Freedom and Fate: is Emerson a naive idealist, or does the later work face limitation without surrendering the soul's freedom?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.12

Sources

  1. "God may consent, but only for a time," said the bard of Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of man. In its last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members. But we must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other elements as well.
    The Conduct of Life
  2. 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.
    The Conduct of Life

Where the argument is made

  • Nature (1836) and its idealism
  • "Fate" and "Power" (The Conduct of Life, 1860)
  • "Experience" and its "lords of life" — temperament, surface, succession, illusion

How the argument was received

Contested as either a retreat from youthful idealism into resignation, or its maturation into a fuller wisdom.