Abstract

We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Ralph Waldo Emerson fiercely championed life as a living, pulsating experiment perpetually engaged and situated in relations. Beginning with Emerson’s first publication, Nature, when he claims that “a ray of relations passes from every other being” and that the human being cannot be understood without other beings and other beings cannot be understood without the human being, Emerson argued that an interconnectedness of being and energy makes life a project of making sense of self, other, and society, with each playing indispensable...