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Emersons Essay Experience
A PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY ON EMERSONS ESSAY EXPERIENCE

by Rexford Styzens, August 2008
ABSTRACT
Traditional views of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a 19th Century Romantic ignore later
developments in his ideas. The essay Experience focuses this thesis. The resources
that comment on Emersons work here all admire its philosophical acumen. American
critics at the time rejected his reliance on German idealism, accusing it and him of
solipsism. Immanuel Kants appeal to formal logic decisively refuted the charge. In
defense of Emerson, this thesis argues that his later ideas conform to a sound view of
the whole of things, as conceptualized now by philosopher P. F. Strawson, so that
Emerson also offered an objective referent.
The cited sources agree that Kants Critique of Pure Reason provides a foundation for
Emersons ideas. They differ over whether his additions to Kant are warranted. Stanley
Cavell argues that Emerson resolved Kants phenomenal/noumenal split, and Lee Rust
Brown agrees. Cavell identifies Emersons contribution as a philosophy of mood. Brown
explores the dynamics of biographical epistemology. David Van Leer does not agree.
Van Leer admires Emersons respect for Kants dilemmas and adherence to them. Is
Kants duality also Emersons? Yes and no.
PREFACE
Comments from four different books1 and a recent philosophical paper provide the
primary resources for this thesis on Emersons essay Experience.
Conventional approaches to Ralph Waldo Emerson treat his most contemplative essays
as expressions of religious mysticism. That may be the reason the first citation in the body of
this thesis denies Emerson a credible comparison with Kant. It will be shown that the authors
of the primary commentaries used here do not agree that Emerson abuses Kants system.
David Van Leers careful textual analysis of Emersons major philosophical essays
concludes that Emerson preserves his philosophical integrity by confirming Kants two worlds
division of phenomenal and noumenal and thus remains under Kants influence. Accordingly,
Emersons uncertainty of coherent knowledge about natures world and people extends such
uncertainty even to claims of knowledge about oneself.2 Van Leer comments,
In absolute terms, the noumenal ruins relative existence: there is no continuity between
the evidence for self-belief and the assumption that experience is grounded.3
So Van Leer equates Emersons self-concept with Kants insistence that it is noumenal. Self is
an indemonstrable linguistic convenience unavailable to evidential claims .
Emerson did not write systematic philosophy, all the commentators make clear. While
his philosophical ideas were based on a thorough respect for Kants work, arguments can be
proposed, as do Cavell and Brown, that Emerson adds original insights. Since he wrote some
150 years ago, during which time philosophical work that takes empiricism seriously continued
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to flourish, the question now is whether any such work done today might help Emerson to
move beyond what seems to be, as Van Leer indicates, the corner into which he, with Kants
help, painted himself.
Stanley Cavell suggests that Emerson carried Kants ideas into new and legitimate
territory. In his analysis of Experience, Cavell employs the later essay by Emerson, Fate, to
clarify his progressive links to Kant. A quote from Cavell about an issue of general interest in
Emersons work illustrates this thesis goal: to understand what Cavell may mean when he
writes,
(T)he argument of the essay on Fate, I might summarize as the overcoming of Kants
two worlds by diagnosing them, or resolving them, as perspectives, as a function of what
Emerson calls polarity.4
Lee Rust Browns book explores Emersons interest in the empirical science of his day.
That perspective amplifies Cavells comments on Experience, as Browns insights are
coherent with Cavell. Material from P. F. Strawson, in the Introduction ahead, offers a
philosophical evaluation of some of the critical concepts Kant uses. Strawsons analysis of
condition provides a foundation for the discussion that follows.
All the comments on Experience agree that Emersons essay divides roughly into
seven segments that, although not subtitled as such, conform to Emersons list of the seven
subjects he enumerates.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,these
are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.5
That organizes this discussion into chapters corresponding to Emersons segments.

Familiarity with Experience aids but is not required to understand these comments. They are
grouped into five arguments, with additional materials to begin and end, and Succession,
Surface, Surprise combined in a single chapter.
Introduction: In order to establish Emerson as a thorough-going but dissatisfied
Kantian, Strawsons analysis of Kants use of the concept condition can be understood by
noticing the way discovery always contributes to or conditions the succeeding stages of
ongoing inquiry. Strawson then explores the way formal concepts extend knowledge but only
so long as the possibility of empirical confirmation is retained. Stanley Cavell elaborates
condition in terms of dictation as employed in Emersons essays. Emersons positive regard
for doubt allows Brown to relate empiricism to belief and an affirmation of holism, consistent
with Strawsons requirements.
Experience as Illusion: Emerson relies on Kants analysis of the elusiveness of
knowledge. Emerson praises skepticism as a beneficial tool to evaluate perceptions. He
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illustrates that with tales from ordinary life, epigrammatically summarized as: nature hides.
Brown distinguishes epistemological doubt in Kant from biographical doubt in Emerson. The
cheerful optimism that critics have dismissed as evidence of a lack of seriousness is
philosophical rather than rhetorical. According to Brown, Emerson makes doubt an ally that
returns hope for the future by providing a pathway to lucidity.
Experience as Temperament: Cavell announces Emerson as a philosopher of mood.
Comments from Cavell, Brown, and Van Leer, as well as comparable dimensions of mood
from existential psychologist Eugene T. Gendlin and Paul Ricoeurs translator, Erazim Kohak,
then introduce a recent paper by philosopher April Flakne that critiques the topic of intuition.
Emerson may be read as a Romantic intuitionist, and evidence for that is ample. But his best
philosophical work, built on the foundations of Kantian epistemology, is consistent with a
contemporary exposition of self-concept that Flakne finds in Merleau-Pontys later work.
Experience as Reality: Emerson is no match for the dilemmas of change and what
does not change. If he had the benefit of the work of Donald Davidson on anomalous
monism, he might have accepted his dilemma as an inevitable predicament of serious
thought.
Experience as Subjectiveness: Here Emersons struggle with the topics of subject,
object, self, other, and world are framed by Strawsons analysis. Strawsons suggestions for a
concept of the whole of things are outlined, which he describes as in harmony with Kants
Critique but not a conceptuality that Kant examined.
Experience as Succession, Surface, Surprise: This section, taken from the middle of
the essay, finally receives consideration. Here Emersons relation to Kant becomes readily
evident. The three themes are grouped into a discussion of time, space, and Strawsons
notion of valid formal concepts for empiricism that can be applied to Emersons examples of
moods. Emerson brings the formal concepts down to earth.
Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Study: The focus falls on the
conceptualizations introduced by the Flakne paper; those confirm Cavells analysis of Emerson
as a philosopher of mood. In addition, brief mention is given to a few areas of further study
that are emerging in the growing philosophical commentaries on Emerson.
Finally the alternate reading of Experience offered by David Van Leer is examined
briefly as a contrast with the Cavell/Brown hypotheses about Emersons relation to Kant. This
thesis does not ascribe preferences either to the Cavell/Brown reading or the Van Leer
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reading. Instead it concludes that rethinking Emersons work offers the opportunity to locate
him as understood best in a context of post-Romantic philosophical developments.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................
CHAPTER
PREFACE.....................................................................................................
1. INTRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ...............
Strawson Compares Kants Conditions and Formal Concepts ..........

Sensible Intuition and Intellectual Intuition .........................................
Cavell on Emersons Empiricism: Language Conditions Empirical
Experience ..............................................................................
Dictation Enacts Condition ......................................................
Doubt Generates a Mutuality of Skepticism and Belief ......................
8
13
2. EXPERIENCE AS ILLUSION ...................................................................
21
3. EXPERIENCE AS TEMPERAMENT ........................................................
28
Other Views of Temperament and Mood ...........................................

Mood as a Topic of Philosophy ...............................................
Erazim Kohak on Paul Ricoeur ...............................................
What or Who Is a Self? ......................................................................
Problem of Memory as the Touchstone of Self-Identity...........
Merleau-Ponty and Chiasm .....................................................
Prospects for Ethics ................................................................
30
32
34
34
35
36
39
4. EXPERIENCE AS REALITY .....................................................................
43
Emersons Principle of Compensation ...............................................
48
5. EXPERIENCE AS SUBJECTIVENESS ....................................................
51
Self-Object as Self-Subject as Self-Subject/Object ............................

On the Whole of Things .....................................................................
Strawsons Summary of Kants Dialectic ......................... ....
Reasons IllusionsThe Unconditioned ............................................
A SeriesAs Either a Collection or AggregateIs Not a Whole
Author of Nature ......................................................................
A Framework of Substance .....................................................
Strawsons Alternative Analysis of the Noumenal ..............................
13
16
17
53
56
57
58
59
61
62
63
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CHAPTER
Page
6. EXPERIENCE AS SUCCESSION, SURFACE, SURPRISE .....................
66
Two Worlds of Phenomena and Noumena ........................................

Universal Hindrance ................................................................
Epistemology .....................................................................................
Belief/Doubt as a Polarity ........................................................
Surprise .............................................................................................
66
69
70
71
72
7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY ............
74
Mood as a Sensible Intuition ..............................................................

Emersons Claim to be Taken Literally...............................................
Consequences for Transcendentalism...............................................
Additional Questions ..........................................................................
77
77
79
80
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................
82
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE6
Emerson published his first book of essays nearly a half century after Immanuel Kant
died. Subsequently Emerson became recognized as the founder and leading member of the
American school of philosophy named Transcendentalism. Emersons reputation as a
thinker has been overshadowed by his achievements as a rhetorician, both writer and speaker,
such that one comparison of Emersons work with Kant concludes,
transcendentalism. Associated especially with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his
followers, who have been called transcendentalists. (The name was erroneously applied
to them because of an incorrectly supposed relationship to Kants philosophy.)7
The prevailing view among philosophers has been that Emerson is a light-weight thinker, who
may be a cheerleader for scholarship but not himself a philosopher. So the attribution quoted
can be reasonably interpreted as intended to be a dismissal.
This thesis concludes, to the contrary, that Emersons view of human experience does
not ignore the achievements of Kants Critiques, as will be examined by a careful reading of his
essay Experience. Emerson remains a Kantian, but one dissatisfied with the pursuit of a
priori certainty. While Kants reply to skepticism provides a useful baseline for inquiry, still
something is missing when the commonplace of human doubt is not also given the same
deliberate examination as Kants affirmation of transcendental idealism. This thesis follows the
suggestion of Lee Rust Brown8 that the beliefs Kant locates in the noumenal Emerson finds
already at work in the freedom of honest human doubt.
For the comparison with Kant, it is necessary first to recite some of the dimensions of
the philosophical requirements set forth in Peter F. Strawsons reading of the Critique of Pure
Reason. After that, the primary goal will be to test Stanley Cavells contention that Emerson
can be understood as a descriptive philosopher of mood. In this Introduction, Emersons
essay Experienceas interpreted by Lee Rust Brown and Cavell (along with Cavells
comments on the later Emerson essay Fate9)will be compared with Strawsons
suggestions (and others) for what works and what does not work in Kant. The examination
intends to show that Emersons view of the nature of experience approaches coherence with
what Strawson projects as valid extensions of Kants conditions for empirical experience.
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Strawson Compares Kants Conditions and Formal Concepts

