Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

dragon.” As the soul purifies, the limitations refine. Yet ”the ring of necessityis always perched at the top.” For on ever higher planes, Fate includesthe eternal laws with which even thought itself must act in accord.And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appearsas vindicator, leveling the high, lifting the low, requiring justicein man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done.… insight itself and the freedom of the will is one of its obedientmembers.Here, as slightly hinted in Experience, “Fate” in its highest stateliterally overcomes, like an arch, the poles of man and nature, of freedomand fate. Nature in 1836, when Emerson was thirty-three, was infused withethical character by the spirit. “Fate” in 1852, when Emerson is forty-nine,was the single spirit infusing both free man and the fallen, with apparentlymalevolent limitations to his will. Yet at this point in the essay, “Fate” illustratesthat Emerson is not a thinker, proceeding on one consistent lineof logical discourse. Emerson is the whole man thinking who, as StephenWhicher notes, “apprehended ideas dramatically, not intellectually.” For justafter expressing the idea of Fate as vindicator, the lighting shifts, the idea isdifferently accentuated, revealing that, after all, “Fate has its lord; limitationits limits, is different seen from above and from below, from within and fromwithout. … If fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizesfate.” The further out from center a man stands, the more he perceives, experiencesfate as limitation. Out there he needs power, power with whichto move increasingly inward toward center, until limitation transcends itslimits and man is aligned vertically with the presiding spirit.To better understand this double nature of Fate we must attend againto Emerson’s concept of man. In Experience, Emerson acclaimed that:The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We climb intothe thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sinkinto that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life,or thought, of spirit, of poetry—a narrow belt.Man needs will. For in “Fate” Emerson identified that “the one seriousand formidable thing in nature is will.” And “there can be no drivingforce except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him thewill, and the will him.” In fact Emerson saw the end and aim of the world174