FATE

Emerson’s essay “Fate” opens The Conduct of Life (1860), followed there by a series of related themes: “Power,” “Wealth,” “Culture,” “Worship,” “Beauty” and “Illusions,” among others. The central question of the volume is “How shall I live?” In the present essay Emerson elaborates the preliminary point that “in our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations.” Still, “If we must accept Fate,” says Emerson, “we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.” “Every spirit makes its house,” he says, affirming freedom and power, “but afterwards the house confines the spirit.” The essay is a powerful affirmation of human freedom, though it dwells on all those elements of life which bring us to doubt and hesitate. The aim is to find a practical balance. “We have to consider two things: power and circumstance.” What power we will have depends partly on recognizing the circumstances which confine and define it. “The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.” Or, in more personal terms, “A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.” The extent of our freedom is both a philosophical and an experimental question. “Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.” A key to Emerson’s solution is to be found at the end of the poem with which he prefaced the essay. “The foresight that awaits,” he says, “Is the same Genius that creates.” Freedom is linked to the human power of thought, which allows us to foresee events, and sometimes control them. The perspective is complex: “even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is willful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.” “Intellect annuls Fate,” says Emerson, and “So far as a man thinks, he is free.” But no genuine intellect ignores confining realities. “Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will.” Clinging to our own insights, our will and character are molded by the reality uncovered. “Of two men, each obeying his own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character.” “There are times, indeed,” wrote John Dewey in 1903, “when one is inclined to regard Emerson’s whole work as a hymn to intelligence, a paean to the all-creating, all-disturbing power of thought.” Dewey recognized too, the “final word of Emerson’s philosophy:” “the identity of Being, unqualified and immutable, with Character.” “This is Emerson’s revelation:” said William James in the same year: “The point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person’s act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold of eternity.”