In a study of Kants first Critique, Strawson enumerates what he has found to be
strengths and weaknesses of that work. He then outlines what he believes to be a more
adequate approach to overcome those problems. He sketches a direction that is both
respectful and appreciative of Kants contribution but pursues several paths that follow some
developments since Kant and that offer worthwhile advances supporting what ought to be
preserved of Kants efforts.
As a guide, Strawson proposes what he refers to as the principle of significance. The
permissible use of concepts in judgements involves (. . . ) their possible application to
objectsultimately to objects not themselves concepts. That, in turn, needs the general
conditions of our becoming aware of objects, i.e. involve our modes of intuition. That
combination exemplifies Kants famous dictum: Intuitions without concepts are blind;
concepts without intuitions are empty.10
Intuition Kant makes clear is sensible and spatio-temporal. Space and time provide
the necessary conditions for our experience of objects. Kants point is that, were we to
separate concepts from those conditions, the concepts become useless for knowledge of
objects. Strawson draws the readers attention at this point by calling that cluster of ideas a
truth and pointing out that Kants pure concepts of understanding, the categories, are
similarly conditioned by space and time even as they supply to experience that unity without
which the objective reference of experience would be impossible.11
The valid knowledge that is Kants central focus depends on the a priori categories and
conditions, which are fundamental criteria that obey the rules of logic and are not themselves
knowledge.
Kants argument proceeds by explaining how it is not only easy but almost necessary
for us to get lost in misleading illusions, a theme as we shall see with which Emerson begins
the essay Experience. The categories, because of their inclusive application and abstract
universality, extend further than sensible intuition, insofar as they think objects in general.
The temptation, then, is to suppose that such foundational categories allow us to draw valid
conclusions about objects as they are in themselves. If the categories are reified that way, it
is then but a small jump to the conclusion that our ability to use such purported universals
indicates, in a useful way, that they cogently describe entities and the properties of entities.
That mistake can be avoided only by remembering that the significant use of concepts requires
the simultaneous observance of the conditions of awareness, primarily space and time, of all
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objects to which they refer. To neglect the categories dependence on space and time opens
the door to erroneous assumptions that can pose as an awareness of things as they are in
themselves.
Kant names the practice of talking about a kind of awareness in which sensibility
played no part, in which understanding gave itself its own object. Kants noumenon applies
in a negative sense to objects of such a purely intellectual intuition. It provides no features to
show what we might mean when we talk in such fashion. Noumena have no empirical
referents, and hence are called purely intellectual intuition. That, according to Kants famous
dictum, renders such concepts empty. The categories, even as the concepts of our
understanding, are empty until they receive, through sensibility, a material application. Only
when they are confirmed by judgments of sensible intuition can we know them. The two
requirements for the principle of significance (concepts plus objects) differ from the categories
in that, for the categories, their meaning is not restricted by sensible intuition; their form is
that of rules.
Material objects affect our sensibility. Although we can be aware of entities by being
affected, we continue to know nothing (of entities) as they are in themselves. While we may
think about and talk about ineffable objects using the terms of the categories, we can have
no knowledge of supersensible objects. The distinction between objects and concepts allows
Kant also to make clear that knowledge of purely intelligible objects (. . . ) a non-sensible,
purely intellectual intuition is beyond the realm of possibility. Strawson notes, wryly, that it
remains to be considered whether the best description for what Kant gives us here is an
example of impossibility. Strawson inquires, Can the words mean anything but that the
objects of such an intuition would both have to have, and have not to have, the abstract
character which belongs to general concepts or to such abstract individuals as numbers? He
suggests that perhaps the Kantian dilemma might profit from a more full and complete
invitation to the further possibilities of knowledge.
Strawson discusses a set of concepts, which he names formal concepts, whose
features can be considered analogous to Kants pure categories. Bear in mind that it is
generally accepted that whenever Kant refers to anything as pure he is operating in the realm
of metaphysical transcendentnot transcendentalidealism. Strawson mentions as formal
concepts identity, existence, class and class-membership, property, relation, individual, unity,
totality. On the basis of formal logic, alone, general deductive connections can be assumed
for those formal concepts. In turn such concepts are also applied or exemplified in empirical
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propositions which do not belong to logic. Those instead assume the existence of empirical
criteria used to determine whether they are employed correctly with other, non-formal,
empirical concepts. One determinable feature of such conditions is that we have no way to
tell in advance of the actual conditions that apply or exemplify formal concepts in non-logical
statementsthat is, what the actual limits might be that permit the legitimate use of those
non-formal concepts. When we have no idea yet what conditions obtain, we cannot impose
any limitations in advance. Kants intuition always needs to be correlated with actual, known
conditions. Such conditions for non-formal concepts, while not limited in advance by the
scope of our actual knowledge and experience are not thereby impossible or incapable of
realization.
Strawson compares those to the categories and finds similarities. His rationale for the
formal concepts develops by analogy from the conditions of the categories. He assigns the
parallel remark that their meaning [of the formal concepts as well] is not restricted by any
empirical criteria used in application or exemplification.
Since the categories must only be used with the conditions of sensible awareness of
objects, Strawson cautions that formal concepts in non-logical assertions then require
articulating the concomitant empirical criteria that will be employed whenever associated with
another concept.
He insists that Kants point about avoiding the mistaken belief in and consequent use of
objects of a special kind of intellectual intuition demands respect. He interprets that in a
slightly amended form and agrees to rule out the notion that the categories can allow us to
cross those bounds and gain knowledge of non-sensible objects.
So it is a matter of never appealing to the claims of the categories to try to justify a form
of non-sensible knowledge and, yet at the same time, not then determining, in advance, that
the real is co-extensive with and confined to our sensible limitations. At issue are two
unjustifiable a priori claims: one that expands knowledge beyond experience to what
transcends it and another that restricts reality only to what has, before now, actually been
experienced.
Strawson makes clear that allowing the concept of objective reality to extend beyond
the types of sensible experience which we enjoy, which exceed the Kantian limitation, should
also be interpreted as his refusal of Kants subsequent employmentas a fixed, final, and
complete schemaof the distinction between objective reality as it is in itself, things as they
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are in themselves, and objective reality as we know it, things as we experience them. He
summarizes that as,
In refusing to commit ourselves to the dogmatic position that, though we do not know
everything, we know at least every kind of thing there is to know about every kind of
thing there really is, we do not have to deny that we know things of some kinds about
some kinds of things there really are.12
To illustrate, Strawson compares the experience of a blind person and a sighted person.
A blind person who would presume to deny color to an object he is able to feel or taste, for
instance, might well be accused of trying to talk about something he has no way of knowing
colorbecause no way of experiencing through the senses. In a similar fashion then, it is
illegitimate for a sighted person to deny the possibility that with a richer equipment of sense
organs13 they too might discover in objects properties of which, as things are, they can [as yet]
form no conception. Such a denial flies in the face of the human ability to learn as a constant
on-going process. Strawson cites the parallel situation of the proposal in scientific theorymaking that allows a hypothesis to be confirmed or disconfirmed. He does insist, however,
that any proposal for an unknown aspect of reality must be connected systematically with
something that is already confirmed. That position, Strawson holds, does not contradict Kants
admonition to avoid affirmation of things as they are in-themselves.
Then he contrasts the way in which the comparison of the formal concepts with the
categories reveals a difference. Kants noumenal cannot be understood in terms of the
categories. However, by analogy, when formal concepts are substituted for the noumenal,
rather than referring to some object of non-sensible intuition, they admit of the possibility of
knowledge of new types of individual, property, and relation, new applications of the concept of
identity, so long as they are applied in a valid way.
Strawson abides by Kants determined limitation for the noumenal, where Kant insists
thatwhile he does operate with one feature of his system allowing a reality transcending
sensible experience altogetherwe must guard against taking a further step of populating
that as if it were a field of experience containing a whole set of related possibilities. Likewise
with the formal categories: no field of entities or even ideas can legitimately be represented
simply by analogy alone with what is known. The formal categories are just techniques for
talking about what we do not know and about which we have no operative conception.
Strawson admonishes us to recognize that Kants claim for the noumenal has that negative
character. Talking about what we do know entitles us also to talk about what we do not know,
although not as knowledge per se.
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In other words, our personal history of experience and insight allows us to affirm that
both something more and something new remain possible at all times. But we must guard
against leaping into metaphysics via such affirmations of our necessary ignorance. Necessary
ignorance does not entail necessary knowledge. At this point, Strawson reconciles his radical
critique of Kant with his affirmation that Kant deserves his exalted place in the history of
philosophy and is much to be admired for the care and creativity he brought to his work.
Strawsons requirement for the significant employment of concepts, using his principle
of significance, is the general formulation, they must be so employed as to have application in
a possible experience. He expects that such would allow at least for what we mean by
observational criteria, based on our existing usage of such criteria and types of observable
situations in which it has application. He cautions that one ought not employ novel notions
simply to duplicate or re-describe what other, established, non-problematic concepts are able
to cover. He assures us that he intends to affirm the achievements of the scientific method.
Yet by considering the addition of possibilities that extend or modify our classifications
and descriptions in conformity with his strategies for formal concepts, we may be able to
extend our knowledge of the world by learning to see it afresh.
In the comparison of Emerson with Kant, to discover whether Emerson also practices
the same respect for the requirements of sensible intuition and avoidance of the presumption
of objects of a purely intelligible and wholly non-sensible character, the distinction that
Strawson points to will be referred to as the affirmation of possibilities. In no way does that
suggest that possibilitieswhen absent any experience whatsoeverdeserve to be taken
seriously. In Strawsons words,
The application or exemplification of the formal concepts in empirical propositions turns
on the existence of empirical criteria for the application of other, non-formal, empirical
concepts, of, e.g., properties or kinds of individual. But we cannot specify in advance
what empirical criteria are permissible in the application or exemplification of the formal
concepts in non-logical statements.
There must be conditions, directly or indirectly related to what Kant calls intuition (i.e.
awareness of objects not themselves concepts) for any employment or exemplification of
the formal concepts in non-logical statements. But those conditions are not limited in advance by the scope of our actual knowledge and experience.14
At the end of this paper, the discussion will return to Strawsons analysis of Kants first
Critique for a brief examination of the notion of what will be called the whole of things. Kant
did not pursue that topic the way Strawson does. Yet it can be consistent with Kants limits
and coherent with the natural sciences.
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Sensible Intuition and Intellectual Intuition15

Cavell attributes to Emerson a distinctly different usage of the term intuition than found
in Kant. Whereas Kant meant by intuition sensitivity to the objective or material world,
Emerson has borrowed the usage, comparable to Kants notion of faculty, that developed in
Anglo-American Romanticism. Consequently, we dare not rely on the term intuition for
continuity between Kant and Emerson. Cavell warns us when he writes,
Our past solutions to these mysteries (the old knots of fate, freedom, and
foreknowledge), however philosophical in aspect, are themselves mythology, or, as we
might more readily say today, products of our intuitions, and hence can progress no
further until we have assessed which of our intuitions are satisfied, and which thwarted,
by the various dramas of concepts or figures like fate, and freedom, and foreknowledge,
and will.16
At the same time, Kant and Emerson rely on a duality that may or may not be similar. It will be
examined ahead under the topic of Two Worlds of Phenomena and Noumena.17
Cavell on Emersons Empiricism: Language Conditions Empirical Experience
A better beginning for the Emerson/Kant comparison emerges from their references to
the concept of condition. Cavell uses Emersons Fate to found the claim for viewing
Emerson as a philosopher. The examination there of the conditions of fate, freedom, and
foreknowledge rely on Kants foundations but in order to include a wider array of experience.
It is as if in Emersons writing (not in his alone, but in his first in America) Kants pride in
what he called his Copernican Revolution for philosophy, understanding the behavior of
the world by understanding the behavior of our concepts of the world, is to be
radicalized, so that not just twelve categories of the understanding are to be deduced,
but every word in the languagenot as a matter of psychological fact, but as a matter of,
say, psychological necessity. Where Kant speaks of rules or laws brought to knowledge
of the world by Reason, a philosopher like Wittgenstein speaks of bringing to light our
criteria, our agreements (sometimes they will seem conspiracies). Starting out in
philosophical life a quarter of a century ago, I claimed in The Availability of
Wittgensteins Later Philosophy that what Wittgenstein means by grammar in his
grammatical investigationsas revealed by our system of ordinary languageis an
inheritor of what Kant means by Transcendental Logic; that, more particularly, when
Wittgenstein says, Our investigation . . . is directed not towards phenomena but, as one
might say, towards the possibilities of phenomena he is to be understood as citing the
concept of possibility as Kant does in saying, The term transcendental . . . signifies
[only] such knowledge as concerns the a priori possibility of knowledge, or its a priori
employment. Here I am, still at it.18
Emersons essay Experience receives most of the attention here, but Cavell employs
a later Emerson essay Fate to expose Emersons philosophical framework in Experience,
located in the critical significance of conditions. After warning that Emersons writing is as
indirect and devious as, say, Thoreaus is, but more treacherous, because more genteel,
Cavell writes,
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The essay Fate is especially useful here because of its pretty explicit association with
Kantian perplexities [of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds].19
Cavell characterizes Emersons sense of intellectual intuition in the following fashion.

Condition is a key word of Emersons Fate, as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason, as
both texts are centrally about limitation. In the Critique: Concepts of objects in general
thus underlie all empirical knowledge as its a priori conditions. I am taking it that
Emerson is turning the Critique upon itself and asking: What are the conditions in
human thinking underlying the concept of condition, the sense that our existence is, so
to speak, had on condition?
Whatever the conditions are in human thinking controlling the concept of condition, they
will be the conditions of the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, immediately
because these words, like every other in the language, are knots of agreement (or
conspiracy) which philosophy is to unravel, but more particularly because the idea of
condition is internal to the idea of limitation, which is a principal expression of an intuition
Emerson finds knotted in the concept of Fate.20
Cavells assertion that Emerson is turning the Critique upon itself appeals to the
distinction between ones having a condition and knowing the condition of such conditions by
giving an account:
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows
himself to be party to his present estate.21
Emerson does not resort to special information or talents. He shares Kants interest in
skepticism but not Kants distrust of it. Cavells contention is that Emerson (as for Cavell)
respects skepticism that deserves to be taken seriously. He portrays Emersons entitlement,
to claim philosophy, beginning in the nature of language not as foreknowledge but rather as
seducing us; language makes us victims of meaning.
Disagreements over such matters do not arise (as they do not arise in skepticism) from
one of us knowing facts another does not know, but, so Emerson is saying, from how it
is one aligns the facts, facts any of us must have at our disposal, with ideas of
victimization, together with whatever its opposites are. (One of Emersons favorite
words for its opposite is Lordship.) Something you might call philosophy would consist in
tracing out the source of our sense of our lives as alien to us, for only then is there the
problem of Fate. This looks vaguely like the project to trace out the source of our sense
of the world as independent of us, for only then is skepticism a problem.
Even someone willing to suspend disbelief this far might insist that Emersons writing
maintains itself solely at the level of what I was calling mythology. So I must hope to
indicate the level at which I understand the onset of philosophy to take place.22
Now it says openly that language is our fate. It means, hence, that not exactly
prediction, but diction, is what puts us in bonds, that with each word we utter we emit
stipulations, agreements we do not know and do not want to know we have entered,
agreements we were always in, that were in effect before our participation in them. Our
relation to our languageto the fact that we are subject to expression and comprehension, victims of meaningis accordingly a key to our sense of our distance from our
lives, of our sense of the alien, of ourselves as alien to ourselves, thus alienated.23
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Cavell asks if Emersons claim for one key, one solution to the old allies of illusion, the
knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge becomes philosophically respectable when used
merely as a key, in Pascals sense that it only opens, it does not further invite, or provide. 24
Cavell employs that distinction as evidence of the way our language exerts both the
need as well as a solace for the human adventure. At issue is human freedom. Kant
stipulates freedom as a regulative principle, an assumption we make for various subjective
reasons of convenience. Emerson, on the other hand, finds freedom to be both the gift and
the burden of self-reflection. (Some doubts about self-reflection qualify its ordinary claim to
self-evidence; those are examined in the Conclusions of this thesis). What Emerson adds to
the familiar modern appreciation of human freedom is that the struggle not only is between
polarities but between any particular set of polarities and the inescapable fact that every
resolution of that struggle must submit itself to the additional ongoing struggle with temporality
and finitude. As we shall see, both Cavell and Brown will argue that Emerson employs that
dynamic as evidence of and momentum toward the whole of things.
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. (. . . )Annul here, I feel sure,
alludes to the Hegelian term for upending antitheses (aufheben), or what Emerson calls
our polarity, our aptness to think in opposites, say in pitting together Fate and Freedom.
Annul also joins a circle of economic terms in Emersons essay, for instance, interest,
fortunes, balances, belongings, as well as terms and conditions themselves, and in its
connection with legislation, in the idea of voiding a law, it relates to the theme of the
essay that We are as lawgivers. The terms of our language are economic and political
powers. They are to be positioned in canceling the debts and convictions that are
imposed upon us by ourselves, and first by antagonizing our conditions of polarity, of
antagonism.25
In his comments on Fate, Cavell illustrates that process of antagonizing antagonism

by connecting dictation and condition in order to position Emerson as what he then
characterizes as a philosopher of mood.
Dictation, like condition, has something to do with languagedictation with talking,
especially with commanding or prescribing (which equally has to do with writing),
condition with talking together, with the public, the objective. Talking together is what
the word condition, or its derivation, says. Add to this that conditions are also terms,
stipulations that define the nature and limits of an agreement, or the relations between
parties, persons, or groups, and that the term term is another repetition in Emersons
essay. Then it sounds as though the irresistible dictation that constitutes Fate, that sets
conditions on our knowledge and our conduct, is our language, every term we utter. Is
this sound attributable to chance? I mean is the weaving of language here captured by
(the conditions, or criteria of) our concept of chance?26
Cavell will suggest, as does Emerson, that there is more to reality than chance alone
can account for. He amplifies the list of terms that participate in Emersons category of
dictation from his familiarity with other essays by Emerson. It seems Emerson attempts to
extend the meaning of fate to a meeting place for empiricism and philosophy. Cavell finds it
Page 16
emerging in the usage of dictation. The problem of human freedom is also a problem of
human bondage, as freedom itself becomes a bond. Emersons conception of voluntary
human behavior is understood not only as a struggle with the involuntary but as a struggle with
itself27 thereby adding a dimension to traditional accounts of human fallibility.
His first way of expressing Fate is to speak of irresistible dictationwe do with our lives
what some power dominating our lives knows or reveals them to be, enacting old scripts.
The problem has famously arisen with respect to God, and with Gods or natures laws.
Emerson adds the new science of statistics to the sources of our sense of subjection to
dictation, as if to read tables concerning tendencies of those like me in circumstances
like mineEmerson spoke of circumstances as tyrannouswere to read my future; as
if the new science provides a new realization of the old idea that Fate is a book, a text,
an idea Emerson repeatedly invokes. Then further expressions of the concept of
condition are traced by the rest of the budget of ways Emerson hits off shades of our
intuition of Fatefor example as predetermination, providence, calculation,
predisposition, fortune, laws of the world, necessityand in the introductory poem to the
essay he expresses it in notions of prevision, foresight, and omens.28
Dictation Enacts Condition

