(Download) "Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language." by Nineteenth-Century Prose " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Emerson and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Language.
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 199 KB
Description
This essay argues that Emerson developed his theory of language in response to the aesthetic tendencies strongly affecting eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophical thought in general and philosophy of language in particular. Like most linguistic thinkers from Vico to Humboldt, Emerson posited an aesthetic origin of language: he attributed the birth of language to the imaginative, creative, poetic endowments of the human mind. He therefore claimed, in words reminiscent of Hamann and Rousseau, that in the infancy of the human race all language was poetry. He also shared the conviction of his contemporaries that language-origination was not confined to a specific past time but that it was a creative process occurring in an ever-continuing present. Hence Emerson's stressing the imaginative, metaphoric, symbolic potential of all language, and his recognition that nature (which, after all, provides the images, metaphors, and symbols used in human speech) becomes the dialogic other in the human spirit's endless effort to realize itself through language. Like many linguistic thinkers of his own and earlier times, Emerson was also convinced that the only solution to the fundamental inadequacy and insufficiency of language was an aesthetic one: figurative language was not a poetic embellishment, but a necessary compensation for the poverty of language as such. Linguistic inadequacy is evident in our inability to conceptualize transcendent truth (conceptualization, after all, involves language) and hence to translate truth into linguistic statement; but truth can, more fruitfully, be suggested through an endlessly creative symbolism inherent in a poetic use of language. Finally, to Emerson as to Humboldt, language is a work of art, and like all great art it is both mysterious and endlessly suggestive and evocative of thought and feeling. **********
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