Understanding Emerson’s Self-Reliance in Terms of Education with a Focus on Language Didactics (original) (raw)
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Educational Philosophy and Theory
b Education, stockholms universitet, stockholm, sweden 'Where do we find ourselves?' (Emerson, 1983, p. 27) is the question which opens Ralph Waldo Emerson's classic essay 'Experience'. In admiration of Emerson, Nietzsche warns, addressing his reader, that answering this question may lead into 'countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself' (1997, p. 129). Instead Nietzsche suggests a path into the unknown. The attention to Bildung and self-cultivation in this special issue is an attempt to explore Nietzsche's rephrasing of Emerson's question, 'But how can we find ourselves again?' (1997, p. 129). The contributors to this issue, in their writing and thinking, stay with this question, rather than giving it a hasty answer. Such a posture, for Emerson, characterizes democratic life. Emerson has long been admired as a writer and important figure of American culture and literature. His works have inspired philosophers such as Nietzsche, John Dewey, George Santayana and others, but until recently his writing thrived mostly on the peripheries of the discussions in professional philosophy. In philosophy of education, his work has shared this fate. Emerson is widely admired but not often thoroughly and explicitly discussed. 1 Still, as Heikki Kovalainen has argued: 'Emerson might be understood as the nexus author par excellence of […] various line of American Bildung. Not only was his philosophy of Bildung decisively shaped by Europeans and Americans, it also exerted subsequent influence on them, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and the three classical American pragmatists, Peirce, James, and Dewey' (Kovalainen, 2012, p. 183). Nietzsche's prominent text on education, 'Schopenhauer as Educator' , can be seen as the work which is most indebted to Emerson. There, he pronounces the idea of education as a matter of finding oneself and finding oneself again; a form of education in which educators or teachers are thought of as cultivators, where cultivation is a liberation from set paths and bridges and other idolatrous gods that determine the goal of the journey (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 130). In this conception of education resound Emerson's words: 'Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul' (1971, p. 80). Education, for Emerson, is a form of cultivation of the self. But this is not all. If Emersonian education begins with questions like 'Where do we find ourselves?' then education as self-cultivation is not only a matter of Bildung as an enculturation in the hands of others. It also makes us 'responsible for our own self-cultivation' (Bates, 2012, p. 28). The tension between our dependency on others for provocation and education and our own improvisations in cultivating ourselves is a recurrent theme in this special issue. It is present in questions of inheritance and novelty, of language and our application of words, in positioning ourselves as scholars, in orienting ourselves as private and public beings between the political and the personal. These tensions are not intellectual riddles, but, as is demonstrated in this issue, experiences of life, in life. It has been largely due to the commendable work of Stanley Cavell and his extensive endeavors to reclaim for Emerson the status of a philosopher to be taken seriously as
Self Discovery and Calling in Emerson’s Philosophy of Education
Emerson's philosophy seems elusive. In addition to a reading of his essay entitled "Education," an illustration of his philosophy of education includes, but is not limited to, an interpretation of the poet as teacher and the American Scholar as student. In this way, we see education not as minor concern for Emerson, but a rather central one. What emerges from this examination is the unique purpose of Emersonian education-selfdiscovery. To reveal this distinctive intention, I will expose several features of Emerson's educational philosophy including his break from his Kantian roots concerning the role of imagination and inspiration, children as the center and starting point of education, the balance of the physical and contemplative functions of a student, the goal of moral education, and the proper pace of education. Many of these features center on two meanings of Nature at work in his philosophy. Emerson sees Nature itself as an educator and access to self-discovery. It is the all-encompassing environment of the student and communicates to him its universal laws. Additionally, Nature serves as an analogy to the pace and method which education should follow. Education should proceed naturally and should not be artificially forced.
From Self-Reliance to that which Relies: Emerson and critique as self-criticism
How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as “Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.” How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world – learning from one’s teachers for example – is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world.
