Comments for Dan Conley

Comment on Emerson Seen Darkly by Steve

Steve — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:03:00 +0000

You have a fantastic way of writing Dan, so captivating…

Comment on Strike Three by Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:28:00 +0000

That’s okay, I don’t need confirmation and I’m perfectly happy to have my core beliefs challenged. Although I will say that my view is closer to the universe is cold, cruel and out to kill us, but life is a gift. In other words, given what we know about the universe, we’re extremely lucky to be alive in it and we should treasure that fact. I’m much closer to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence than Schopenhauer’s gloom.

Comment on Strike Three by Rex Styzens

Rex Styzens — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:10:00 +0000

I have read that RWE maintained his belief in compensation the whole of his lifetime. While the details of his explanation in the essay by that name can be contested, and while in his later essay “Fate” he makes clear that he is aware of the dangers and threats to life, if you are looking for confirmation of your view of the universe as “cold and out to kill us,” I am sure you will not find it in his work.

Nor will you find proof that life is a gift. But that is RWE’s worldview.

Comment on Strike Three by Rex Styzens

Rex Styzens — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:41:00 +0000

RWE’s notion of compensation is also for me the most difficult to rationalize. I do it by crediting him with being a theologian as well as philosopher: compensation is a statement of faith. Elsewhere in his writings similar episodes give evidence of his faith that doing the right thing is rewarded beyond the evidence of calculation.

I read somewhere that some see it as simply the idea that we cannot do everything at the same time; in order to do one thing, we must accept that we cannot do the other thing. Then RWE’s view of compensation might compare to Newton’s law that every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction. I expect that had to be taken on faith in its time. Today we have a more complex view.

Comment on Self-Reliance and Rhetoric by Rex

Rex — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:52:00 +0000

Part of the reason that Nietzsche denied RWE the status of philosopher may be that RWE placed a responsibility on the teacher to “to lift and cheer.” RWE addresses genius again at the end of “Experience.”:

“Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but, in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old heart!–it seems to say,–there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”

Comment on The American Religion by Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:49:00 +0000

There is a Bercovitch/Lasch version of Emerson out there that blows up all American liberal/conservative notions. Given my disgust with politics (and my life spent feeding the beast), the search may be worthwhile.

Comment on Emerson: Need I Continue? by Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:46:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment — I agree, Emerson hasn’t been done. I’ve only scratched the surface myself. I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Comment on Emerson: Need I Continue? by Kelly Jolley

Kelly Jolley — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:28:00 +0000

I write essentially for myself, accidentally for others. So–if it’s working for me, it’s working. If others find it works for them, great; if not, oh well, too bad, –they can spend their time elsewhere, with my blessing.

One problem with writing on Emerson. Everyone thinks they’ve read him. Everyone is wrong. (Unless a little numb perusal in a junior high English class counts.) Everyone thinks they understand him. Everyone is wrong. The basic problem with Emerson is that everyone thinks he’d ‘been done’, when he’s barely been started. But it is hard to shatter that conviction. Emerson is the butt of his own quotability.

Comment on Emerson: Need I Continue? by Rex

Rex — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:57:00 +0000

Take another look at the quote I posted some few days ago from Sacvan Berkovich on the distinction between individualism and individuality. Yes, all the easy questions about RWE have already been answered. The subtlety of such a distinction as Berkovich’s — there’s a difference between self-interest for self-advancement and self-interest for a more perfect commuity–has to the best of my knowledge not been explored. Comparing RWE to radical right-wing so-called conservatives could be explosive.

Comment on The Nonconformist by Rex

Rex — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:37:00 +0000

RWE is a poet and, even when he writes prose, his poesy can sing out the sense. If poems ought not “mean but be,” “Self-Reliance” succeeds as its endless interpreters testify. David Van Leer, in his fine study Emerson’s Epistemology, suggests “Emerson writes the word” [invoking "the talismanic power of the written over the spoken"] “not because whim is the thing sought, but because to claim to pursue anything more would be hubris.”

I read RWE’s reference as a counter-thrust at the human practice of treating the engraved figures in classical buildings as things compared to which humans must deny their own nature. Divinity is at first-hand.