Cavell then explores what seem initially to be indecipherable aspects of Emerson by
referring to what his language shows us. Following Emersons apparent contradiction of the
promise and the refusal of freedom, Cavell asks,
Then on what does a decision between them depend? I think this is bound up with
another question that must occur to Emersons readers: Why, if what has been said
here is getting at what Emerson is driving at, does he write that way?29
Cavell answers his own question with one of the most significant assertions in support of
Emerson:
That he shows himself undermining or undoing a dictation would clearly enough show
that his writing is meant to enact its subject, that it is a struggle against itself, hence of
language with itself, for its freedom. Thus is writing thinking, or abandonment.30
The power of wordsnot only to tell what they mean but to show what they mean
raises questions of limits, staying within the acceptable limits of language. That issue is where
Emerson and Kant cross swords most significantly. Cavell does not deny that it is difficult to
justify Emerson as a philosopher, but one indication can be found in whether Emerson
coherently searches for ways to keep his language within acceptable philosophical limits or
whether he lets his language drift into the never-land of undiluted metaphysical speculation.
The youthful and the mature Emerson are distinguishable on those terms.
Emersons earlier call, from Self-Reliance, Society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its members, is almost arrogant in its advocacy of
personal self-acceptance. Cavell finds a different appreciation of human limits in the more
Page 17
wistful admission of human contributory negligence, represented by, This dictation

understands itself, and the essay [Fate] sets this understanding as our task.
Emersons initial claim on the subject (and it may as well be his final) is this: But if there
be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are
not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of
duty, the power of character.31
Cavell interprets that as a key to Emersons conditions.

It emerges that in, so to speak, taking our place in the world we are joining the
conspiracy, and we may join it to our harm or to our benefit. (. . . The) remark above all
means that Fate is not a foreign bondage, human life is not invaded, either by chance or
by necessities not of its own making.
One key to Emersons Fate is the phrase the mysteries of human condition. I take
the hint from the awkwardness of the phrase. I assume, that is, that it is not an error for
the mysteries of the human condition, as if Emerson were calling attention to mysteries
of something which itself has well-known attributes. (. . . )
The hint the phrase the mysteries of human condition calls attention to is that there is
nothing Emerson will call the human condition, that there is something mysterious about
condition as such in human life, something which leads us back to the idea that in the
history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and that this has to do
with his [knowing] himself to be a party to his present estate.
And he says: A mans fortunes are the fruit of his character. The genteel version of
this familiarly runs, Character is fate, and it familiarly proposes anything from a tragic to
a rueful acquiescence in our frailties.32
Doubt Generates a Mutuality of Skepticism and Belief33

Cavell reads Emerson from the point of view of a philosopher. While Brown is familiar
with the current claims of philosophy, he analyzes Emerson from the perspective of the textual
interests of the literary critic. That focus becomes evident when Brown distinguishes
Emersons skepticism from epistemological skepticism:
I have been looking at skepticism as a working feature of action and experience rather
than as a set of doubts about what human beings can know. Epistemological
skepticism, on the other hand, has concerned itself with the limits of our ability to gain
certain knowledge of the nature or even the existence of objects.34
So Brown holds for Emerson that,

Skeptical moments are biographical before they are epistemological. They befall us, as
moods do, in the course of our empirical passages and endeavors. As a matter of
course, they generate epistemological doubts of all sorts, but these doubts arise from
within the economics of endeavor rather than as consequences of some Pyrrhonistic or
Cartesian poche.35
Emerson raises epistemological doubts, Brown writes, only insofar as they may pertain to uses
and ends apart from epistemological uses and ends. It is more important for Emerson to ask
what we do with the answers we seek than to ask how answers are possible.
The answer to the question of the worlds existence, and hence to the question of
whether we can have certain knowledge of objects, makes no practical difference. At
Page 18
the same time, Emerson finds that a noble raising of the doubt makes a great deal of
difference. Doubts, especially extreme doubts, work even better than knowledge in
provoking us to try out new experience.36
For Emerson the issue is not proof of certainty of knowledge, as it is for Kant, but the
relation of doubt to belief. As shall be examined more closely in the segment identified as
Reality37 in chapter 4 ahead, Browns contention is that belief, for Emerson,
(. . . ) appears first as a quality of engagement, a practical orientation toward the future;
only by implication does it raise issues of certain knowledge. As he points out in
Experience, skepticism records a descent into fragmentary immediacy, whereas belief
looks forward to a prospect of the whole.38
As evidence of Emersons empirical focus, doubt keeps his interests close to that of the
evidence of the world at hand, which must ground our enterprise if only by the most chastening
contradictions.39
This same proximity to common things reappears as an imperative in The Poet, where
Emerson says that the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step
nearer to it than any other (CW 3:13). What he there calls the ravishment of the
intellect by coming nearer to the fact is the other side to skepticisms contracted focus; it
requites our painful perceptions of limit with the plain face and sufficing objects of
nature, the sun, and moon, and water, and stones. (. . . S)uch common things make
their own promises to the persistent eye, since they stand ready to furnish their parts
toward a future whole: Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in
turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning.40
Emerson further distinguishes the skeptic from the mere programmatic doubter, whose
practice is no less dubious than that of the uncritical believer.41
This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic, this of consideration, of selfcontaining, not
at all of unbelief, not at all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting, doubting even
that he doubts; least of all, of scoffing, and profligate jeering at all that is stable and good
(. . . ).42
Every superior mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,I should rather say,
will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon
against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and blockheads. (CW 4:90, 97)43
Emerson prefers to speak of belief and skepticism in dynamic terms of compensation,

