Emerson's Casting Moments: Design Resistance, Climate Change, Metabolic Architectures (original) (raw)
2022, AutopoietiX
During an October 1836 outing, Ralph Waldo Emerson jotted the Goose Pond Principles1a into his notebook.1—p254 That eight-point notation marked a stage in his thinking when observations and perceptions, prompted by wild nature, were comprehended as generating ideas illuminating life, intelligence, physical matter, and phenomenal mind. Circulating today, the Goose Pond Principles can be read as prefatory to Nature’s collection of essays arising out of what the sage of Transcendentalism had previously called the casting moment. Emerson had cast his text in outline — a manifesto to himself — intended to guide the writing of his Philosophy of History lecture series. I look at two of those principles, registering their content as originating in cast moments that resulted in a précis of Nature as well as a preamble to the book’s most notable literary image, the “transparent eyeball.” The cognitive network of casting moments contributes to and unavoidably conveys biological data mingled with visual-aesthetics realized in Nature and Emerson’s later Transcendental ideals. In Bernhard Berenson’s art historical words, that network adds “tactile values to retinal impressions.2”
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This essay explores one way of understanding how concepts of human nature and the natural world evolved during the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American philosophical thought. It traces changing conceptions of human nature in relation to the natural world through the respective philosophies of transcendentalism (as represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson), idealism (as represented by Josiah Royce), and pragmatism (as represented by John Dewey), with reference to environmental historian Donald Worster’s discussion of the “arcadian” and “imperial” intellectual traditions in his book Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. It argues that Worster’s thesis regarding the dialectical relationship between these two traditions and the eventual ascendancy of the imperial perspective to predominance in American culture generally is also applicable to certain successive transformations that occurred in American philosophy specifically, as exemplified by Emerson, Royce, ...
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