Emerson is often labeled an idealist. This is not wrong, but it may be misleading, for many things can be meant by the term "idealist."

Is Emerson like George Berkeley, who posits a world of individual minds and their ideas, or more like Plotinus, who speaks of the "One," and of a central mind or intelligence from which the world emanates? Is he on the other hand a Kantian, who delineates the necessary structures of experience, or is he closer to Hegel, or even to Hinduism?

There is evidence for all these claims. Emerson discusses Berkeley's idealism with approval in his first book, Nature, he acknowledges a debt to Kant (through Coleridge) in "The Transcendentalist," he is heavily indebted to Plotinus both in Nature and in "The Over-Soul," and his late work The Conduct of Life is imbued with his readings in Hinduism.

In the first session of the week, we will sort out these varieties of idealism as they appear in Emerson's texts. For the second and third sessions of the week, Barbara Packer will join us. Packer recently published the introduction to the new Harvard edition of Emerson's late work, The Conduct of Life (1859), and will lead the seminar in comparing Emerson's "Illusions," from that work, with earlier versions of idealist thinking in the "Idealism" chapter of Nature, and in "Experience."

In outlining the approach she would like us to take in the seminar, she states that "people still don't know what to do with late Emerson, treating [the writing] either as a simple retraction or ignoring it altogether. Yet it seems to me that the development is organic, and that the late work tests and probes the earlier work to see where it still holds true, where it needs revision."

Emerson, Nature, "Experience," "Illusions"; Packer, Emerson's Fall, chapters on Nature and "Experience"; Cavell, "Thinking of Emerson," "Emerson, Coleridge, Kant"; Goodman, "East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1990).