Emerson’s Strong Present Tense

Chapter 3 considers this question: why, when Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks of history, does he so often think of the present? Emerson’s various rejections of the past seem to suggest that he had no real interest in history, despite the fact that a persistent engagement with the value and meaning of history provides a certain continuity to his career from beginning to end. This chapter argues that Emerson’s subordination of the past to the present is anything but unhistorical. I read Emerson’s major essays of the 1840s in relation to his antislavery addresses of the 1850s. His ruminations on history, philosophical and political, reveal that he was already an immediatist well before he was an abolitionist. For Emerson, as for immediatist abolitionists, the dynamic, fluid nature of the present moment is that which gives rise to historical consciousness and what makes history and (historical) experience possible in the first place.