Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Logic of Decadence.

This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking and style are governed by a hitherto unrecognized "logic of decadence" that manifests as a fascination with the philosophical and ethical functions of negativity, decay, and destruction. It discerns in Emersonianism a peculiarly American idiolect of decadence—an "alter-decadence"—that emerges from similar sources as that of the fin de siecle Decadent movement but evolves in a divergent direction, notably by valorizing the dialectical tension between the totality of nature and its parts instead of celebrating the breakdown of holistic unities. The first section argues that although critics have long invoked tropes of decadence to describe features of Emerson's work, they have generally misunderstood their functions. The second section excavates ideas about decadence that Emerson received in his reading of historians like Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon, arguing that even in his early thinking Emerson was adapting a historical logic of decadence in order to reconcile his alternately monistic and pluralistic views of the universe. The final section explores how the logic of decadence provides an infrastructure for Emerson to develop these metaphysical concerns into an ethic of relationality and contingency that eschews belief in absolute conceptions of the good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]