Transcendentalism:

[distortedlogic]

We just recently started studying Transcendentalism and Romanticism in my Literary Theory class and it's been the one topic that I've become very attached to, in studying.

Emerson's works especially, are just mindblowing. We had to read 'Self Reliance' in class and I've been doing some side reading myself. One of his essays 'Prudence' really strikes me as just such a brilliant essay.

There's this part of the Essay that I can't really make sense of and I was wondering whether you guys could help me out.

"The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and therefore literature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and times, being studied with the co-perception of their subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention..."

(http://www.authorama.com/essays-first-series-14.html)

What exactly does Emerson mean by 'spurious prudence' and how does it tie into the concept of sensuality?

[billl]

In the paragraph right before the quote you provide, Emerson writes this:


The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear... But culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants.

I think the idea here is that the "spurious prudence" which makes senses "final" is failing to take the final step of "wisdom" which would consider the sensual experiences along with OTHER *higher* "cultural" considerations (e.g. humankind's purpose, the goal of perfection) as being the means by which the prudent course would be calculated. That is: just living, acting, and judging things by sight, sound, flavor, etc. is a much too primitive, for Emerson. The paragraph seems to suggest that such an approach lends itself to an ugly greed and artlessness.

In the paragraphs that follow (and I have only skimmed tonight, sorry) Emerson mixes in the importance of Nature and accurate perception, and so it wouldn't be right to think he is opposed to practicality and realism. I think the part you are looking at is hard to nail down exactly, but maybe it is basically a caution against a certain type of practicality that reflects an over-immediacy of our animal nature, or something. Or, maybe it'd be better to say: a too shallow analysis, one that lacks the vision and greater effects that the addition of an individual's reflective mental life, and cultural considerations might accomplish.

Like thinking to oneself, "I'm still pretty hungry, and that's the last piece--better grab it!" at a business dinner meeting. It might be charming (in a way) but... perhaps others are hungry, too.

I'm just taking a stab at it, hopefully someone else will be able to spell it out a little better (or take a superior tack entirely, if I've gotten it wrong).