Introduzione

The Conduct of Life detains the full maturity of thought of R. W. Emerson, marking, at the same time, its meaningful turn in direction of a practical application - ethical, social and political - of those neo-platonic principles that, in a first moment characterized the peculiar theoretical approach to the problem of the human being by the Transcendentalist. Against an idea of Zeitgeist connected to a philosophy of the history largely attested in that time in America, inside hegelian circles, Emerson works out ‘practically’ the problem of the “spirit of the times” and in his thought the crucial theme of the passage to modernity opens itself to a new key of reading that will find listeners also in European philosophy, ready to receive its most stimulating suggestions.