Climating to Nature: Natural History of Intellect (1893), Ralph Waldo Emerson's open philosophical apogee

Benjamin PickfordUniversité de Lausanne"Climating to Nature: Natural History of Intellect (1893), Ralph Waldo Emerson's open philosophical apogee"Natural History of Intellect (1893) is Emerson’s most neglected text, a... [ view full abstract ]

Benjamin Pickford

Université de Lausanne

"Climating to Nature: Natural History of Intellect (1893), Ralph Waldo Emerson's open philosophical apogee"

Natural History of Intellect (1893) is Emerson’s most neglected text, a product of committee authorship in which Emerson’s notes from 30 years of lectures were composited by James Eliot Cabot after the author’s death. The recent editorial decision to omit NHoI from the Harvard-Belknap edition of the Collected Works on these grounds constitutes an authoritative statement on the relevance of the work in Emerson’s oeuvre.

I argue that neglect of NHoI represents a categorical misunderstanding of Emerson’s poetic theories. Drawing on my monograph project on Emerson’s poetics, I illustrate that NHoI is the imperfect summation of his philosophy of nature and subjectivity. Criticism has failed to note that the absence of the authorial person from NHoI is absolutely coherent with the logic of its title, the “naturalization” of the intellectual activity of authorship. “Climating to nature” refers to the acclimatization of Emerson’s epistemology to his core subject, a move away from the aspiration to immanence in subjective consciousness toward an intellectual production permeated by the alterity and impersonality of natural processes. Climating is, however, not simply an epistemological concept but an active practice conducted through Emerson’s poetics of revision and reiteration that demands use of the verb. I draw on the manuscript lecture notes of NHoI and Cabot’s notes to argue that the logic of committee authorship should be understood as the key to Emerson’s later work, demonstrating that Emerson theorized his poetics as a process of autoalienation and dissolution of authorial sovereignty. Significantly, this makes NHoI a model for a mode of authorship that consciously invites interference of the circulating climatic conditions of its time (ideological, political, and ecological), and therefore a crucial text in analyses of nineteenth-century subjectivity and their revision in current discourses around critique and postcritique.