action and reaction, cause and effect, or, as in the passage just cited, the checks and
balances of nature. Emersons ordinary world has the power to reveal the common
resources of experience, which, Emerson insists, is also the place where belief finds its
beginnings. (. . . ) So skepticism and belief sustain one another by mutual provocation.44
Skepticism recalls belief home to its source in perception by demanding that our
expectations answer to the private yet common world of experience; but it is just as
surely the case that what Emerson calls the universal impulse to believe (CW 3A2),
which lies at the quick of both skepticism and revelation, will startle the skeptical eye
with irresistible prospects. Doubts and detections of limit are not merely criticisms of
established things, but fresh findings in nature. They are like the lusters in our reading
or, for the naturalist, like those New World specimens that defied even the broadest of
standing classifications. Without this freshness, without a perception so striking and so
Page 19
reliable that it outshines all prior persuasions, criticism can be nothing but censure,
scoffing, or mechanical dissection.45
What rank does belief hold for Emerson? Brown writes that it assures us we can
believe in our own ability to see the self-evident; so that the skeptic denies out of more faith,
not less, ultimately sharing resources with his antagonistic twin, the prophet. 46 Contrary to
Descartes skepticism, Emerson writes in The Over-soul,
We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we
are awake. (CW 2:166)47
Brown identifies a practical bond between self-reliant skepticism and self-reliant belief
in Emersons openness to both. Then Brown introduces the concept of anomaly. Ahead
here in the analysis of the segment on Reality, chapter 4, a recent utilization of the concept
anomaly by Donald Davidson helps to explore Emersons paradoxical dilemma between
natures determinism and human freedom. Brown praises anomaly as a symptom or sign of
indicators of the whole of things.
Perception of anomaly, then, works as a kind of initial prophecy, the first outcropping of a
more capacious prospect of the whole, which in turn prepares the field for future
skepticisms. As for the natural history of the process itself, Emerson can only call it, in
Experience, a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has
none (CW 3:27).48
Objects compose reality, but we only understand them insofar as human appreciation is
also made evident and paired with the dynamics of the principle of significance. Brown notes,
it can be described as a combination of both ecstatic and practical where belief and
skepticism meet before departing once again.49
Power, Emerson says, resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in
the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim (CW 2:40). By the terms of this
passage, transitional momentum finds direction in the focal points of new objects,
whether these appear as states, aims, or even things. Particular objects may be
abandoned and exchanged, but they are never transcended in any categorical way. In
fact, we grasp objects in their fullest nature only when we treat them as objectives for
actions. Thus moments of power are both ecstatic and practical, combining the most
extreme transport with the most discriminating objectivity. Power resides (the word
suggests crossing between sides and also remaking the sidesboth the limits and the
arrayed meaningsof a new situation) in the vertex where lines of belief and skepticism
meet before departing once again.50
Emerson locates what interests him in the practical ends that conclude Experience
with the declaration the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the
transformation of genius into practical power. That is only possible after confronting the
limitations of human perception.
Transforming our limited objects or objectives into terms of power happens not through
transcending limits but in seizing limits and turning them into instruments. But first we
must squarely behold the limits by opening our eyes to near things. It is well worth the
Page 20
sense of loss in affirming the limits of life as our own, since they also suggest the
prospect of regaining the world as a whole.51
Both belief and doubt bear upon the exercise of the will. Emerson saw the anomaly of human
freedom as a paradox of the expected and surprise, the connected and the disconnected,
drawing our attention to evidence of the whole when we pay attention.
Page 21
CHAPTER 2
EXPERIENCE AS ILLUSION52
THE lords of life, the lords of life,
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name;
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look:
Him by the hand dear Nature took;
Dearest Nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, Darling, never mind!
Tomorrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!
Emerson announces the theme of illusion as the essay opens with a colorful description
of various human ineptitudes. He begins with what amounts to a comic page of human
bewilderment and foolishness. The tone set by the poetic prologue, with its characterization of
us, humans, as a little man (. . . ) with puzzled look, shapes the tone of what follows: we are
all in this together! From a patronizing pat on the head, bordering on the parental humoring of
a child, it concludes with the revelation that lifes self-evident powers, whose momentum fills us
with awe, turn out to be our own creation (our race). How might that be? As we shall see,
the essay answers that questionbut not simply.
The representation of humanity as protagonist in the poem is towered over by a host of
guardians tall, the lords of life. Though pictured as guardians, clearly the poetic drama is
not about a struggle for survival. Instead, it is the safer but still serious predicament of finding
ourselves lost. Guidance finally comes from Nature who takes the wanderer to lead him by the
hand. It is Dearest Nature, strong and kind, as a friend, from whom we learn that those
Page 22
mighty laws of necessity enumerated in the preceding lines as use, surprise, surface, dream,
succession, wrong, and temperament, while they march deliberately, purposefully, unstoppably
from east to west are the little mans family and friends, the race, whom he has founded.
How so?
Emerson begins his prose with the question: Where do we find ourselves? So before
he gets to the discussion of what he will later tells us is the subject of the theme in this first
segment, Illusion, he immerses the reader in some of the consequences he associates with
skepticism.
Emerson describes our confusion over reality to be provoked by our inadequate,
dreamy aptitude for perceiving reality.
(T)he critical conditions of the common world stand at odds with reality, which is
nonetheless their foundation and only significant object. Time and experience tempt
Emerson to bow to the distance itself, and to grow weary in the endless series of lessons
affirming it. He addresses this weariness in Experience, when he admits that sleep
lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the firtree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception.
(CW 3:27) Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. (CW 3:30)53
Where are we? Emerson answers with images first of being on a staircase, neither of
whose ends we can see. At birth, we pass through a door but only by paying the price of
ingesting lethe, as in the classic tales, where that is given as the reason none can remember
anything of a prior existence. The narcotic, however, is not life threatening. Only our
perception suffers.
Then follows an elaboration of other symptoms of human foolishness, seen as a lack of
purpose and direction. The result is we lack the affirmative principle. (. . . )If any of us knew
what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! In other
words, we cannot think straight, because we do not know what we are doing and where we are
headed.54 Instead we find ourselves surprised when something good happens. We cannot
even give an account of the fact that, believe it or not, we do seem to be able to accomplish
things, despite our bewilderments. Emerson summarizes that with, Tis the trick of nature
thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in.
If we try to give an account of ourselves, we can barely identify the date, time, and place
where the effort was achieved. Even as supreme an act as martyrdom, at the time it is
suffered (. . . ) looked mean. Our location receives little regard; the grass is always greener
elsewhere. We compare what we have with others, as Emerson puts it more liltingly:
Yonderrich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow. But my own land only holds
the world together.
Page 23
The same comedy plays out in our ideas. When I quote others as authoritative, they
likely are quoting me similarly to their acquaintances. All of us lack appreciation of the worth of
what we say. Further, it is not only we, average and everyday folk, but the renowned literati
whose example confirms the case that
(T)he pith of each mans genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of
literaturetake the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel,is a sum of very few
ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation of these. So in this great
society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions.
It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem
organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.55
Emersons theme of sleep recurs insofar as even a wakeful state seems still a kind of
sleep. We stumble through life like drunkards who cannot put one foot in front of the next. As
stumblebumswho are perfectly healthy but just cannot stop wandering, and whose energy
levels, we complain, are minimalwe do not know what we are doing or where we are going.
Emerson accounts that to, we lack the affirmative principle, and (. . . ) have no superfluity of
spirit for new creation.
That threat, not to life but to our perception, so distorts our senses that we cannot even
tell whether we are busy or idle. It is not that we do not get anywhere. Somehow things get
done. But we are surprised to see it when it happens, especially when it is wisdom, poetry,
virtue. We denigrate ourselves and the daily routine, disparaging our own; what someone
else says, we think important.
Everything around us offers a means by which we can orient ourselves. Yet disasters
happen, and when they come, even then,
There is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces.56
(. . . )I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our
fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.57
Confinement to surfaces includes human contact as well, where Our relations to each
other are oblique and casual. We are disappointed whenever we look for reliability. In our
households we ask continually after news of what is happening elsewhere. Yet as we all
know, it is not half so bad with them as they say.
Even death and grief are unconvincing of their reality. We try to comfort ourselves that,
because all must die, we will at last contact a reality that will not dodge us. Emerson shares
his experience of grieving over the death of his first and, at the time, only son to emphasize
how difficult it is for human beings to probe below the surface of things, a theme he will
examine more specifically in later essays. What eludes us is real nature.
Page 24
Both nature and human nature hide from us when all are reduced to objects. The
distance, the lack of direct connection, this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, is the
most unhandsome part of our condition. Most obvious is when we try to overcome it and
instead let them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest.
Emerson reveals his familiarity with classical culture throughout this essay. The sayings
of Heraclitus appear or are paraphrased in several places. In this segment, we read, Nature
does not like to be observed. Thank you, Heraclitus. Emerson agrees, Few adult persons
can see nature.58 What does that mean?
Emersons ridicule of human limitations prepares readers for his praise and respect for
what is had only on condition. Wonder wears a comic mask.
The desire that Emerson expresses in regard to reality, the desire to close the distance
between himself and it, (. . . ) he often represents it in terms of manual grasping or
holding. In Nature he finds himself unable to clutch the worlds beauty, which he can
only witness from behind the windows of diligence. The American Scholar suggests
a tactile, almost parental enfolding in its demand that we embrace the common. And in
Experience Emerson speaks far less hopefully of that reality, for contact with which we
would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers; then he complains that, in a life of
evanescence and lubricity, where objects slip through our fingers then when we clutch
hardest, death may turn out to be the only reality that will not dodge us (CW 3:29).59
(Since) reality is bound intimately into perceptual activityit suggests itself in senses of
something freestanding and absoluteand so any real effect must make its appearance
within terms of a perceptual life prone to illusions, temperamental distortions, serial
displacements, superficies, and Subjectiveness.60
One major theme throughout this essay contrasts what changes to what does not
change. As we shall see, the illusion is to think that we only need look for one of those, if that
is all there isit must be either change or the unchanging.61. What else?
Space and time contribute to our bewilderment if neither what changes nor what
remains the same describes reality. Illusion is the habit of restricting ourselves to such binary
views to define reality, despite the realization that none disturb[s] the universal necessity.
Even disaster is merely a show: there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most
slippery sliding surfaces. Universal necessity encompasses and exceeds time and space. In
the Conclusions to this thesis, this writer confesses an inability to make any more headway
than that.
The comments from early in the essay belong to his first theme of Illusion. A bit of
clarity appears near the end of the essay where he writes,
But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism;since
there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded.62
Page 25
Emerson thus offers a joke in place of an answer or a resolution. He does not justify his
conclusions by collecting objective data to which one applies analysis. Nor, as other
comments in the essay make clear, does he place much reliance on speculation. Such
attempts, by both reason and strict empiricism, prove fruitless.
The essay shows clearly that Emerson is familiar with and respectful of Kants work. In
the next segment of the essay, he writes,
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through
nature.63
He and Kant agree on the nearly unlimited capacity of human perception to lead us astray in
the results of experience. We, as a civilization and as individuals insofar as we are honest
about our sense of locale, are not sure we know where we are. But Kants approach to
skepticism is not Emersons.
As was mentioned earlier, Brown writes that for Emerson Perception is a process of
life, not just an epistemological vehicle.64 He expands on that.
It should be clear by now that I am treating Emersons skepticism as something different
from what the word tends to mean in strictly epistemological settings. I have been
looking at skepticism as a working feature of action and experience rather than as a set
of doubts about what human beings can know. Epistemological skepticism, on the other
hand, has concerned itself with the limits of our ability to gain certain knowledge of the
nature or even the existence of objects. It may evaluate experience to question the
validity of empirical truth-claims, or it may evaluate the limits of pure reason prior to
experience; in either case, it judges the possibilities or conditions that predefine any
particular act of knowing anything.
Now, any reader of Nature and Experience will recall Emersons willingness to
entertain the extremist doubts of this sort, even those doubts that convert our inability to
ascertain the substantial existence of nature into a Berkeleyan faith that nature exists
only in the mind. Yet it is also the case that Emerson raises those doubts within a
framework of further uses, uses pertaining to ends other than epistemological ones. In
the Idealism chapter of Nature, for example, he almost offhandedly grants the noble
doubt. . . . whether nature outwardly exists; but then he subjects it to the criterion later
made famous by pragmatists such as Peirce and James: What difference does it make,
whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of
the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is
the difference? (CW 1:29)
For the epistemologist, the answer to such questions makes all the difference in the
world, as it defines for us what we can or cannot know about the existence of objects.
Emerson makes it clear, however, that for him the difference depends on what we can
do with the answer. As far as concerns his ability to make use of nature, the answer
makes no difference: Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in
the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it
may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses. The answer to
the question of the worlds existence, and hence to the question of whether we can have
certain knowledge of objects, makes no practical difference. At the same time, Emerson
finds that a noble raising of the doubt makes a great deal of difference. Doubts,
Page 26
especially extreme doubts, work even better than knowledge in provoking us to try out
new experience.65
So while Kant addressed skepticism in order to overcome it with surpassing logic, and
while Emerson is also teaching his readers to be affirmative, Kant attributes our confusion to a
misdirected reliance on reason devoid of or contrary to experience.66 Only the guidance of
space and time governing empirical conditions provides reliability. Emerson, on the contrary,
does not find even space and time sufficiently reliable and thus implicates it in our confusion.
The secret of the illusoriness, Emerson later adds, is in the necessity of a succession
of moods or objects. In contrast to Emersons loss of his dearest object, it is the dry
irony of perceptions automatic continuance, needing no hope of an end to close on, that
finally presents the most dangerous threat to perception in experience. Meaningful
perception relies on hope, on the sense of an aim beyond its instruments. Without a
hopeful aim there can be no progress, but only static succession, a series of which we
do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.67
Brown adds, the essay Experience displaces the question of reality into an issue of
serial realization. Reality works instrumentally at some virtual point within the perceptual
series, not outside it.68 I interpret Brown as confirming that Emersons reality is what Cavell
calls Emersonian Moral Perfection, which is realized progressively. 69
Emersons methodology in Experience is little more than offering his carefully
considered beliefs. He uses everyday events to amplify and illustrate his conception of
experience. If that can be fairly identified then, as the experience of experience, even though it
is only one persons experience of experience, Emersons appeal is to what anyone can verify
for himself. That does not yet have a logical or philosophical grounding to compare with Kant.
However, while Emerson makes no allusions to Hegels work, one must assume he was well
aware of itparticularly since Transcendentalisms primary competition came from American
Hegelians.70
I do not know what Emerson wrote about Hegel. However, I assume that since
Transcendentalism and Hegelianism were primary antagonists in the United States, they must
have shared some of the same interests and perhaps methodology. If that were the case, then
an investigation of the experience of experience might reveal some parallels with Hegels
work.71
Emersons reflections, while not systematic philosophy, are not casual opinions. He
sets out his carefully considered beliefs. From the opening argument of the essay, it seems
clear that among Emersons strongest beliefs is a belief in doubt. Further he offers doubt as
what is to be believed, in the sense of trusted. That approaches the philosophical, if for no
Page 27
other reason than its resonance in the Western tradition, which reaches back at least to Platos
portrait of Socrates.
Page 28
CHAPTER 3
EXPERIENCE AS TEMPERAMENT72
Emersons undesignated theme of constancy and change runs throughout the essay.
The preceding segment, on Illusion, entertained the confusion of change in its constancy. Our
disability is not blindness, not an inability to perceive. Instead, our perceptions are only that,
no more than our perceptions. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate.
That is coordinate with Kants famous The conditions of the possibility of experience in
general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience. 73
What happens to us contributes to our understanding, even if confusing, and something is
always happening.
Emersons philosophy of mood stakes out a substantial claim to the new territory. His
second theme is Temperament, to which he attributes a power of determination but still leaves
open the degree to which he means something as changeable as mood or as constant as
character.74 The clich, The more things change, the more they stay the same, captures the
sense of temperament as character and mood.
Exactly what Emerson intends with the concept temperament does not arise
immediately or easily. An issue that deserves attention, but will not get it here, is the extent to
which the recent interpretations of Emerson have become possible only because of what we
have learned from those modern philosophers who may have been influenced by his work,
some of whom will be cited shortly. No false modesty prompts the realization that, without the
study done by the philosophers who have been and will be quoted extensively immediately
below, I could not have come to appreciate Emersons point in Experience. That is also to
say, the topic of temperament deserves a study in itself.
Emerson relies on the image of a string of beads, along with color and hue, to represent
a succession of moods that populate our perceptions. The iron wire on which the beads are
strung is temperament, and it enters fully into the system of illusions.
We cannot do anything to change or to deny temperament, because it shuts us in a
prison of glass which we cannot see. It even dominates momentary spontaneity. Always
temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, even to the extent of being
inconsumable in the flames of religion. He admits that the moral sentiment can impose some
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modification of mood, but moral judgments will be influenced and exert influence only to the
extent allowed by temper.
In the examination of what changes, illusion was found everywhere as binding as a law.
Yet even that is subject to a more intrusive lord. Emerson writes,
I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it
without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man
willingly hears any one praise but himself.
The whole essay examines what it means when we say, life. Here Emersons
distinction between ordinary life and that aspect of life that is the exception to the case blurs
those differences; the ordinary is exceptional. What is it about temperament he finds
exceptional? Not that it is either unknown or familiar to us only as solitary individuals. Rather
to us, only our own moods are praiseworthy. We admit awareness of that in our private
thoughts and self-evaluations. Others moods bother us as stubbornness or idiosyncratic
fixations.
Emerson contrasts the platform of ordinary life with the platform of physics, on which
we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. It is clear to this reader that
Emersons objection is not to science per se but to so-called science, which then explains the
examples that follow of physicians and phrenologists. It may be necessary for current
readers to remember the extent to which the American Civil Wars laudatory result, in addition
to preservation of the union and emancipation of the slaves, was that the battlefield physicians
were so immersed in casualties and engulfed by suffering that their surgeries, however done,
were justified, allowing them to violate with impunity previous limitations. Hence, medicine
improved after that war from what was learned during it. In our time, after the immense
expansion of the medical arts, medicine now bears little resemblance to what Emerson knew.
Emersons denigration of so-called science, as lacking originality, emphasizes his
assertion that temperament has the final word,
Temperament puts all divinity to rout. (. . . )Temperament is the veto or limitation-power
in the constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution,
but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all
subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final.
The governance of temperament may limit an opposite excess in the constitution.

However, Emersons romantic claim is, that when temperament encounters an original
equity, a virtue, the combined result is of such a fundamental nature that it ranks as final.
He follows that immediately with references to absolute truth and absolute good in
order to make clear the conclusiveness with which he intends his final. Again that contrasts
with the alternatives of so-called science, which he describes as a sty of sensualism where
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one would soon come to suicide. Instead of the nightmare of the links of the chain of
physical necessity, his own resort is to an affirmative principle:
But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence
there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes.
Emersons justification for his selected evidence emerges, employing standards that are
not conventionally empirical, as he discusses this second theme. The many different attitudes
expressed by those observing even the same nature, he writes,
It depends on the mood (. . . ). The more or less depends on structure or temperament.
Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.
Other Views of Temperament and Mood

Cavell asserts that mood is an appropriate topic for philosophical investigation. He is
not alone, as the following brief comments by Gendlin, Kohak, and Flakne show. When
Emerson is examined as a philosopher of moods, mood accounts as both a cause of our
confusion and a response to it.
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to
be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what
lies in its focus.
Cavell recalls his own evolution from negative to positive in evaluations of Emerson. In
his initial study of Thoreau, Cavell credited him with a more genuine relationship to Kants work
than Emerson had achieved. Since then, he regrets that declaration. Now Cavell writes,
The idea is roughly that moods must be taken as having at least as sound a role in
advising us of reality as sense experience has; that, for example, coloring the world,
attributing to it the qualities mean or magnanimous, may be no less objective or
subjective than coloring an apple, attributing to it the colors red or green. Or perhaps we
should say: sense experience is to objects what moods are to the world. The only
philosopher I knew who had made an effort to formulate a kind of epistemology of
moods, to find their revelations of what we call the world as sure as the revelations of
what we call understanding, was the Heidegger of Being and Time. But it was hard to
claim support there without committing oneself to more machinery than one had any
business for.
Now I see that I might, even ought to, have seen Emerson ahead of me, since, for
example, his essay Experience is about the epistemology, or say the logic, of moods. I
understand the moral of that essay as being contained in its late, prayerful remark, But
far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism. That is,
what is wrong with empiricism is not its reliance on experience but its paltry idea of experience. But I hear Kant working throughout Emersons essay Experience, with his
formulation of the question Is metaphysics possible? and his line of answer: Genuine
knowledge of (what we call) the world is for us, but it cannot extend beyond (what we
call) experience. To which I take Emerson to be replying: Well and good, but then you
had better be very careful what it is you understand by experience, for that might be
limited in advance by the conceptual limitations you impose upon it, limited by what we
know of human existence, that is, by our limited experience of it. When, for example,
you get around to telling us what we may hope for, I must know that you have
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experienced hope, or else I will surmise that you have not, which is to say precisely that
your experience is of despair.75
Along with what we find, there always is and will be that which befalls us. As Brown
writes of skepticism,
Much of Emersons hopefulness about human nature rests on his confidence that
skeptical impulses are beyond our control. Skepticism befalls us, as surprising
perceptions do, in spite of our best accomplishments and expectations. Against our
wishes, the Supreme Critic leads us out of false or superannuated pieties back into the
vestibule of the true temple. People wish to be settled, Circles tells us; only as far as
they are unsettled, is there any hope for them (CW 2:189).76
What happens to us plays as much of a role as what we make happen. Like it or not,
those are necessarily connected. The skepticism and doubt of science model that at a more
inclusive level. Earlier Brown was quoted writing that For Emerson, skeptical moments are
biographical before they are epistemological. They befall us, as moods do, in the course of
our empirical passages and endeavors.77
Our intentions matter to Emerson because of the connection such purposes make to the
whole of things, in the polarity of immediacy and prospects.
Both poles of experience, however, work within a larger compensatory process of life:
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but
that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being
conscious, knows not its own tendency. So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity,
because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and
now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law (CW 3:40-41).
Skepticism looks ahead by withholding belief, working and watching for the fact to be
shown. But there is no doing this without also holding hard to the evidence of the world
at hand, which must ground our enterprise if only by the most chastening contradictions.
This is where our actual knowledge falls into question, particularly if we allow
Emersons point in Nature, that few adult persons can see nature.78
We feel handicapped when we are faced with chastening contradictions. In

