Thursday, March 1, 2012

Emerson, America, Philosophy

IMPORTANT NOTE: I forgot to mention here, though I did mention it in class, that this entire line of thought is taken from  Stanley Cavell's  essay "An Emersonian Mood."

I'm late posting this because of the snow day and the two and four year old running around here all day (I know, I know - nice example I set), but I wanted to at least begin to articulate something that I find intriguing about the philosophical orientation that Emerson articulates - or, better, enacts - in these writings. In Nature, Emerson writes:

Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystical philosophy and dreams.
A couple of interesting things to note here. First, he is making a pretty clear reference in that last sentence to the split between the British empirical tradition of philosophy (Locke, et. al.) and the German Idealist tradition (Kant, et. al). Second, he is claiming, at least in this one sentence, not to belong to either party (a bit of a surprise, since he elsewhere identifies fairly clearly as an idealist), but rather to embrace both traditions. Finally, he wants to say that these two philosophical traditions exist for him - I would add here, as an American - within the lived experience of the diurnal cycle.

This rather complicated rhetorical moment seems to me to connect to many of the things Emerson says in "The American Scholar," particularly: "What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body..." Emerson seems to me, in these moments, to be articulating a new, neither-idealist-nor-empiricist (or maybe both-idealist-and-empiricist) philosophical position, one in which spirit, rather than being located in another realm (as in Kant) or in a world of perfect forms (as in Plato) inheres in the material reality of everyday life. More on this tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment