Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Their Dynamic Approach to Language as a Constituent of Literary Modernism
Abstract
Among the modern scholarship, Ralph Waldo Emerson is seen as a late Romantic philosopher and a precursor of early modern thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. One of the novel approaches of Emerson is his processual destabilization of language and conceptual knowledge.
In his "Circles" Emerson memorably posits: "There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees." Emerson later extends this idea of fluidity and mobility of the conscious/unconscious to concepts in language and language metaphors. This is also precisely the idea that Friedrich Nietzsche, his transatlantic follower, builds upon in his Antichrist.
Nietzsche builds on Emerson and demands that an honest philosopher should never even entertain a "Begriff", or a concept, but instead be a walking revaluation of all values, incessantly re-molding and re-shaping his creative expression. Finally, William James introduces in his Principles of Psychology his theory of transitive and substantive language.
James claims that the stream of consciousness, which we constantly experience, can be better described through the transitive parts of speech, such as conjunctions and prepositions. For James, nouns as the part of substantive language are conceptual in nature, but fall short of accurate depiction of our fluid, mobile consciousness, and feelings.
This short presentation will present three excerpts from these transatlantic thinkers and will attempt to show a concrete line of development of Euro-American pragmatism as a precursor, but also a direct shaper of modernist thinking in 20th century literature.