Emersons time, the natural sciences were still referred to as natural philosophy. Since then,
the dependence of science on philosophy has become both more incisive and less noticed.
Science must survive in a world where what often matters most is results. But the results are
also determined by choices, made from sources that have additional and involuntarily
dimensions. Philosophy of science continues to study that pattern, yet it remains at best an
avocation for only the most authentic scientist. Such is the holistic dimension of science, and
Emersons examination, insofar as it can be called philosophical, aspires to a holism of human
knowledge. That invariably depends on the self-awareness of the investigator and the
methodology used. It complicates rather than resolves our confusions, and Emerson argues,
then we best know that chastening contradiction. To ignore the participation of agency (even
though it is less manageable than results that can be verified by duplication, anywhere at any
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time) results in a distortiona denial that indeed may prove to be useful eventually but only at
the sacrifice now of what may not be useful, like poetry or love. Specialization generates
enormous power, but it may or may not be helpful. Further consideration of that topic follows
in sections ahead. Knowledge, too, is liable to mistakes when evaluated in the absence of the
context of temperament.
A handy way to understand what Emerson is getting at may be to compare the
prevailing attitude toward the natural sciences, as tools of purported certain knowledge, with
attitudes toward, say, poetry as a mere art form. When laboratory science explains its
discoveries and how it has reached them without including the investigator, the study and
subject become disconnected. That is, the scientific ideal is to accumulate data that is
universal, insofar as any similarly trained investigator who can repeat the methodology that
produced the data will reach the same results.
To do that, science must guard against bias that arises as a consequence, say, of the
investigators personal history or ambitions. Only then is there some assurance that what the
investigator has found anyone else can also find. Kants meticulous examination in his
Critiques of the tools available for thinking, for reasoning, for evaluating our sensible intuitions
has proved to be a revolution because he could appeal to the universal conditions of traditional
logic to justify his conclusions. Anyone trained in the same logic will arrive at similar
conclusions. Cavell criticizes that with the assertion that such an investigator is, at best, an
ideal type, and that types amount to denials of the investigators actual humanity.
Strict science legitimately pursues the hunt for what does not change. Thus science
accumulates a tradition of knowledge that future generations can use, because it will be the
same for that future generation as it was in the initial discoveries. Commonly that approach
today is referred to as the ideal of scientific objectivity. 79 It is both the glory of science and
source of the complaint that it is liable to objectivism when its value-laden dimensions are
ignored. A science of ethics is a necessary requirement if sciences progress toward
objectivity is to be continuous.80
Mood as a Topic of Philosophy
The theme of mood, as an appropriate topic for philosophical investigation, is far too
broad for a carefully considered explication here, but some further confirmations of Cavells
perspective can be given at least passing reference.
The first is by philosopher Eugene T. Gendlin81 who, along with Cavell, finds the
treatment of Befindlichkeit provocative. In what can be an apt response to the opening
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sentence of Experience, Where do we find ourselves? and the comment from Fate, in the
history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a
party to his present estate, Gendlin writes,
In German Sich befinden (finding oneself) has three allusions: The reflexivity of finding
oneself; feeling; and being situated. All three are caught in the ordinary phrase, How
are you? That refers to how you feel but also to how things are going for you and what
sort of situation you find yourself in.
To view feelings, affects, and moods as Befindlichkeit differs from the usual view in the
following ways:
1. Whereas feeling is usually thought of as something inward, the concept refers to
something both inward and outward, but before a split between inside and outside has
been made.
We are always situated, in situations, in the world, in a context, living in a certain way
with others, trying to achieve this and avoid that.
A mood is not just internal; it is this living in the world. We sense how we find ourselves,
and we find ourselves in situations.
Humans are their living in the world with others. Humans are livings-in and livings-with.
2. A second difference from the usual conception of feeling lies in this: Befindlichkeit
always already has its own understanding. We may not know what the mood is about,
we may not even be specifically aware of our mood; nevertheless there is an
understanding of our living in that mood. It is no merely internal state or reaction, no
mere coloring or accompaniment to what is happening. We have lived and acted in
certain ways for certain purposes and strivings and all this is going well or badly, but
certainly it is going in some intricate way. How we are faring in these intricacies is in our
mood. We may not know that in a cognitive way at all; it is in the mood nevertheless,
implicitly.
This understanding is active; it is not merely a perception or reception of what is
happening to us. We dont come into situations as if they were mere facts, independent
of us. We have had some part in getting ourselves into these situations, in making the
efforts in response to which these are now the facts, the difficulties, the possibilities; and
the mood has the implicit understanding of all that, because this understanding was
inherent already in how we lived all that, in an active way.
3. This understanding is implicit, not cognitive in the usual sense. It differs from
cognition in several ways: It is sensed or felt, rather than thoughtand it may not even
be sensed or felt directly with attention. It is not made of separable cognitive units or
any definable units.
4. Speech is always already involved in any feeling or mood, indeed in any human
experience. Speech is the articulation of understanding, but this articulation doesnt first
happen when we try to say what we feel. Just as Befindlichkeit always already has its
understanding, so also does it always already have its spoken articulation. This doesnt
at all mean that there is always a way to say what one lives in words. But there are
always speakings, with each other, and listening to each other, involved in any situation,
and implicit in any living. Hearing each other, being open to each others speech, is part
of what we are, the living we are. And so it isalways already involved in our living,
whatever we may then actually say or not say.82
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Erazim Kohak on Paul Ricoeur

Another perspective on the philosophy of mood can be found in the early work of Paul
Ricoeur. The comments here borrow from the analysis of that work by his English language
translator, Kohak.
Understanding Ricoeurs dynamic of the voluntary and the involuntary requires a careful
tracing, as the dialectic gets more complicated than just the back and forth of a simple duality.
Evidence can be found for behavior and emotion where, not only does the involuntary have an
initial impact on the voluntary, there returns a rebound or a reciprocity from the involuntary on
the voluntary that is frequently hidden on first impression. Kohak refers specifically to,
Neither reflexes nor instinct, but emotion or habit might be the area in which the will is
ultimately secondary to the involuntary.83
Kohak prefers the image of emotion as an organ rather than a motive. He sees that
particularly in the dynamics of human behavior.
Ricoeur finds good and sufficient reason for considering emotion, too, an organ rather
than a motive of willing, offering means rather than endsthe means of effective action.
This is not difficult to establish with respect to the emotions whose basic mode is
wonder. These emotions lend an affective coloring and vibration to my encounter with
the world, helping to bridge the distance between perception and action. But even the
emotions whose mode is shock ultimately support Ricoeurs contention. Even they, as
he shows, include an element of valuation and judgment: only a world about which I
care, in which I intend, can shock me. Though the will is overwhelmed and broken, it is
not enslaved. Only in passion is the will an enslaved will rather than either sovereign or
defeated will. But while emotion provides the corporeal point of entry and an alibi for
passion, it is not passion. Passion is a mental rather than a corporeal phenomenon it
is the vertigo to which the will chooses to yield, a bondage which the will imposes on
itself. The true corporeal involuntary, emotion, remains in principle an organ rather than
a master of the voluntary.84
What or Who Is a Self?

One of the major criticisms of Emersons difficulties points to his reliance on the notion
of intuition. Emersons use of that term stands in contrast with Kants application of the term to
our normal involvement with material events. For Kant, intuition allows us to depend on our
senses as we make our way in the midst of things.
For Emerson, the Romantic Movement had a strong influence. Historically, Emerson
communicated with the British Romantics regularly. He adopted their association of intuition
with feelings, understood as innate human capacities, rather than intuition as contact with the
world.85 Emersons adoption of the Kantian philosophical system led him to intellectual
uncertainty about even oneself,86 so perhaps the imagined certainty of the Romantic notion of
intuition had great appeal as an alternative.
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Since Emersons time, those issues have occupied the attention of any number of
philosophers. In a recent paper the philosopher April Flakne analyzes Merleau-Pontys later
work. That is useful for the purposes of this essay, because Flakne frames her analysis
around a critique of Merleau-Ponty that closely resembles the familiar critique of Emerson as
an intuitionist. She reveals a dimension of Merleau-Ponty that illuminates an additional
dimension, if not an alternative, to the phenomenal/noumenal conceptuality. Flakne accepts
the principles of Derridas criticism of Merleau-Ponty, but she objects that those specific issues
are misdirected in the case of Merleau-Ponty. Her defense of Merleau-Ponty provides a new
perspective and, by comparison with Emerson, reveals the unexamined possibilities of
Emersons work.
Problem of Memory as the Touchstone of Self-Identity
To set the stage, a brief review of Van Leers interpretation of Emersons essay
Experience provides a useful context. The first remark cited focuses some of the implications
of what Emerson had declared is the question under consideration. Emersons first sentence
is, Where do we find ourselves? Van Leer puts it in this context:
In terms of the essays initial question, how can I distinguish between a single self at
many placeswhere do I find my self?and a simple multitude of personswhere do I
find my selves?87
Not quite half-way into the essay Experience, Emerson refines the search by asserting
that Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that
which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows
not its own tendency. So is it with us(. . . ). The most trusted evidence for the permanence of
self-identity is remembering. I can tell you today what I did yesterday, so it must be the same
I on both occasions. When examined more closely, however, as Wittgenstein pointed out in
his private language argument, that most personal experience is logically incoherent.
(Emersons) claim that life has no memory, like the claim that the world has no inside,
implies that within the system of experience there is nothing that could test the memory
of recollections. I think I remember experience X, or feel the same sensation S as I did
at time T. But in the absence of objective standards for X, S, and T, I cannot be certain
that my memory of their definitions is accurate. In Wittgensteins famous analogy, to use
one memory as the subjective justification of another is like using a mental image of a
timetable to check the trains departure time or, worse, to buy duplicate copies of a
single newspaper in order to demonstrate the truth of the news.88
The assertion that we are all alike is an extension of our familiar individual selfunderstanding. However, must we not know who we are before we can assume that we are all
alike? Perhaps such a generalization of our commonality is just an excuse for an incomplete
idea.
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In part, then, what Emerson explores in the lower argument is the lack of objective
criteria for the ascription of place, memory, and, by extension, of self-identity itself. In
this context, the opening question provokes Humes response that we find ourselves
nowhere, that every attempt to find self as an object reveals some particular perception
or another, but never a self without a perception or anything but a perception. Other
people, the standard against which the lords [elements of the essay] are measured
throughout the lower argument, only aggravate the problem. Though they seem to
demonstrate the reality of other selves, even the unity of these selves, they do not solve
our personal problem. For, as Emerson later admits, we believe in ourselves, as we do
not believe in others.89
The centrality of Emersons inquiry shows itself by comparison with Kant whose answer
takes the form of the concept, transcendental unity of apperception. While it may be that only
a philosopher worries about such issues, we need to ask where our certainty of the self takes
us when looked at closely. Its complexity leaves us still struggling today, just as for Emerson.
For Kant, man finds his self not in any real place but in the formal unity of
consciousnessthe transcendental unity of apperception. Wittgenstein, attending more
specifically to the meanings of the terms, argues that I, when used as a subject, does
not really denote a possessor any more than here does a place or now a time. The
implication is, then, that the proper answer to Emersons opening question of where is
In the think or even simply Here. To demand a more complete definition of place
or self is simply to misunderstand the function of the two concepts.90
Van Leer questions the usefulness of the analogy of what I think and feel to what
another thinks. That seems available, but it leads to dilemmas. Consequently,
Analogy, then, challenges privacy and the notion of will it supports. In the remaining
sections, Emerson tries to imagine how one might believe in other minds without
analogically doubting ones own.91
Thus Emersons skepticism about other minds reduces to skepticism about minds
altogether. And the solution of hypothetical indifference toward the existence of other
people suggests an equal indifference about the meaning of personality itselfa refusal
to explain the ineffable irreducibility of the elements of human life.92
Merleau-Ponty and Chiasm

