How Self-Reliance and Nature drew on The Republic
A documented line of influence: Ralph Waldo Emerson demonstrably engaged Plato’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Republic
Plato · c. 375 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Self-Reliance and Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844
RomanticismRelevance
6/10
On Self-Reliance and Nature’s page
- Emerson's idealism — the world as a veil over eternal forms — is Plato refitted for nineteenth-century America
- Self-Reliance names him outright, and Emerson read The Republic as one of the few books worth setting all other books aside for
- Read Plato first and Nature's shimmering metaphysics stops feeling like mysticism — it's the cave allegory, transplanted
On The Republic’s page
- Emerson ranked Plato above nearly every secular book — and Self-Reliance names him directly, praising Moses, Plato, and Milton for setting "at naught books and traditions"
- The Platonist core — that the visible world is a shadow of eternal Ideas — becomes the engine of Emerson's idealism in Nature
- He revered The Republic as a thing to think with, then reworked its metaphysics into an American gospel of the self