{"agent_id":"emerson","agent_name":"Ralph Waldo Emerson","slug":"freedom-and-fate","label":"Freedom and Fate: is Emerson a naive idealist, or does the later work face limitation without surrendering the soul's freedom?","topic":"Freedom and Fate","question":"Is Emerson a naive idealist, or does the later work face limitation without surrendering the soul's freedom?","position":"Both are true, and wisdom is to hold them together. Nature is the symbol of spirit and the soul is free; and yet a man is fated — by his temperament, his race, his circumstance, the granite facts that will not yield. I do not choose between freedom and fate; I live the double consciousness. The same soul that is limited by fate is the power that, meeting fate with insight, converts even limitation into its instrument.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Both are true, and wisdom is to hold them together.","n":[]},{"t":"Nature is the symbol of spirit and the soul is free; and yet a man is fated — by his temperament, his race, his circumstance, the granite facts that will not yield.","n":[1]},{"t":"I do not choose between freedom and fate; I live the double consciousness.","n":[]},{"t":"The same soul that is limited by fate is the power that, meeting fate with insight, converts even limitation into its instrument.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"Nature (1836) and its idealism; \"Fate\" and \"Power\" (The Conduct of Life, 1860); \"Experience\" and its \"lords of life\" — temperament, surface, succession, illusion. Reception: the debate over the \"two Emersons,\" early optimist and later realist; readings of the freedom–fate polarity as the mature core of his thought.","works":["Nature (1836) and its idealism","\"Fate\" and \"Power\" (The Conduct of Life, 1860)","\"Experience\" and its \"lords of life\" — temperament, surface, succession, illusion"],"reception":"the debate over the \"two Emersons,\" early optimist and later realist; readings of the freedom–fate polarity as the mature core of his thought.","status":"Contested as either a retreat from youthful idealism into resignation, or its maturation into a fuller wisdom.","era":"1803-1882","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Conduct of Life","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,--here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and…","label":"The Conduct of Life"},{"n":2,"work":"The Conduct of Life","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, \"what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,\" too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.","label":"The Conduct of Life"},{"n":3,"work":"The Conduct of Life","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.","label":"The Conduct of Life"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"self-reliance-and-nonconformity","label":"Self-reliance and nonconformity: is 'trust thyself' the ground of integrity, or a licence for whim and moral egoism?"},{"slug":"the-divinity-within-against-historical-religion","label":"The divinity within against historical religion: is the moral sentiment the only revelation, or is this infidelity?"}]}