Neither Derivative Nor Eclectic

In the end Emerson would prove to be more than an American Plato since he would reject Plato's politics and would struggle to reconcile Platonism with democratic idealism. He is not just an American popularizer of Kant either, because he subjected German idealism to what may be called the critique of everyday life and because he brought life to Kant's acceptance of the authority of subjective knowledge by connecting it with the experiences of the great religious mystics and enthusiasts and with the passions and raptures of great poetry. Nor is Emerson merely an American Marcus Aurelius, because he reconciles classical Stoic insistence on self-rule with Dionysian wildness and a sweeping commitment to self-expression. Emerson is at least neither derivative nor eclectic. His insistence on grounding thought, action, ethics, religion, and art in individual experience is his center. He makes a modern case for the idea that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each individual through his or her own nature. In this respect, Plato is a Greek premonition of Emerson, Marcus Aurelius a Roman one, and Kant a German one.

--Richardson, Emerson: The Mind On Fire, 234.