Essays: Second Series
Emerson's 1844 second essay collection — including "The Poet," "Experience," "Nature" (1844), and "Politics" — a more sober and philosophically mature volume than the First Series
Tradition: American transcendentalism
The poet, experience, nature, politics — Emerson's second collection, more sober and philosophically mature than the First Series
Emerson's 1844 second essay collection — composed after the 1842 death of his five-year-old son Waldo. The eight essays — "The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature" (a different essay from the 1836 book of the same title), "Politics," "Nominalist and Realist," "New England Reformers" — show a more sober and philosophically mature register than the First Series, especially the "Experience" essay (which begins "Where do we find ourselves? In a series, of which we do not know the extremes" — one of the great American essays on grief, scepticism, and the limits of philosophical optimism).
Author
Editions cited
- Essays: Second Series (Boston: James Munroe, 1844); modern critical edition in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3 (Belknap/Harvard UP, 1983)
School Embodiments
Major statement of mature American transcendentalism — the more philosophically sober register that follows the youthful confidence of the First Series.
"Where do we find ourselves? In a series, of which we do not know the extremes." (Experience)
"Experience" especially shaped James and Dewey — Emerson's anti-systematic, sceptical-pragmatic engagement with the limits of philosophical knowing.
"I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition." (Experience)
The "Experience" essay is one of the foundational American pre-existentialist texts — grief, scepticism, the impossibility of stable foundations.
"I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience... But, in real life, the loss of one's child loses no more reality than this." (Experience)
The Second Series' more attentive phenomenological method — close descriptive attention to the felt textures of experience.
"Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates." (Nature, 1844 essay)
Continues the transcendentalist-idealist framework but with more philosophical sobriety than the First Series.
"The poet... names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other." (The Poet)
The religious-philosophical framework continues to shape liberal-Protestant thought.
"There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile." (Experience)
The Second Series shows more attention to the underlying limits of human knowing — the "lords of life" Emerson identifies in "Experience" as the structural conditions within which we must work.
"Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life." (Experience)
Internal Tensions
The relation between the First Series' confident transcendentalism and the Second Series' chastened scepticism has been variously read — some seeing continuity, others seeing genuine philosophical development. The "Experience" essay's impact (on James especially) has been substantial.
I. Time
The temporal succession of "Experience" — the impossibility of stable presence.
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II. Space
The lived spaces of post-1842 New England life.
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III. Matter
The embodied life that "Experience" treats as the proper object of philosophical reflection.
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IV. Observer
The mature Emersonian observer whose youthful confidence has been chastened by loss.
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V. Energy
The energies of grief, of philosophical thought, of poetic naming.
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VI. Information
The "lords of life" — the underlying structures within which human cognition must operate.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Essays: Second Series resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.