Volume 5, Issue 2-3

The established scholarly perspective on the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Neoplatonic metaphysics is underdeveloped. This perspective asserts that Schelling consistently distances himself from the emanation-based framework of Neoplatonism along with its construction of matter ( ὕλη ) as completely passive, purely potential, and spectrally obscure. Such a hermeneutic emerges from a close reading of Schelling’s 1794 Timaeus commentary as well as his 1811–1815 Weltalter drafts. I mark my intervention at the temporal midpoint of this range (1804–1806), namely during the final throes of Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie . At this point in Schelling’s intellectual itinerary, he discloses a proximity between his conceptual configuration of matter ( die Materie ) and the aforementioned, Neoplatonic conceptual configuration of matter. Insofar as heretofore erudition has overlooked the denouement of Schelling’s early philosophical phase, it has also neglected Schelling’s coquettish attitude toward Neoplatonism and its ontological destitution of matter. I intend to highlight the overlap between these respective approaches.

In this essay, I engage in an interpretive and critical analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar (1837) essay wherein he states, “Our day of dependence, our longstanding apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” I assert that the educational philosophy Emerson posits in this essay on how to educate the new American intellectual of his time, which includes curricular engagement with nature, books, action, and the development of the human traits Emerson characterized as “man thinking,” continues to be relevant for informing contemporary forms of liberal learning curricula; indeed, some of these curricula can represent a Transcendentalist response to the decaying effects of neo-liberal economic interests, anti-intellectual impulses, and the neglect of the perennial idea of learning for its own sake. I contemporize and critique Emerson’s ideas explored in The American Scholar by including the work of two philosophers namely Murray Miles and Iris Murdoch; and, Emerson and Transcendentalism scholars including Barbara Packer and Robert D. Richardson Jr. and others provide contextual insights about The American Scholar address’s implications for achieving self-reliance and a more autonomous creative impulse initiated through the liberal arts tradition, with special attention to the essential literary works of humanity.