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Natural History of the Intellect: the Last Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Amazon Sales Rank: 427702
Publication Date: 2008-06-30
Publisher: Wrightwood Press
ISBN: 0980119014
Type: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 164
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At his death in 1882, Emerson left behind a trove of unpublished material extraordinary for its quantity and depth-hundreds upon thousands of pages of journals, letters, notebooks, and lectures that dwarf his nine books in volume and scope but were never seen during his lifetime. His most important manuscripts have gradually filtered through to the public over the course of the last hundred and twenty-five years, save one: the final product of what he himself considered to be the "chief task of his life." Here for the first time in print are the last lectures of Emerson's career, a cycle of seventeen that he delivered at Harvard University in 1871. In his last lectures, Emerson set out to gather and structure the best thoughts of a project that spanned thirty-three years and ran as a constant, though largely hidden, thread throughout his active career. The result is a vibrant fabric of thought, image, and word as startling for the boldness of its pattern as for its immediacy and relevance to the modern reader. The powers of the mind and states of consciousness, the transcendency of physical into spiritual laws, the governing influence of Ideas in the history of humankind, and the ethical duty laid upon those who recognize the Good Cause as their own-all serve as themes and elements of Emerson's portrait of a practical understanding of the spiritual foundations of human experience and self-development.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2008-11-04
The First Publication of Emerson's Last Lectures
I give this long awaited book five stars because it's the result of 7 years of painstaking work in archives and on folders containing loose papers with confusing page numbers. The editors vividly describe their painstaking work in the preface. (An annotated edition will be out in the coming months chronicling the details and circumstances of Emerson's manuscript.)
"The Natural History of Intellect" also gets five stars because of its extremely important and precious contents: These lectures tell how Emerson experiences his own intuitive capacity. He knows it to be the very quick of his being, the divine spark that makes him human because it makes him part of the divine creativity of the universe. To write a "natural history" of such a "thing" is to create a carefully considered record of the cultural and social importance of humanity's core capacity for intuition as one might make a geological or zoological record of scientifically observed flora or fauna in a particular region. Emerson's "natural history" is of spirit, the reality and character of spirit--how it lives in us as it does around us.
Here is an epigrammatic statement that shows what high aims he has for his kind of "science" writing: "Arithmetic is a science of surfaces; probity [i.e. moral integrity], of essences." Emerson's science of essences is a spiritual science, a science of spirit. Readers of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy will recognize the desire to develop such a science. In fact, Emerson's book and the editors' interest in its perceptions, can be read as elaborations or supports of Steiner's work, especially his work on "intuitive thinking as a spiritual path." (That phrase forms the title of a fairly recent translation of Steiner's classic, Philosophie Der Freiheit, usually translated as Philosophy of Freedom.) Both of these wisdom writers devoted their lives to articulating their subtle and extensive experiences of "intellect" or spirituality, or spirit knowing, or just plain "knowledge" (Wissenschaft) as Steiner often called it.
The point for both is the living reality of spirit, its essentially source-like nature, and its intelligibility through experience. That last is worth repeating: only experience, not deduction or induction, permits one to "know" the living reality of spirit, the essences that Emerson's and Steiner's work speaks of. In Emerson's many volumes of lectures and in these culminating ones, there lives a vital, vigorous treasury of reports on his own lifelong cultivation of his awareness that a living kind of thinking pulsed in him as it does through the universe, and that this phenomenon of inner and outer life can be approached through a prepared consciousness. In this sense, Emerson's natural history of spiritual intuition capacities, or "intellect," belongs as much to our emerging twenty-first century culture as it does to its 19th century origins or to Steiner's early 20th-century writings. For in recent decades people have been interesting themselves more and more in meditation, cultivating that which is spirit, discovering spirituality as a way to think religious facts without having to create or subscribe to religious doctrine. People seek ways of worshiping that have their foundation not in obedience but in reverence, awe, and deep interest. Such preferences and desires characterize the emerging consciousness of the present moment.
I expect universities will soon be inaugurating programs and departments of "consciousness studies." If so, Emerson's entire life work will be pertinent to them, and certainly this most welcome and needed collection of his final lectures will be required reading--the kind you want to do whether you're getting credit or not. That's ultimately how this brand new book, so timely yet almost lost forever, earns its five stars: When you read it you find that it can help refine, confirm, and extend your own natural science of spirit or intellect, your own consciousness, as you become ever more fully acquainted with how consciousness lives and works in the suprasensory and sensory worlds. That's what "intellect" means in Emerson's work. Not smarts, not brains, not even mental life in the usual sense of synthesizing or analyzing. Here we're talking about the essence, the very being, of the spark that humanity shares with divinity: ability to make meaning.
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