Another essay succeeds in sharpening the consequences of the Romantic drift from
intuition as an empirical experience to the temptations of intuition as knowledge beyond
evidence. Emerson may not have been completely able to avoid his transcendent wishes.
Nor did he succumb to an extreme Platonism.
Flakne defends Merleau-Ponty from Derridas criticism that he collapses the distinction
between seeing and touching and thereby perpetuates the questionable intuitionist tradition.
Undoubtedly, Emerson relies on seeing as with his mythic eyeball. Romantic intuition can be
understood to claim an immediate relationship granted by seeing is believing. Since seeing
traditionally is a one-way perspective, the other gets lost when engulfed in such selfknowledge. Flakne summarizes her essay as follows:
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I want to focus on three of Derridas criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. First, that MerleauPonty misreads Husserls exemplary phenomenological approach to the other, and ends
up reducing the other to an object of intuition. Second, and closely linked to the first,
that Merleau-Ponty collapses seeing and touching. Third, that all of his talk of gaps and
imminence notwithstanding, Merleau-Pontys account of the body ultimately prefers
unity, coincidence, and totality to dispersion, noncoincidence, and multiplicity. In the
course of treating these objections, I will argue that they stem from Derridas
underestimation of the potential role of synaesthesis in Merleau-Pontys thought. As I
have shown elsewhere, synaesthesis is best understood as a self-other relation that
effects the unity of the perceiving, embodied self rather than assuming it.93
Flaknes account of synaesthesis, as she borrows it from Aristotle, will be mentioned

shortly. What is significant here is the emphasis on a self-other relation that effects the unity
of the (. . . ) self. That is, synaesthesis produces or creates the self through a relation with an
other. That differs from views that begin with an assumption of a foregone or given unity of
self. Unity is made, not axiomatic. It is a consequence of the encounter (the dynamic of
encroachment and divergence) rather than of inherent and unshared prior attributes or aspects
of the participants in the encounter.
Flakne examines and interrelates the following key concepts. The format used here
does not represent the style of Flaknes brilliant and meticulously crafted argument. The
oversimplification enables me to short-circuit her complexity to suit my purpose, which is to
compare some features with Emersons dilemma, as Van Leer puts it, of the lack of objective
criteria for self-identity. Arbitrarily I place some of Flaknes key concepts into three groups:
problematic ideas, transitional ideas, and the enabling ideas suggestive of further exploration.
The problematic concepts are intuition, perception, and apperception. Flakne
offers the following descriptions for those.
Intuition:
(W)hat both philosophical and common language cling to as the ideal of intuition: the
eye that sees is the eye that grasps, be-holds (hence com-prehend, con-cept, be-griff,
and so forth). Thus precisely where the reach of sight-based intuitionism faltered in
Husserlthe juncture where the eidetic constitution of objects gives way to touch and
the passage to alterity this allows[Derrida charges that] Merleau-Pontys alleged
hierarchy, displacement, or parallelism consolidates a scopic/haptic alliance that leaves
no space for alterity, rejoinder.94
Derrida praises Husserls analysis of the scopic/haptic, or sight and touching,

distinction. His critique of Merleau-Ponty elevates Husserls as the more reliable philosophical
position.
Perception and apperception:
(S)ight, which must be directed outward and can never see its own controlling organ,
governs perception, while the touch that can touch itself uniquelythat is, uniquely
possesses reflexive sensationgoverns apperception. On this Husserlian view, our
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access to the other takes place in the irreducible gap between touchwhich gives me
access to myselfand sightwhich gives me access to objects.95
Derridas critique of haptics aims at apperception, the feeling that one feels, especially
as this is cast as a mode of self-reflection governed by the human hand associated with
human making and mastery. Derridas deconstruction of haptics aims to unsettle any
notion of the body, or my body, indeed, any proper body such mastery might
underwrite. Instead, along with Nancy, Derrida endorses a view of the body or flesh as
multiple and fluid points of contact, a view that seeks to reconfigure oppositions between
integrity and alterity.96
As will be seen in a citation below, Flakne finds it useful to place the word perceive in
quotation marks in order to designate the new sense in which the word applies for MerleauPonty. The word has many different interpretations, as perception is a central philosophical
concern at least since Descartes. While the contributions of Descartes, Locke, and Kant are
necessary, perception as it has heretofore been understood by them remains problematic.
The transitional concepts are appresentation, empathy and alterity.
Derrida maintains that despite all Merleau-Pontys oscillations between coincidence and
non-coincidence, his thought remains governed by a unity implied by the with in his
phrasing it is a non-coincidence that I coincide with here (cited in OT 198). Thus,
according to Derrida, instead of extending indirection or appresentation from my relation
to others to my self-relation, Merleau-Pontys coincidence with non-coincidence simply
allows for an intuition of a difference that is no less mine for being different (cf. OT
198)it is merely a kind of second degree difference.97
Derridas point is that while Merleau-Ponty uses the terminology of difference, his kind
of difference still depends on an assignment of ownership, understood as self-identity that
belongs to the traditional formulas of sight-based intuition, of the variety that Husserl rejected.
According to Derrida, Merleau-Pontys difference does not demonstrate or prove a unity. As
with intuition, it assumes unity and fails by the fallacy of petitio principii, begging the question.
Appresentation (in which I pair my body with that of the other, and thereby perceive
that its animation is like my own) and empathy (in which I imaginatively project myself
into the place of the other) are the indirect means through which I approach, without
appropriation, the alterity of the other. Yet it belongs to the essential sense of these
non-cognitive acts that they can never be fulfilled: the other is never delivered to me as
are ordinary intentional objects. In my self-relation, I can touch myself and feel myself
touching, whereas when I touch the other I can imagine that she can feel herself
touching, but I can never directly feel what touching is for her. Alterity is given, but
resists subsumption. Indeed, for alterity to be alterity, it must remain inaccessible in this
way.98
The enabling concepts are chiasm, inter-corporeity, and synasthesis.

For Merleau-Ponty, the figure of the chiasm is an attempt to undo dualisms such as
subject and object, self and other, or touching and touched. Playing on both the
anatomical (chiasma) and the rhetorical (chiasmus) senses drawn from the Greek
khiasmos, Merleau-Ponty draws our attention both to a process in which the data from
two distinct eyes cross over or intertwine in the optic nerve to forge a single picture,
and to the way in which a switch-over of subject and object from one clause to the next
in a single sentence alters the meaning of each distinct term. What these two senses of
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chiasm have in common is the engendering of a new meaning or picture that depends
on the possibility of a reversal of the elements, but would collapse were there to be an
identity between the elements. The key concepts, then, making up Merleau-Pontys
notion of chiasm are those of divergence (cart) and encroachment, rather than identity
and difference.99
I understand Flaknes interpretation of Merleau-Pontys reference to rhetoric here to

mean that one can get a determination of a genuine relationship of the meaning of terms by
substituting them in identical sentences. Then one can see what meaning arises from such
movement. When the terms have identical meaning, substitution adds nothing. In other
cases, substitution adds new meaning according to the order of the movement of the terms.
Merleau-Ponty suggests to me that if we alter the metaphor of our inquiry from What
can we see here? to What do we touch here? a new dimension emerges. Flakne
maintains
that Merleau-Ponty wants to abandon a model of appresentation (. . . ) not in order to
return to an immediate intuition of the other that he has already rejected even for the
self(. . . ). The chiasm, the intertwining, of the diverse, is the creation of a third that
informs and orients the original elements. So too, the coincidence that Derrida refers
to is never for Merleau-Ponty a coincidence of myself with myself, which can therefore
appropriate all encounters with the other as being mine. The coincidence of
noncoincidence is always something provisionally created through the encounter that
effects a rapport that thereby shapes and orients each of the always non-coinciding
(cart) elements.100
Prospects for Ethics

Flaknes adaptation of Merleau-Pontys chiasm in terms of Aristotelian synaesthesis
generates a conception of self and other whose development can only be imagined at this
point. However, its distinctiveness from traditional intuitionist views promises fecundity. 101 Here
she mentions the alternative of intercorporeity to a narrative, or what might be called a linear,
description of the bodily center.
Rather than effacing alterity through a return to intuitionism, such synaesthetic
intercorporeity allows us to rethink our contact with others. The other is not a text to be
readdeconstructively or hermeneuticallybut a co-participant in an improvised
choreo-graphy, a drawing or marking of space between two or more. In short,
understood as synaesthetic intercorporeity, the encounter between self and other
unfolds not as structured narrative but as a kind of contact-improvisation that
determines, both momentarily and cumulatively, the bodily center, and therefore sense
of self, that each maintains vis--vis the other.102
Then Flakne offers some practical examples of her alternative view of sensory
interaction with objects in our world. Addressing the specific joint possibilities of sight and
touch, she emphasizes the need for each to preserve its separateness in order to coordinate
provisional co-incidence.
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The narrowly synaesthetic chiasm, that is, the one that Merleau-Ponty explores between
the senses of sight and touch, must also be understood in this choreographic fashion.
If I touch something that my eyes perceived to be soft, and it turns out to be hard, it is
not so much that I correct my eyes with my fingers, as that my notions of hard and soft
alter to accommodate the possibilities of this new kind of data. There is certainly no
hierarchy here, because even concerning proper sense datasuch as color is for
sighteach sense accommodates the gifts of the others (e.g., we perceive a soft
orange color) in their intertwining. Nor is there a metaphorical displacement between
the senses, as they work in conjunction without ever collapsing into each other or
becoming indistinguishable. Finally, the only parallelism involved is the chiasmic
relation that specifies the non-identity intrinsic to all reflexion, the third that rebounds on
the original twobe it the seen sight, touched touch, or the witnessing of touch, etc.
and the ability of each sense to affect the other, and so jointly to bring about or effect a
provisional co-incidence.103
At the level of the ethical relation of persons, the meanings of here and there are
also reorganized by intercorporeity when it avoids Romantic intuitionism.
On Merleau-Pontys account of intercorporeity, I do not passively sense or actively
observe the behaviors of the other and thereupon conclude that the other is animate like
myself. Instead, upon perceiving the other body, my own body takes up the gestures
and sensations of the other: for example, my gaze is directed to the focal point of the
others gaze, my body feels warmth when the other noticeably sweats, I cringe with her
sudden movement, etc. True, what takes place in Merleau-Pontys intercorporeity is not
well understood as synthesis, analysis, and belief-formation, but this does not reduce it
to a kind of intuitionism. Rather, it is best understood as choreo-graphya mutual
marking or drawing [graphein] of space [chora] between two (or more) bodies. The other
body impacts my body, even when there is no direct touch, because my body is in
constant contacteven if indirectwith other bodies that share and inscribe the space
comprising heres and theres. Thus for Merleau-Ponty, sensing the animacy of the
other means neither that I intuit it directly, nor that I approach it indirectly, through signs
and interpretation. The animacy of the other affects mein fact, effects me, as we shall
see. It is not analogized to my lived-body, but is part and parcel of the living of this lived
body.104
One of the concepts others have offered to replace or modify the traditional view of the
intuitive self has been the notion of ownness. However, that substitution does not add a new
dimension of significance. So Merleau-Ponty disavows it.
Derrida (. . . ) fails to notice (. . . ) Merleau-Pontys prior disavowal of ownness. In fact,
this retreat from ownness, which blossoms in the late work, can already be glimpsed in
the move to intercorporeity described above. For Husserl, appresentation analogized
from my own propriety with respect to my lived body (ownness) to the ownness of the
other. Merleau-Ponty does without this analogy, however, and by putting our bodies into
constant intercorporeal contact, he does away with the ownness that undergirds it as
well. I do not first found an identity with myself through self-touch that I then extend to
the other, the different. Instead, the other always touches me through her
encroachment on a shared space. Conversely, my sense of space, my distinct center
and self (cart), always only emerges through this encroachment. This idea is
developed from the self-other relation to self-relation itself in The Intertwining when
Merleau-Ponty claims that my left hand never actually touches my right hand touching,
that there is always a chiasmatic relation that brings with it an imminence and a near
miss.105
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Flakne concludes her paper with a convincing case that Merleau-Pontys analysis of
chiasm, understood in terms of intercorporeal synaesthesis, is an intertwining whose emergent
product cannot be reduced to intuitionism.
One area that begs to be reviewed would be what difference, if any, the synaesthesic
conceptuality might offer to interpretations of Emerson, both in terms of his views of nature and
his views of ethical relationships to nature and to other persons. Recall Emerson musing,
Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never
touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the
things we aim at and converse with.106
Limited to the conceptuality available at that time, Emerson was honest enough to admit
that the idea of touch as bumping into one another is oversimplified. His essay makes clear
that the prospect of an incorrigible distance between persons left him with an unhappy
dilemma. Flakne proposes that such a dilemma, as also examined by Derrida and MerleauPonty, promises a new avenue for reconstructing ethics.
(W)hen we take into account Merleau-Pontys insistence that the intercorporeal relation
to the other is also chiasmic, we arrive at an illuminating notion of the synaesthetic that
embraces both the self-world (perceptual) and the self-other (ethical) relations, as these
intertwine in the world as an arena for synaesthetic improvisation.107
Our Western tradition has a variety of major competing approaches to ethics. From
Kants deontology through utilitarianism and axiology to modern varieties of situationalism,
elaborate investigations have contributed libraries of persuasive commentaries. In this writers
opinion, all have strengths that are matched by significant conceptual dislocations.
Flakne posits that Merleau-Ponty provides tools for moving beyond the traditional views
of the self. She finds in Merleau-Ponty a firmer ground and opportunity on which to advance.
Certainly it is not yet apparent the extent to which Merleau-Pontys conceptuality may
engender support for any existing ethical system.
Merleau-Pontys work can be read as exposing appresentation as itself a corollary of
intuition, and inviting us to get past both of these by rethinking the body proper through
an expanded notion of synaesthesis as a self-world and self-other relation taking us
beyond a metaphysics of presence and of self-presence, and allowing us to rethink the
relationship between perception and ethics.108
Flakne concludes that we can think and reason productively without reliance on intuition
or on the self as an abstract me or a disembodied memory. Instead the framework of self
arises from contact as a kind of dance, where the space between us continually alters at the
same time it holds firm.
One shift in imagery that might be helpful would be from the notion of the body as a
container of the self109 to the image of the self as an occupation. The concept of vocation
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familiarly combines inside and outside by imagining it as a call that one hears. The transaction
takes the form of interactions. We are what we do in our inescapably shared space.
We need to learn how to talk about personal space without the habitual reference to
inside and outside. Being outside the self, while closer to actuality, is inadequate, since it
relies on the conventional notion of a contained self and is a phrase that has often been used
mistakenly, associated with spooky images.
Immersed works, but only if what we are immersed in has space without a fixed
shape. We speak of the universe as if it had a shape, because that allows us to continue to
employ our vocabulary of locationin space and in time. We are in the universe but that
is an inside that has no center nor outsideat least insofar as we can yet tell.
The philosophical concept that works best is called Being-in-the-world. Its implications
for self-development are that selves need to develop a bigger world and that a bigger world is
a world of increased freedom. We measure ourselves then by how much we are immersed
and how much we are distanced. Something uncontrolled is ever present. In human agency,
it can be called temperament or mood. Emerson believes it is creative.
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CHAPTER 4
EXPERIENCE AS REALITY110
The poetry that begins the segment on reality, we are told, is Emersons adaptation of
words from Sophocles Antigone.111 It poses the question of where to begin. What sort of
reality is it, since nowhere in the essay does he identify comments with reality except as what
is missing or our encounters with sots and bores and death?
Emerson restates Life as a flux of moods, consistent with the essays prevailing
interest in change and in lifes fluctuations (life understood comprehensively as the
succession of all natures objects [phusis] that reside in the world). Reality surely also refers to
Dearest Nature of the essays opening poem, who takes us by the hand to lead us through
our illusions.
Emersons work engages the actual world in the most thoroughgoing sense, aiming no
less intensely than science and realist novel-writing to account for those reliable but
mostly concealed realities that make up the shared world. Certainly Emersons
arguments make use of abstraction and generalizationmany readers mistake this for
evidence of mysticism or airy idealismbut these are means rather than ends, practices
that serve the science of reality.112
The specific pages of Experience selected to represent reality are only a few
paragraphs. Emersons view of reception gives reality its place.
Our thinking is a pious reception, Emerson says in Intellect (CW 2:195), where he
accounts for intellect receptive as a whole range of organizing capabilities, including
perception, spontaneous insight, classification, and that natural-historical process of
detachment by which objects are eviscerated of care and offered for science.113
Brown lists, as synonyms for reality Emerson uses in various essays, Instinct,
spontaneity, God, cause, source, self, life, youth, absolute or supreme nature, force, light
Emerson is always ready to call these real.114 Brown identifies them as beliefs understood by
Emerson as reception because,
All these interchangeable names speak in one way or another for the work of an inner
drive; they seem to apply more specifically to what lies behind acts of perception than to
what lies before us in the objects we perceive. If such names imply an aim or direction
for the enterprise of opening the eye, it lies along the way of what Emerson calls
reception, which entails opening ourselves to things, but with an eye first to what they
provoke from our own secret resources. These are resources of activity and invention,
and are always constructive at least in some provisional way.115
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Emerson contrasts realitys fluctuations with that in us which changes not. Brown
finds evidence of Emersons idiosyncratic use of reality when he points out thatinstead of it
being the conventional synonym for all things, known and unknownit is located as simply
one item in the series that is identified here as the seven elements of Experience.
One would expect reality to appear in contradistinction to these lords of life (or lords of
perception), but Experience lists reality as yet another in their company, cropping up
among them in fragmentary glimpses, indicating itself in surprises and fugitive effects.
As critics have noted, in no other essay does Emersons point of view seem so
thoroughly locked into the terms and limits of empiricism.116
Reality is what happens, as both the rule and the exception.

