The beautiful necessity......................

     Emerson draws up two columns.  In one there are fate, nature, determinism, and circumstance.  In the second column stand power, thought, freedom, and will.  The two columns relate in a process Emerson is now willing to call "history."  "History," he says, "is the action and reaction of these two, Nature and Thought."  It is, he says, like "two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement."  But there is not only the actions and reactions, stroke and recoil.  There is unity and there is advance.  The unity lies in the fact that the entire second column - power, thought, freedom, and will - is just as necessary, as fated, as the first column.  This is the "beautiful necessity," the real order of nature, the ultimate status quo, the conviction that nature bats last.  The possibility of progress, amelioration, reform, and struggle arises from the fact that this unity is not static but in some rough Hegelian way dialectical, that is to say, oppositional and advancing at the same time.  For Emerson is at last convinced that the universe can be understood as "advance out of fate into freedom."  Merely to say "Hegelian" of "dialectical" is finally misleading too, since the main force of the essay is not so much a theory of history as a platform for present action.  Emerson began by asking, "How should I lead my life?"  The answer given by the essay "Fate" is "Pursue freedom."  Freedom is as much the "beautiful necessity" as is the standing order.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson:  The Mind on Fire