
13 Religion in the Making (New York, 1926), p. 153.
14 Lucien Price, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston, 1954), p. 60.
15 Religion in the Making, p. 146.
16 Price, op. cit., p. 370.
17 F. I. Carpenter, Emerson Handbook (New York, 1953), p. 213.
18 New York, 1929, pp. 524, 528, 529.
19 Religion in the Making, p. 160.
20 The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York, 1929), p. 23.
21 See his valedictory lecture entitled “Immortality,” delivered at Harvard on 22 April 1941, and published in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York, 1951), pp. 682–700.
22 New York, 1937, p. 305.
23 Quoted in Amos N. Wilder, Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition (New York, 1952), p. 258.
24 Pitirim Sorokin, The Reconstruction of Humanity (Boston, 1948), passim.
25 Arnold J. Toynbee, An Historian's Approach to Religion (New York, 1956), passim.
26 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago, 1948), passim. Tillich wanted to give his book the title The End of the Protestant Era, but his publishers objected.
27 This is not to imply that the synthesis proposed by any of these thinkers is like that of Emerson and Whitehead, but they all consider an analytical, “atomistic” philosophy as an expression of the spiritual chaos of the age.
28 Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese (eds.), Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago, 1953), passim.