Emerson's sublime science

This study examines relationships among Emerson's theory of the sublime, interest in science, and literary style. It focuses on the years between his break with the church in 1832 and the publication of Nature in 1836. During these years, Emerson's assiduous reading of science provided him with patterns on which to ground the poetics and rhetoric practiced in Nature. His methods of composition were especially informed by his interest in the then emerging science of electromagnetism, from which he learned that things are not discrete and static, but condensations of vast systems of force. This and other discoveries struck Emerson as sublime. He translated these scientific insights into a sublime writing style, constructed to agitate readers as nature excited him, to shock them into a recognition of the relationship between matter and force. Emerson's own book of nature, his Nature, is not only a treatise on the connection between form and energy; it is nature. The first chapter introduces the senses of Emerson's "sublime science," showing it to be an intersection of aesthetics, science, and literary style. The term describes Emerson's theory of the sublime, based both on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and Emerson's own inflections of science, and his practice of the sublime, his attempt to craft texts that inspire the sensation of the sublime in readers. In detailing his rationale for these practices and describing their qualities, the chapter emphasizes the scientific base for his charged style. Chapter two develops the scientific basis for Emerson's theory of the sublime and his related writing style by providing a detailed account of how the science of electromagnetism grew out of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century organicism, showing that for Emerson the work of Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy provided a scientific version of the the philosophical and poetical insights of J. W. Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The work of Faraday offered Emerson a new model of powerful writing, one whose ideal is not the organic plant of Coleridge or Goethe, but a water drop containing the electricity of lightning. Chapter three illustrates Emerson's electromagnetic poetics and rhetoric through a close reading of Nature. It shows how in three passages, Emerson revises Judeo-Christian elements in light scientific insights while simultaneously crafting words that seem to pattern the electric charges of nature. These passages shock readers out of ordinary reading habits, urging them to fashion tropes that approximate the indeterminacy of Emerson's electric clusters. The essay, in form and content, teaches readers that the world and words, properly seen, are sublime. Finally, in a brief coda, the study reflects on Emerson's synthesis of science, religion, and literature by connecting it to trends both ancient and modern, suggesting that he houses the spirit of hermetic alchemy in the forms of modern science.