If reality is all we prize, and if perception holds us off from it even while revealing slight
but sure signs, then perception itself falls into jeopardy. To do so, it is important to
rework the old philosophical anxiety that worries about perception as a more or less
reliable mediator, perhaps an obstacle, in regard to apprehending a separate reality.
While Emerson follows Goethe and Coleridge in affirming the active, creative nature of
perception (as opposed to Lockes passively received impressions), he also accepts
the skeptical rule, implicit in Locke and explicit in Hume, that puts literal reality out of
reach and that instead finds our claims on the real to be based on belief, which inheres
in a certain quality of perceptions. Once this concession is made, we become less
anxious about our objects, real or unreal, than about how well we can manage the deed
of seeing them. And whether as cause or consequence, this deed in turn depends on
how well we can manage to believe in them.117
If Emersons mood is belief as reception, as Brown suggested above, Emersons reality

correlates with his further refinement of belief into a universal impulse. Is that which changes
not belief as mood? Certainly that is empirical.
Emerson characterizes reality as on a sliding scale (. . . from) First Cause to flesh of
his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. He identifies whatever that is by attributing to it
the capacity to rank or order all sensations and states of mind. Emerson names the ordering
capacity simply consciousness, so along with the earlier in us, those restrict it to the human.
Emersons more than life must be some kind of life, presumably elevated above some
other kind of life, only by degreesyet by infinite degrees. Is Emersons appeal here to
something other than finitude? If so, is that not precisely the error in thinking that Kant makes
clear in the Dialectic does not deserve to be taken seriously? At the conclusion of this
segment, an explanation to rebut that will be offered.
Emerson also borrows a distinction that is one of Kants ethical operatives. The dignity
of any deed is decided by, granted by, a sentiment that rules the distinction between the act,
what you have done, and the motive for the act, at whose command it has been done, the
latter being decisive. If that comparison is legitimate, what Emerson calls a sentiment serves
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a purpose similar to what Kant called a regulative principle, whose source, for Kant, is not
empirical but a matter of belief; its reality is that of the noumenon.
Emersons distinction between skepticism and belief, between what we believe and
the universal impulse to believe, between that which changes and what does not, marks a
divide similar to the one Kant draws with the phenomenon-noumenon distinction. For
instance, while our sense of freedom is on the phenomenal side of the divide, the source and
meaning for that freedom isfor Kant, if not perhaps for all of uson the noumenal side with
the thing-in-itself. We cannot know it, but we can think and talk about it.
Emersons sentiments do not teach a particular doctrine, idea, or belief; rather, they
reveal a universal impulse. For instance, the distinction between the ignoble and the
noble, when following the lead of the sentiments, is found in the difference between what we
believe and the universal impulse to believe. Emersons description of the latter as the
material circumstance and the principal fact in the history of the globe locates belief as
reception at the apex; hence, as reality.
Browns description of Emersons struggle, with skepticism as a tension between poles,
gives us insight into the leading of the sentiments:
For Emerson, skeptical moments befall us, as moods do, in the course of our empirical
passages and endeavors. As a matter of course, they generate epistemological doubts
of all sorts, but these doubts arise from within the economics of endeavor rather than as
consequences of some Pyrrhonistic or Cartesian poche. Hence Emerson opposes his
skeptical doubts not to certain knowledge but to belief, which for him appears first as a
quality of engagement, a practical orientation toward the future; only by implication does
it raise issues of certain knowledge. As he points out in Experience, skepticism
records a descent into fragmentary immediacy, whereas belief looks forward to a
prospect of the whole. Both poles of experience, however, work within a larger
compensatory process of life.118
Emerson dismisses all interest in whatever name is given to what he is describing.

Instead he appeals to the example of the heroes of faith who have offered us one or another
symbol for this ineffable cause, for what changes not, identified as this unbounded
substance. His argument is that those heroes are found everywhere in human history, in
every clime and condition. After references to the ancient Greeks, Thales, Anaximenes,
Anaxagoras, and historical religious heroes Zoroaster and Jesus who have supplied various
names for what changes not, he elaborates by reciting an incident attributed to the Chinese
sage Mencius, who chose as the name for the infinite, unbounded and ineffable, this vastflowing vigor in which all entities, human and non-human, share.
Finally, Emerson cites a more correct referent for what changes not as the name of
Being. Classically, that is both terminus a quid and ad quo but, for Emerson, ad quo in the
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sense not of a wall, but at interminable oceans, where it demonstrates the preponderance of
the prospective over the present.
Emerson admits that most of life, to the contrary, demands a payback, a return, a
reward for its performancecash on the barrelhead, as the saying goes, or a cash out as
some philosophers seek. Emerson protests that such is too little to ask of life. He dismisses
those efforts by describing them as merely how we give ourselves away. Most of life finds
the justification to demand such an exchange by claiming human greatness. What, he asks,
is so great about such a limited view?
Here he borrows the term faculty to express his repeated acknowledgement that even
the most extravagant praise of humanity is used to sell ourselves cheap rather than that we
are very great. His reasoning can be compared to Kant whose certainty of moral idealism is
not to be measured by our inevitable moral failures, because the moral law within rises above
actuality.
Brown takes us more deeply and clearly into Emersons examination of reality by
relating it to the problems of illusion.
We manage to rely on reality only by aiming at it. The same optical and critical
distances that hold us in solution with others also hold us apart from reality itself.119
Indeed, the differing qualities of our perceptions of objectssome things seem much
more real than othersteach the very practical lesson that our receptive work depends
on confidence in some further objective or aim. Reception must admit that it relies on
some reality in the world, something that serves as both foundation and ultimate aim.
Our critical constitution by itself is not enough to provide the firm, reliable sense of an
objective.120
(S)o long as we hold fast solely to the instigating power of instinct, cause, self, or youth,
(b)y virtue of such devotion we should always be throwing ourselves ahead of things,
leaving old attachments behind, relying on nothing but the forward transition.(. . . )
Experience takes account of the fact that devotion to source depends on faith in a
destination; and also that, in one sense or another, we need the destination to strike us
as firmly as the source. This reliance has as much to do with our objects as with our
own resources; it learns as much from perception as from instinct.121
Emerson offers as evidenceapplicable to practical results of a different material

circumstancethe fact that results of belief, while sometimes not directly observable, do not
hide the plentiful power and direct effects of the just and righteous impulse, as those make
themselves plain enough eventually.
Is Emerson not insisting, in his appeal to sentiment/mood, that we human beings cannot
be measured or understood adequately by value-free methods? His example is the behavior
of all just persons (emphasis added, and comparable to Kants persons of goodwill) whom
Emerson describes as explained without explaining (. . . ) felt without acting, even in their
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absence. They communicate without speech and above speech. His evidence here is that a
right action has an influence over any distance that might separate one from ones friends.
Ones presence is not required because I exert the same quality of power in all places,
presumably so long as it is just and right.122
Consequently, that context lends itself to evidence for Emerson of the ineffable
understood as cosmic justice. Emersons usual referent for that is compensation or retribution.
Next he makes reference to spirit. While there are other terms that are equivalent in
the essay, here it is preceded by the definitive article the in order to be combined with his
references to organs . . . powers and direct effects. His context is that of power at a distance
in interpersonal relationships where the covert is sufficient in the absence of the overt, across
time and space. The covert, as in the example of silence, is ordinarily overcome by finding an
accounting in subsequent activity, and the overt, as in examples of absence, likewise. Both
have consequences associated with a kind of presence, especially among friends and
acquaintances, even at a distance. He goes so far as to equate personal absence and
presence as having the same quality of power in all places.
Emerson saw the most moving of these lusters in other people, but they only led him on,
like his own best thoughts, along the way of further and better work: Thus journeys the
mighty Ideal before us; it was never known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an
experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!
(CW 3:43).
To find these words encouraging, we have to imagine ourselves engaged in a curious
sort of pursuit, less like quests for a Grail or a golden fleece than like the questionable
progress of the self-propelling contraption pictured when we speak of hitching our wagon
to a star or hoisting ourselves by our bootstraps. The onward trick of reality gets
exposed in Experience as a kind of remote pulley or come-along, not pristinely
separate but somehow extending from us, and hence journeying before us, and along
with us, as part of the instrumental process by which we advance through one
perception to the next.123
Reality as Being and in combination with succession, understood as the leadership of

an Ideal such as justice or compensation, turns prospects into the possibility of a new picture
of life and duty. Cavell develops that into his characterization of Emersons theory of moral
perfectionism.124 Because the as yet unrealized doctrine of life transcends any written
record, it can combine both skepticism and the faiths of society to produce a philosophy that
can render skepticism into affirmative statements both from themselves and from the oldest
beliefs. So human freedom affirms the possibility to win/overcome antagonisms by
surpassing skepticism.
That impulse also includes readiness for what is new, so new that Emerson proposes
that a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have already exist(s) in the
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many minds around you. It will use all of what has been, the good, the bad, the ugly, but
especially the rule of justice, and with a new philosophy, turn limitations into affirmations of
possibility.
With this point I come to the reason why Experience dwells on the word reality, with
all its designations of an objective, believed-in world, rather than on any of Emersons
more wonted terms of instinct and reception. Experience explores our need to engage
just the power that all those receptive terms name, but with the vitally added sense of an
objective or practical purpose. This can only be suggested in the form of what empirical
life most distinctly offers us: objects. In other words, Experience essays our reliance
on an objective, our need not only to open ourselves to reality, but to close with it. To do
this, the essay does not need to probe beyond the empirical format of reception; instead
it probes into the foundations assumed by reception.125
Emersons Principle of Compensation

