Self as World: The New Emerson
Acta Universitatis Tamperensis, No. 1568
By Heikki A. Kovalainen
November 2010
Tampere University Press
Distributed by Coronet Books
ISBN: 9789514482809
530 pages
$97.50 Paper Original
In detail and depth hitherto untried by professional philosophers, my dissertation develops a comprehensive reading of Emerson´s philosophical project, early and late, with particular emphasis on the insurmountable ethico-ontological question concerning the intimate relationship between the self and the world. How much of our self should we allow to leave its trace on our experience of the world, and how much should we immerse ourselves in the world, endeavoring to distance ourselves from an obsessive attachment to the self? The dissertation does not provide normative guidelines on the matter but shows how the problem might be divided into various different aspects, thus fleshing out its full meaning. In my view, Emerson is first and foremost thinking about the philosophical question concerning the ways in which the two poles of the cosmos, the self and the world, are fundamentally blood-bound to one another, woven of the same ultimate fabric of reality, both jointly bringing about one another somewhere on the shared brink of our earthy existence.
In order to make full sense of the intertwinement of subjectivity and our experience of reality, the work is divided into three parts, each of which approaches the theme of the self and world from a particular angle. The first part contains comprehensive readings of the best available philosophical interpretations of Emerson, with special attention to Stanley Cavell´s Emersonian Moral Perfectionism (chapter 2), and a diverse host of pragmatist criticisms against the interpretation (chapter 3). The first chapter includes a reasonably detailed mapping of Emerson´s most central philosophical sources, with sub-chapters on Socrates, Plato, Montaigne, Kant, English Romanticism, and Goethe. As a whole, the first part delves into the ways in which Emerson at once engages and transfigures philosophy, rooting his thinking through and through in the history of Western and Eastern thought, yet decisively vivifying it through his original appropriations.
The second part is devoted to critically interpreting Emerson´s early philosophy (1836-1844), extending from his first book Nature (1836) to the classical texts of Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844). Despite its philosophical shortcomings and the occasional lapses of style, it is shown how Nature gives the first expression to the rudiments of the mature Emersonian philosophical project, the interplay between self and world, and how the role of neither can be ignored in making sense of our romance with reality. With the help of the early texts "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance", I outline the unique reflexivity of his philosophy - how Emerson is concerned with making our everyday lives the infinite reserve for high-rising thoughts, and using essayistic thought in turn to facilitate our overcoming of the Emersonian essays themselves, helping us leave words behind ? in order to get closer to reality as a lived experience. Along the way, an interpretation of "The Divinity School Address" brings to the fore the fact that Emerson´s philosophy is from early on concerned with redefining the place of religion in our lives.
The ensuing interpretations of the other key early essays of Emerson, in particular "Compensation", "Circles", "Experience", and "Nominalist and Realist", amount to two main theses essential to his entire philosophical project. First, in virtually all of his essays, Emerson is deliberately invoking antithetical terminology, such as self and world, fate and freedom, nominalism and realism, yet his antitheses are never intended to conjure up dualistic metaphysics; he gives expression to various opposing tendencies of thought and life in order to strike a balance between them. His constant (and perhaps we may say, quasi-Aristotelian) seeking of the middle ground, then, amounts never to an agnostic flat compromise in the middle: he keeps the extremes alive, on the contrary, in order to help us recognize the place of both in our human existence, allowing us to swing from one to the other. Secondly, the very tension between particularity and universality pervasive particularly in his early thought - how we may know the world only from ever-alternating perspectives, yet it is still one and the same world represented by those perspectives - may be dissolved by a kind of synthesis: knowing reality in a more than perspectival sense becomes possible by the perpetual overcoming of the particular perspectives, forming a whole of a world out our own fragmentary and often painful points of view.
In the third and final part of the study, finally, I delineate three thematic pathways into Emerson´s later philosophy (1860-1875), relatively understudied and its philosophical content often falsified by an exaggerated adherence to the details of his biography; in particular, his alleged lack of the tragic sense, often wrongly attributed only to his later philosophy - a view I consistently resist. The seventh chapter shows in detail how the central later essay "Fate" takes up the philosophical problem of freedom and determinism, infusing the question with a uniquely "existential" sense that had a deep and direct influence on the very earliest essays of Nietzsche, crucially anticipating his later ideas of the eternal recurrence and the love of fate. In the eighth chapter, I explicate Emerson´s sophisticated understanding of culture and self-culture, presenting important criticism against John T. Lysaker´s recent book on the topic. The final and ninth chapter takes on the ultimate point of consummation of the Emersonian project of self-culture ? religion. The chapter wraps up the argument for the main thesis of the study, that the self before reality is both its master and slave, or to venture into the religious register, God cannot be known solely by virtue of grace nor of our own effort, but through a balanced recognition and a lived experience of both.
