22 July 2010

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I recently encountered online a fascinating discussion of one aspect of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I will simply offer the link, to Jeff Carreira's essay.

Carreira quotes Emerson thus: "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him."

If you wish to read that in context, you can of course go here and use Amazon's marvellous "click to look inside" feature.

Right after the two sentences that interest Carreira, Emerson gets more visual and metaphorical. But I leave that to your investigation.

There is a certain sort of thinker who begs to be known by three names. Even if the folks who knew him just called him "Waldo Emerson," it would seem to us in the 21st century wrong to just call him by two names. Plain wrong....
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Pragmatism Refreshed

Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.