Socio-biographical Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance"
This paper intends to explore Ralph Waldo Emerson"s essay "Self-Reliance" within the guiding framework of relationships between text and author"s biography and the prevailing social milieu of 19 th century America. Published in 1841, "Self-Reliance" represents one of Emerson"s profound works that gained immense attention for its seminal appeal and reflections on the general nature of human or "individual" conduct within society. The paper intends to examine how particular biographical, social and political events may have influenced particular reflections within the text. Like Emerson"s first work "Nature" (1836), "Self-Reliance" (1841) was recognized for its peculiar character as a work of social commentary, espousing ideals of "how men ought to live" while deemphasizing the asphyxiating pressures of external authority. The paper would also attempt a critique of some of Emerson"s philosophies in a bid to generate a more comprehensive analysis.
Grammatical self, linguistic community and education of grownups: Cavell reads Emerson
Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2021
The article discusses Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Ralph Waldo Emerson with a focus on the concepts of individuality, self-acknowledgment, and Bildung as one’s education through reading, called “the education of grownups”. Beginning with Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”, his critique of Descartes’ cogito is examined and the Emersonian alternative vision of acquiring individual existence is reconstructed. In this depiction, a solipsistic Cartesian account of man is replaced with a vision of the grammatical self, which is at the same time social, linguistic, and, as a result, literary. Creating the self proceeds through a critical discussion with the extant tradition and, besides self-acknowledgment, aims at contributing to the founding of a particular form of life (within a nation, a community). The two goals of creating the self—the individual and the social one—constitute for Emerson the core of the Bildung construed as the forming of a particular person. In this context, the Emersonian phrase of “new yet unapproachable America” is placed against the educational background, in which neither the individual self nor the communal we are ever completely grasped. The distinctive feature of such Bildung is that it is not confined to the process of one’s growing up, but extends to the life of adults and, as a result, finds its realisation within “the education of grownups”. Accordingly, the process of education assumes that one individual needs another as a teacher—who paradigmatically speaks to her via a literary text—to constantly be open to some unknown, possible direction of her development. For Cavell, mutual education, i.e. one’s being a teacher or/and a learner, is a precondition of democratic society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Views on Education
Ralph Waldo Emerson once claimed, "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of an education (qtd. in Williamson 381). This article critically evaluates Emerson's philosophy on education who believed that education should be nonconformist and individualistic.
Bildung and educational language Talking of 'the self' in Anglo-American education
The language used to frame and discuss educational issues, both in scholarly publication and in everyday talk, shapes broader possibilities for theory and practice. It both enables and limits ways of defining and addressing pedagogical concerns, from general policy to the minutiae of practice. For example, to speak of education as ‘a process of living and not [as] a preparation for future living’ (Dewey 1897: 7) has rather different implications than conceiving of it as a form of ‘human control’ exercised through ‘fundamental laws of change’ (Thorndike 1912: 95, 97). Over the past century or more, the language associated with educational scholarship has changed considerably. In this chapter I present an overview of some of these changes, focusing on the field of educational psychology, beginning with the work of Dewey and Mead on the one hand, and Thorndike on the other. I conclude with an examination of the vocabulary of the ‘Learning Sciences’ and of other contemporary contributions that bring with them rather different possibilities for theory and practice.
Studia Edukacyjne
The purpose of the article is to contribute to the discussion about the relevance of existential issues in contemporary education. The analyses presented in the paper are related to the problems of self-reflection, self-questioning and the process of spiritual and moral development of human beings. Firstly, the author begins by depicting the meaning of human existence in the light of philosophy. What is at issue here is a question of being oneself, recognizing personal truth and finding one’s own voice as opposed to being inauthentic or fleeing from oneself. Special attention is paid to the language as an essential, constitutive element of being. Secondly, the article attempts to consider some educational implications resulting from the deep ontological relationship between human beings and language. Describing them, the author indicates that ignoring vital questions in language education contributes to spiritual vacuity in the lives of young people and reduces educational thinking ...