ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson's earlier works, "Experience" portrays his stance toward unfolding power. Emerson pursues examination throughout his career. From the beginning, one suspects, Emerson sensed the natural origin of libido in the body's physical energy. Indeed, to the extent that Emerson focuses upon the patterning of his thought and feeling, he inclines toward perspectives similar to modern phenomenologies of the self. Edmund Husserl responded to a similar crisis, developing his phenomenology in reaction to the threat of solipsism, as a bridge attempting to reunite subject and world. "The phenomenology of the involuntary," Paul Ricoeur explains, "becomes the phenomenology of the power which the body offers to voluntary action." Paul Ricoeur's exposition of the point stands as a virtual paraphrase of Emerson: the experience of a voluntary force which has begun to deploy itself in the body, has as its constant counterpart a background of invincible nature, necessity.
