Emerson and the Problem of Evil
With John Kaag, Professor of Philosophy at University Massachusetts Lowell and Associate with the CSWR Transcendentalism Initiative
In the second episode of "Living Texts," John Kaag explores Ralph Waldo Emerson's lifelong engagement with theodicy—the enduring philosophical and religious question of how suffering and evil can exist within a universe imbued with the divine. Beginning with the Divinity School Address and continuing through Compensation and Fate, Kaag traces how Emerson's thought evolved through personal loss, philosophical dialogue, and the pressing social realities of his time, including Frederick Douglass's challenge to Emerson's understanding of suffering and justice. Rather than offering easy answers, Emerson develops a deeply personal vision of freedom, suggesting that our response to suffering can become a path toward self-transformation and a more profound relationship with the world.
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Watch John Kaag discuss Emerson and the Problem of Evil — Edited Version
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Featured Texts
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Divinity School Address (1838). Delivered at Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation (1841). Published in Essays: First Series (Boston: James Munroe, 1841).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fate (1860). Published as the opening essay in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860).
Select Passages
From the "Divinity School Address"
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws… These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue… yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance... He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled.
Jesus represented the highest expression of the divine spirit through the life and actions of a man, [and] served as model and inspiration for other men, but achieved nothing beyond the capabilities of humankind in general.
In this view, Jesus is not an exception to be worshiped from afar, but an exemplar whose life can be lived – an inlet into the deeps of Reason that is open to each person.
From "Compensation"
POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female... An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole.
Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these small boundaries.
Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law... Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded... Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.
From "Fate"
But Nature is no sentimentalist – does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The way of Providence is a little rude.
The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities.
We come upon immovable limitations... There is Fate, or laws of the world.
We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger.
But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit. We are sure that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty... The riddle of the age has for each a private solution. How shall I live?
John Kaag
John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, existentialism, and the history of ideas. He is the author of American Philosophy: A Love Story (FSG, 2016), Hiking with Nietzsche (FSG, 2018), and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (Princeton, 2020), and co-author of Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton, 2023). In addition to his academic scholarship, his writing has appeared in venues such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
