2020.12.07 11:11
Fatal Courage - The American Scholar
https://theamericanscholar.org/fatal-courage/
2020.12.07 11:15
2020.12.07 11:26
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.[4] The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.
Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume",[1] and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. Miller and Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.[5][6] It was also strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads.(from Internet)
2020.12.07 15:20
"It took decades, but Emerson ultimately changed my life. More accurately, he changed my world, how I think it through, how I see it, even and most especially when I can’t see a way forward. Emerson’s angle of vision allows us to see beyond the immediate concerns of life to the truly important ones, to trump cynicism with insight, and to reframe a world shot through with boredom, injustice, and inescapable tragedy. To face the world with clear eyes, with Emerson’s eyes, is to cultivate what he would call a “fatal courage.”'
This is a very personal story of a professor of philosophy, John Kaag, which
sounds like he experienced some sort of enlightenment by reading some 11456 pages of
Emerson's journal while recovering from open-heart surgery and by rediscovering
true Ralph Waldo Emerson different from his earlier version.
It is interesting and gives us a chance to revisit Emerson.
By the way he apparently had a congenital coronary artery anomaly where the LCA arises
from either RCA or right sinus of Valsalva, necessitating the surgery of transplanting the LCA
to the left sinus of Valsalva. I had one such case.
2020.12.08 09:14
"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men to win them."
Of note, there is an extensive discussion by Emerson on courage.
It would appear to take more reading on his work and more thinking
to understand the fatal courage by Emerson more deeply as this professor
did thru his suffering.
2020.12.08 09:37
" 'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.
For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.
1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;--sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.
This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking from insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind: seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its invincibility, he says, I am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the maker, not of what is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is not used. It distances those who share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it not are flocks and herds. It dates from itself;--not from former men or better men,-- gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom. Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a musical or pictorial impression. The world of men show like a comedy without laughter:-- populations, interests, government, history;--'tis all toy figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his. 'Tis the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and glory of the way."
The best understanding of Emerson's fatal courage for me is to meet our fate, however bad it may be,
with an equal force, the equally, relentless, unavoidable, 원수를 외골목에서 만나듯,
uncompromising pure and raw courage, "fatal courage," even at the high risk of being destroyed.
This kind of courage surely always brings to us a peace of mind in our daily life.
This reminds me of Beethoven and his symphony number 5.
For the elderly, aging is their fate, and if they can drum up the fatal courage to meet this fate,
that will certainly be desirable and commendable.
2020.12.10 09:40
A Psalm of Life/Henry Wadworth Longfellow
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
*Of note, 'Solemn' means serious, stern and gloomy, and 'main' is an open ocean. In the above phrase the poet has compared this life to a stern and gloomy ocean. ... By life's solemn main the poet means the open, gloomy ocean of our life in which our ship is sailing..
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“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” ---- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882),[7] who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson in 1857
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.
Ellen Louisa Tucker
(m. 1829; died 1831)[1]Lidian Jackson
(m. 1835)Main interests
Notable ideas
Influences
Mary Moody Emerson, Emanuel Swedenborg, Rene Descartes, Germaine de Staël,[2] Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Jefferson, Victor Cousin,[3]Joseph de Gérando,[4] Hafez[5]Michel de Montaigne[6]
Influenced
Harold Bloom, William James, John Muir, Karl Marx, [Nikolaj Velimirovic], Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."[8]
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance",[9]"The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature",[10] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."[11]
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement,[12] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man."[13] Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.[14]