Robert S. Corrington

Emerson and the agricultural midworld

The metaphor of the “midworld” refers to Emersons conception of the realm between the human process and nature. In his earlier writings, poetry served as a linguistic midworld that made it possible for the self to relate to the innumerable orders of nature. By the 1840s Emersons thought had taken a much more skeptical turn and had moved decisively away from his earlier linguistic idealism. As a consequence, his conception of the nature of the midworld changed. The more humble work of the farmer came to represent more clearly the actual development of the midworld. In agricultural production, the basic features of nature became more directly available to the self. By the 1870s Emerson recognized that the farmer and the poet were both representatives of the midworld that made nature actual to the human process.

Natural Law and Emancipation: Toward a Theonomous Democracy

It is customary to contrast the tradition of natural law to that of the historically more recent tradition of voluntaristic legal positivism. In our century, a number of thinkers have struggled to redefine the notion of natural law in such a way as to vindicate its claims against the constructivistic attitude of the legal positivists. This has entailed a defense of the co-dependent notion of natural rights which are held to have validation outside of the sum of all actual and possible culturally based legal systems. Of course, the revival of the natural law tradition requires a different conception of nature and human culture then that which sustained earlier perspectives. This paper argues that a new conception of nature has been inaugurated in the writings of John Dewey (1859–1952) and Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) and that such a conception can help us to redefine the correlation between the orders of nature and the drive for emancipation.