Reflections on Emerson and non-European thought

Abstract My subject here is Thoreau’s teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was as interested in non-European thought as was Thoreau. Emerson eagerly sought translations of Asian and Persian texts, where he found material for the great survey of the human mind that he conducts in his philosophy. ‘If the picture is good,’ he wrote in his Journal, ‘who cares who made it? … [T]he authorship of a good sentence, whether Vedas or Hermes or Chaldean oracle, or Jack Straw, is totally a trifle for pedants to discuss.’ In this article I briefly consider the appearance of Confucian, Hindu, and Islamic philosophy in Emerson’s writing, showing that he develops not a clash, in the sense articulated by Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1998), but a blending of civilizations.