Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Emerson’s Epistemologywith Glances at Rudolf SteinerbyGertrude Reif HughesIn an 1837 journal entry, Emerson pondered a version of his favoriteparadox, “the infinitude of the private man.” Noting that many people feeldwarfed by circumstances, he recommended that they counter their melancholyby remembering their own infinitude. “As fast as you can,” he urged,“break off your association with your personality and identify yourself withthe Universe.” Why does such self-transcendence make one both freer andmore oneself, rather than less so? Because—and this is the paradox of “theinfinitude of the private man—I could not be, but that absolute life circulatedin me, and I could not think this without being that absolute life.”Not only does “absolute life” confer individual existence upon manas it circulates in him, but, says Emerson, man can only have this perceptionbecause he himself is that absolute life. To repeat his words: “I could not be,but that absolute life circulated in me, and I could not think this withoutbeing that absolute life.” These words reveal Emerson’s affinity with RudolfSteiner’s philosophy of thinking. Emerson and Steiner share a radically selfreferentialepistemology in that both find in self-observation a starting pointfor reliable cognition. Each in his own way—Steiner more programmaticallythan Emerson—says that our own cognition is an activity which, whenwe ourselves observe it, reveals itself to be both objective and subjective.Our own act of thinking is unquestionably present for us to observe, andas unquestionably, it is our own activity, not something imposed upon us.Thinking “is the unobserved element in our ordinary life of thought,”says Rudolf Steiner in his Philosophy of Freedom (1894; revised 1918). In thatwork in his dissertation, Truth and Knowledge (1892), as well as in his 1920178