
Contents
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Prima philosophia Prima philosophia
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Analogies of Experience Analogies of Experience
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The First Cause The First Cause
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The One The One
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First Philosophy First Philosophy
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Notes Notes
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6 The Seed of the World: Emerson’s Transatlantic Transcendentalist First Philosophy
Get accessDavid Greenham, Professor of English Literature, University of the West of England
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Published:18 July 2024
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Abstract
This chapter investigates an often overlooked transatlantic origin for Emerson’s conceptualization of nature, which is also a crucial marker in the genealogy of the Anthropocene: the binary distinction between man and nature that emerged in the writings of the pre-Socratics, whose work Emerson sees as the “Seed of the World.” Emerson scholars have unearthed numerous transatlantic strata of Emerson’s thought and writings, whether Platonic, Neoplatonic, Puritan, Empiricist, Scotch Common Sense, Eclectic, or Romantic. However, prior to these layers of influence pre-Socratic thought provides a philosophical origin story to the distinction between matter and spirit that divides man from nature, and represents the deepest, perhaps most stable layer of Emerson’s intellectual evolution. The pre-Socratics give shape and structure to an Anthropocenic conception of man’s place in the cosmos that Emerson inherits, exploits, and bequeaths to nineteenth-century American literature and culture through his symbolic literary theory and practice.
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