哲学与爱默生间的较量

原文：Philosophy vs. Emerson (Excerpt)“HE is,” said Matthew Arnold of Emerson, “the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.” These well-known words are perhaps the best expression of thesomewhat vague yet powerful and inspiring effect of Emerson,s courageous butdisjointed philosophy.Descended from a long line of New England ministers, Emerson, finding himselffettered by even the most liberal ministry of his day, gently yet audaciously steppeddown from the pulpit and, with little or no modification in his interests or utterances,became the greatest lay preacher of his time. From the days of his undergraduate essay upon “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy” he continued to be preoccupiedwith matters of conduct: whatever the object of his attention—an ancient poet, a factin science, or an event in the morning newspaper—he contrives to extract from it alesson which in his ringing, glistening style he drives home as an exhortation to ahigher and more independent life.Historically, Emerson marks one of the largest reactions against the Calvinism of hisancestors. That stern creed had taught the depravity of man, the impossibility of anatural, unaided growth toward perfection, and the necessity of constant and anxiouseffort to win the unmerited reward of being numbered among the elect. Emerson startswith the assumption that the individual, if he can only come into possession of hisnatural excellence, is the most godlike of creatures. Instead of believing with theCalvinist that as a man grows better he becomes more unlike his natural self (andtherefore can become better only by an act of divine mercy), Emerson believes that asa man grows in excellence he becomes more like his natural self. It is common to hearthe expression, when one is deeply stirred, as by sublime music or a moving discourse: “That fairly lifted me out of myself.” Emerson would have said that such influenceslift us into ourselves.For one of Emerson’s most fundamental and frequently recurring ideas is that of a “great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere,” an “Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made onewith all other,（The phrase originates with Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay by that name）”which “evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty.”This is the incentive—the sublime incentive ofapproaching the perfection which is ours by nature and by divine intention—thatEmerson holds out when he asks us to submit us to ourselves and to all instructiveinfluences.Nature, which he says“is loved by what is best in us,”is all about us, inviting ourperception of its remotest and most cosmic principles by surrounding us with its simpler manifestations.“A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws whichbind the farthest regions of nature.”Thus man “carries the world in his head.” Whether he be a great scientist, proving by his discovery of a sweeping physical law that he has some such constructive sense as that which guides the universe, or whether he be a poet beholding trees as“imperfect men,”who“seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground,”he is being brought into his own by perceiving “the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of material objects, whether inorganic or organized.”Ranging over time and space with astonishing rapidity and binding names and things together that no ordinary vision could connect, Emerson calls the Past also to witness the need of self-reliance and a steadfast obedience to intuition.The need of such independence, he thought, was particularly great for the student, who so easily becomes overawed by the great n ames of the Past and reads “to believe and take for granted.”This should not be, nor can it be if we remember what we are. When we sincerely find, therefore, that we cannot agree with the Past, then, says Emerson, we must break with it, no matter how great the prestige of its messengers. But often the Past does not disappoint us; often it assists us in our quest to become our highest selves. For in the Past there have been many men of genius; and, inasmuch as the man of genius has come nearer to being continually conscious of his relation to the Over-Soul, it follows that the genius is actually more ourselves than we are. So we often have to fall back upon more gifted souls to interpret for us what we mean but cannot say. Any supreme triumph of expression, therefore, should arouse in us not humility, still less discouragement, but renewed consciousness that “one nature wrote and the same reads.”So it is in travel or in any other form of contact with the Past: we cannot derive any profit or see any new thing e xcept we remember that “the world is nothing, the man is all.”Similar are the uses of Society. More clearly than in Nature or in the Past, we see in certain other people such likeness to ourselves, and receive from the perception of that likeness such in spiration, that a real friend “may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”Yet elsewhere Emerson has more than once urged us not to be “too much acquainted”: all our participation in the life of our fellows, though rich with courtesy and sympathy, must be free from bending and copying. We must use the fellowship of Society to freshen, and never to obscure,“the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny.”Such, in some attempt at an organization, are a few of Emerson, s favorite ideas, which occur over and over again, no matter what may be the subject of the essay. Though Emerson was to some degree identified, in his own time, with various movements which have had little or no permanent effect, yet as we read him now we find extraordinarily little that suggests the limitations of his time and locality. Often there are whole paragraphs which if we had read them in Greek would have seemed Greek. The good sense which kept him clear of Brook Farm布鲁克农场because he thought Fourier (Charles Fourier，1772年- 1837，是法国著名哲学家，经济学家，空想社会主义者。