In order to make full sense of the intertwinement of subjectivity and our experience of reality, the work is divided into three parts, each of which approaches the theme of the self and world from a particular angle. The first part contains comprehensive readings of the best available philosophical interpretations of Emerson, with special attention to Stanley Cavell´s Emersonian Moral Perfectionism (chapter 2), and a diverse host of pragmatist criticisms against the interpretation (chapter 3). The first chapter includes a reasonably detailed mapping of Emerson´s most central philosophical sources, with sub-chapters on Socrates, Plato, Montaigne, Kant, English Romanticism, and Goethe. As a whole, the first part delves into the ways in which Emerson at once engages and transfigures philosophy, rooting his thinking through and through in the history of Western and Eastern thought, yet decisively vivifying it through his original appropriations.
The second part is devoted to critically interpreting Emerson´s early philosophy (1836-1844), extending from his first book Nature (1836) to the classical texts of Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844). Despite its philosophical shortcomings and the occasional lapses of style, it is shown how Nature gives the first expression to the rudiments of the mature Emersonian philosophical project, the interplay between self and world, and how the role of neither can be ignored in making sense of our romance with reality. With the help of the early texts "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance", I outline the unique reflexivity of his philosophy ? how Emerson is concerned with making our everyday lives the infinite reserve for high-rising thoughts, and using essayistic thought in turn to facilitate our overcoming of the Emersonian essays themselves, helping us leave words behind - in order to get closer to reality as a lived experience. Along the way, an interpretation of "The Divinity School Address" brings to the fore the fact that Emerson´s philosophy is from early on concerned with redefining the place of religion in our lives.
The ensuing interpretations of the other key early essays of Emerson, in particular "Compensation", "Circles", "Experience", and "Nominalist and Realist", amount to two main theses essential to his entire philosophical project. First, in virtually all of his essays, Emerson is deliberately invoking antithetical terminology, such as self and world, fate and freedom, nominalism and realism, yet his antitheses are never intended to conjure up dualistic metaphysics; he gives expression to various opposing tendencies of thought and life in order to strike a balance between them. His constant (and perhaps we may say, quasi-Aristotelian) seeking of the middle ground, then, amounts never to an agnostic flat compromise in the middle: he keeps the extremes alive, on the contrary, in order to help us recognize the place of both in our human existence, allowing us to swing from one to the other. Secondly, the very tension between particularity and universality pervasive particularly in his early thought - how we may know the world only from ever-alternating perspectives, yet it is still one and the same world represented by those perspectives - may be dissolved by a kind of synthesis: knowing reality in a more than perspectival sense becomes possible by the perpetual overcoming of the particular perspectives, forming a whole of a world out our own fragmentary and often painful points of view.
In the third and final part of the study, finally, I delineate three thematic pathways into Emerson´s later philosophy (1860-1875), relatively understudied and its philosophical content often falsified by an exaggerated adherence to the details of his biography; in particular, his alleged lack of the tragic sense, often wrongly attributed only to his later philosophy - a view I consistently resist. The seventh chapter shows in detail how the central later essay "Fate" takes up the philosophical problem of freedom and determinism, infusing the question with a uniquely "existential" sense that had a deep and direct influence on the very earliest essays of Nietzsche, crucially anticipating his later ideas of the eternal recurrence and the love of fate. In the eighth chapter, I explicate Emerson´s sophisticated understanding of culture and self-culture, presenting important criticism against John T. Lysaker´s recent book on the topic. The final and ninth chapter takes on the ultimate point of consummation of the Emersonian project of self-culture ? religion. The chapter wraps up the argument for the main thesis of the study, that the self before reality is both its master and slave, or to venture into the religious register, God cannot be known solely by virtue of grace nor of our own effort, but through a balanced recognition and a lived experience of both.
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