Brown poses his interpretation of Emersons notion of realityhis earlier reference to
that reality in terms of perceptions capacity to compensateby recalling Emersons personal
experience of the exponential human price to be paid for the gift of life, since in order to gain
one must be prepared to lose. Emerson only mentions his sons death in this essay, but he
also lost two brothers to disease and his first wife to childbirth. Browns point is that Emerson
knows well from his own experience that a cost is to be paid for lucidity in our receptive
practices, but that the price is well worth it.
The compensatory equation is too perfectly balanced to account for the fact that reality
remains an aim beyond both the objects seen and the costs absorbed, while still
somehow consisting intimately in the work of seeing. As Emerson elsewhere protests,
The soul is not a compensation, but a life (CW 2:70). Something vitally important
seems left over in Emersons naming of that reality, for contact with which we would
even pay the costy price of sons and lovers. The phrase stumps us. What is it that
drives Emerson, in a passage treating the death of his son, to reaffirm an offer the
nature of experience proves to be starkly gratuitous? Like similar passages in Nature,
Compensation, and Circles, this moment from Experience documents the fact that
Emerson has paid just such costly prices in full measure, regardless of his willingness to
do so. There is something extra in his offer to pay again what he already pays,
something unaccountable in regard to either costs or benefits.
We can only suspect that this extraordinary offer makes up Emersons strongest address
to reality; for realitys intimate remoteness corresponds to what seems the
gratuitousness or grace of his offer to pay costly prices all over again. As if in
spontaneous but distant communication with reality, the painful offer orients us toward
the future, which is also something extra beyond the full ledger of present perception.
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective, the essay declares at one point,
not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor (CW
SA2).
Emersons earnest offer to pay again what he has already paidan offer he makes in
writing, which is also something exceptional in regard to ordinary experienceprepares
the ground of reality that will give rise to new perception. This may not give him title to
reality, but it gives him a vital stake in itin other words, a stake in the future.126
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Browns distinction between the polarity of cost and payment plus something extra
beyond can be understood if one thinks of the totality of human experience as represented in
part by one conceptual framework and in part by a different, incommensurable conceptual
frameworkrealitys intimate remoteness. That the different frameworks are
incommensurable suggests there must be a competition for truth between descriptions framed
one way and those framed the other.
Donald Davidson employs such a pluralistic conceptualization to relate the cause-effect
world of natural science and the fact of human freedom. To allow for the freedom of human
thought, one must go beyond the confines of explanations by the physical sciences, yet
without perpetuating a mind/body dualism. In Mental Events he concludes the exposition of
his own view of anomalous monism in these words:
Mental events as a class cannot be explained by physical science; particular mental
events can when we know particular identities. But the explanations of mental events in
which we are typically interested relate them to other mental events and conditions. We
explain a mans free actions, for example, by appeal to his desires, habits, knowledge
and perceptions. Such accounts of intentional behaviour operate in a conceptual
framework removed from the direct reach of physical law by describing both cause and
effect, reason and action, as aspects of a portrait of a human agent. The anomalism of
the mental is thus a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.
I conclude with a second passage from Kant: It is an indispensable problem of
speculative philosophy to show that its illusion respecting the contradiction rests on this,
that we think of man in a different sense and relation when we call him free, and when
we regard him as subject to the laws of nature. It must therefore show that not only can
both of these very well co-exist, but that both must be thought as necessarily united in
the same subject.127
Emerson includes in his exposition of Experience both what changes and what does
not change. But how? They are incommensurable frameworks rather than polarities.
Heraclitus saw that with his concept of polemos, which he described through the image of a
struggle, a war. We find an updated version of that in Nietzsches philosophy of the eternal
return. It now finds a contemporary philosophical expression in the anomalous monism of
Davidson. The extent to which that is a continuous theme, back through Emerson and back to
Heraclitus, is a continuing research task for Western thought.
If experience is of what happens, and if reality, as interpreted by Emerson, is one
element, and just one, of what makes things happen, then human freedom as expressed in
belief is also an element that makes things happen. Neither what changes nor what does not
change is unconditional. The unconditional is counterintuitive but perhaps that can be taken
as evidence of its significance, since the arguments over our meanderings in illusion are wellsettled agreement now. If that is a monism, it is such only negatively.
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The 20th Century commentators relied on here are still struggling with versions of the
same issues that Emerson struggled with 150 years earlier. They want us to get beyond the
one-dimensional view that our only options are either reality that is all materialmatter in
motionor the dualistic view that reality is mind/bodymatter infused with immortal substance
of some kind.
In this part of the essay, Emerson writes, it is not what we believe concerning the
immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material
circumstance(. . . ). Not immortal? And impulse to believe is a material circumstance? I
take that as both a clear denial of the options of dualism and materialism while still holding out
for material circumstance. How do you pull that off?
One way is with Davidsons anomalous monisma monism that requires two separate
systems of conceptualization that are applicable in a single locationthe free human being.
We are both material and believers.
In sum, we are just beginning to learn to talk about how humans are both matter in
motion (which is not free according to physics; it is bound by law) and spontaneously free,
unpredictable. We cannot do it yet with a single conceptual system. We are stuck with
dilemmas. Emerson wrestled with them, too, back in his day. Freedom to believe is found in
anticipation and expectation.
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CHAPTER 5
EXPERIENCE AS SUBJECTIVENESS128
The portion of Emersons text identified with his theme of subjectiveness begins the
segment with the words It is very unhappy and ends with the words just three paragraphs
later his divine destiny.
While this reader finds this portion among the most entertaining in Experience, space
only allows a discussion of the elements that bear most directly on Emersons philosophical
interests. His opening line, with the statement, It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,
the discovery we have made that we exist, signals readers that we are about to be exposed to
what Cavell earlier referred to as Emersons stylistic treacherousness, much like Thoreaus.
Both rely on figures of speech. Is that only because they wish to stir the attention of the
readers? Or is it also because they must tease in order to say what they have to say?
In the following comment by Cavell, some of the difficulties of Emersons relationship to
Kants search for certain knowledge become evident:
I believe Emerson may encourage the idea of himself as a solipsist or subjectivist, for
example, in such a remark, late in the same essay, as Thus inevitably does the
universe wear our color. But whether you take this to be subjective or objective
depends upon whether you take the successive colors or moods of the universe to be
subjective or objective.129
Cavell offers there both insight into and a demonstration of Emersons methodology.
The subjective/objective options apply equally to investigations of the investigator, as well as
what is investigated. How you take things depends on, well, how you take thingswhatever
that means, and it is taken here to mean one must read the whole segment in context. The
implication is that even Kant, despite his rigor in maintaining strict regard for empirical
confirmation, is likewise liable to suspicions of solipsism.
The Kantian ring of the idea of the universe as inevitably wearing our color implies that
the way specifically Kant understands the generation of the universe keeps it solipsistic,
still something partial, something of our, of my, making.130
Kant labored to avoid solipsism, clarifying the relations between subject and predicate
by declaring that existence cannot be a predicate. Cavell argues that, rather than pitting
himself against Kant, Emerson resolves the issue in terms of a partiality.
My claim is that Emerson is out to destroy the ground on which such a problem takes
itself seriously, I mean interprets itself as a metaphysical fixture. The universe is as
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separate from me, but as intimately part of me, as one on whose behalf I contest, and
who therefore bears the color I wear. We are in a state of romance with the universe
(to use a word from the last sentence of the essay); we do not possess it, but our life is
to return to it, to respond to its contesting for my attention, in ever-widening circles,
onward and onward, but with as directed a goal as any quest can have; in the present
case, until the soul attains her due sphericity. Until then, encircled, straitened, you can
say the soul is solipsistic; surely it is, to use another critical term of Emersons, partial.
This no doubt implies that we do not have a universe as it is in itself. But this implication
is nothing: we do not have selves in themselves either [emphasis added]. The universe
is what constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions. It is what can be all the
ways we know it to be, which is to say, all the ways we can be. In Circles we are told:
Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That
central life . . . contains all its circles. The universe contains all the colors it wears.
That it can wear no more than I can give is a fact of what Emerson calls my poverty.131
The mutuality of belief and doubt focus Emersons attention. They are woven together
so tightly that it is difficult to sort them out. The interdependence compares to what Husserl,
later, will refer to as Bedeutung or Sinn, which translate most readily into the English word
meaning. For Husserl meaning approaches the same level as Kants a priori; however,
Husserl names its source eidos in order to make clear that meaning refers to an immediately
given structured experience. It is a structure of internal relations of subject engaged in a
world.132
Emerson writes,
We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means
of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the
amount of their errors. (. . . )Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the
eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding minds eye which makes this or that man
a type or representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint.133
Earlier Emersons comments on illusion were paired with Kants parallel views of
perception as permitting only appearances. Here, however, Emerson and Kant are in tension,
not because they are far apart but because they are still close together. However, the small
step makes a big difference, as Cavell writes elsewhere,
While the idea of the noumenal plays a role in what I understand as Emersonian
Perfection (as when in Experience Emerson breaks into his thoughts by saying I know
that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think), and is
related to an idea expressed as being true (or false) to oneself, I assume no role for the
idea of a true (or a false) self. (. . . ) Nor, in a similar domain, will I appeal in what follows
to an idea of a duty to oneself.(. . . )
The knowledge Emerson expresses of the non-identity of the world he converses with
and the world he thinks is an expression of what I called a while ago his picture of the
doubleness of the self. This expression of doubleness, part of Emersons continuing
interpretation of Kants interpretation of the human as the capacity to take two
standpoints toward itself, can, I hope, serve to show the idea of what I will be calling the
next (or further) self.(. . . )
The reflexiveness of the self registers a fact of selfhood, of the human, for which I
assume any view of the self will have, or want, an account. The doubleness in Kants
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two standpoints, or two worlds, that the human takes upon itself, or lives in, is, I think,
understandable as a projection of reflexiveness. The intelligible world would be the
scene of human activeness, the sensuous world that of human passiveness. Then
Kants moral imperative, his ought, which the doubleness of human habitation is meant
to explain, or picture, is also an explanation, or shows the place for one, of the selfs
identity, that it is the same self that is active and passive (if the one who knows and the
one who is known were not one [one what?], what would self-knowledge be [of]?). My
reading of Emerson takes him, however else, as looking everywhere to inherit Kants
insight without his architectonic (. . . ) and so without Kants fixed differences between
the intelligible and the sensuous realms, between the imposition of the categories and
the reception of their intuitionsdepartures from Kant that will require Emerson to find
freedom and knowledge as much in the passive (patience, passion) as in the active
dimensions of selfhood.134
Emersons familiar metaphor of the great eyeball does not help to distinguish active and
passive. We know, from the laboratory work with the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) for
instance, that the eye sees only what it recognizes. We can name aspects of an ink blot only
with the names we already know. Is that passive or active? Are not inkblots deliberately
created to minimize their intrinsic resemblances? Yet do not the experimenters select the
ones to use in laboratory work that have demonstrated to be most actively provocative? The
line between active and passive is as thin as Freuds reaction formation or passive
aggressiveness.135 Yet the question remains whether blurring the line augments
intelligibility.136
Self-Object as Self-Subject as Self-Subject/Object137
Emerson observes that ones own interests are not easily supplanted, even by
friendship and love. However, reducing the activity of self and consciousness to a vacuum of
subjectiveness leaves one to wonder why Emerson would bother or to whom the following is
addressed.
The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence
and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. (. . . )Life will be imaged, but
cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not
twin-born but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in
appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act
betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves as we do not believe in
others.138
Emersons struggles, as he must realize, become a dialogue the minute they are put
down on paper. They are not soliloquy. The illustrations of isolation, much like the proverbial
message in a bottle, presuppose an acknowledgement of the reciprocal implication of subject
and object. Cavell, as mentioned above, explained how the traditional mistake, of treating
Emerson as a simple mystical poet of nature, whom critics sometimes identify with solipsism,
then misses Emersons repeated and deliberate interest in the empirical world. We are fated,
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as an iniquity not unlike the Fall of Man, to obey not only the limits of knowledge but the
necessary condition of knowledge as always addressed, even when to one unknown. It may
not be sufficient knowledge unto certainty, nor is it solipsism.
One fable not to be missed in this segment is where Emerson asks us to consider the
cat playing with its own tail. Recall his comment about our condition being such that we are a
party to our own estate and Strawsons comparison of the conditions of the sighted person
with one who is blind.
The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects on
which it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same
extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so
prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with
hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long
conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,and meantime it is only
puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines,
laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject and
an object,it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds
nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere, Columbus and America, a
reader and his book, or puss with her tail?139
Do we, simultaneously, both believe in ourselves and not believe in others?140 Emerson
admits the possibility but only by analogy.141 He complies with Kants admonition about the
unavailability of the thing-in-itself and Kants need to stand off from the self in order to have a
self. As with things, Emerson celebrates and regrets the distance that keeps persons
unreachable when we reach. A romantic congruence of souls is impossible, yet the very
distance that necessarily separates us from each other contributes to human community via
conspiracy.
Brown finds a key to understanding Experience in the tension between two conflicting
Emerson beliefs.
(At issue is) the final separation of these two beliefsour real belief in others and belief
in our own real ends. In Experience, the fact that these two beliefs first do and then
finally do not coincide makes for an account balanced between extreme hope and
extreme despair, the contest of which generates the special experiment of the essay.142
Emerson was frustrated with our illusions. They prevent us from determining
conclusively the nature of objects, so that is the most unhandsome aspect of our existence.
But the otherness of things contributes to an appreciation, via compensation, of the whole of
things to which we belong. Emerson sees a parallel there to personal relationships in human
society. Cavell extends Kants conception of the self to society, when he writes,
The idea of the self must be such that it can contain, let us say, an intuition of partial
compliance with its idea of itself, hence of distance from itself, space for consciousness
of itself, or of consciousness denied. The companion concept of society is such that
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partial compliance with its principles of justice is not necessarily a distancing of oneself
from it, but may present itself as a sense of compromise by it or conspiracy with it.143
Emerson commented earlier that science teaches us about the infinite spaces that exist
in any material object, which are required for it to exist as an object. So also, explains Brown,
the solitariness of the individual builds human community.
Emerson holds that we realize the shared world in moments of vision that are, by nature,
critical. Out of skepticisms discipline, we glimpse the plain foundations of common life.
Any more elaborate structures lie only in prospect. There is a major paradox here, since
our hopes for community, and for communication, rely on our success in taking
exception to every established proposal of community:
(T)he one thing we have in common (is) that we are all bound by criticisms necessity.
This is a costly condition, for it will always separate us as much as it joins us.144
Brown draws attention to the metaphor of rocks in order to praise Emersons contention
that our perceptual poverty is actually a prized possession.
A diamond is nothing but infinite space if we forget that it is also a rock, and that as a
rock it still stands for the obstacles and efforts we all endure alone. The diamonds stony
nature communicates our common circumstances more heartily than the clear
propositions of its facets, which are only proposed out of the original discipline. This is
the sense of the famous passage about rocks and poverty in Experience, which may
be Emersons strongest single statement of his poetics (. . . ): And we cannot say too
little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated
with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes
in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however
scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess
our axis more firmly (CW 3:46).145
The treachery of cannot say too little exposes Emersons essence: in order to celebrate our
personal worth, he tells us not to take ourselves seriously.
Then Emerson translates self-reliance into a model for holding others to a similar selfdiscipline that eventuates in self-respect.
The life of truth is cold and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions and
perturbations. It does not attempt anothers work, nor adopt anothers facts. It is a main
lesson of wisdom to know your own from anothers. I have learned that I cannot dispose
of other peoples facts; but I possess such a key to my own as persuades me, against all
their denials, that they also have a key to theirs.146
Emersons high regard for individualism threatens him with solipsism, especially when
he parades his estimate of the no less than divine nature of ones own being as our illconcealed deity. Emerson may look like a solipsist, but he is not such, as indicated by
Cavells remark above, we do not have selves in themselves either.147 Individual
relationships are different from our relationship to things, even while the other person remains
an object, over against a subject whose priority is invincible. Emerson writes,
There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as between the original and the
picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two
human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in
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contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and
the longer a particular union lasts the more energy of appetency the parts not in union
acquire.148
Taking Emerson at his word earlier, where he declares himself intent most to be honest
in this essay, here we find him reaching for authenticity. It arrives in the delicate but dynamic
balance that he exposes of the relationship of person to person as less real than of person to
universe, the bride of the soul. He adds the necessary qualification that what might be
denied or goes unrecognized has a turn that must also come. The ultimate test for Emerson,
as for empiricism, is the practical result, or as he would have learned during his years as a
clergyman, By their fruits you shall know them. The evidence is the fruit.
In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides.
This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be
able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer
to the importunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim which makes their
wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts.149
Brown locates an impetus to community in the motive of taking exception and being
critical:
For Emerson, community, like communication, is something achieved in the original
actions of individuals. Such action requires rejecting or taking exception to
preestablished conventionstaking the way from man, not to man. It also requires
building a new orientation in regard to new exceptions taken. Hence criticism is a
necessary part of community, just as opening and focusing the eye are necessary for
fresh vision.
Because they are excessive, because they take exception, the moments when we
realize the common world are moments when we are most respectful of distance, of the
critical distance that unites us even as it keeps us apart.
Emerson celebrates the critical distance or repellency that obtains between persons,
since it attests, on one side, to the constitutional independence of character and, on the
other, to a dynamic and provocative medium for communication. But Emerson also
holds that communication draws its power to provoke from its address to real
foundations in the common world. Our action should rest mathematically on our
substance, he says in Character. It is only on reality, that any power of action can be
based (CW 3:59).150
On the Whole of Things

The argument that follows, based on Strawsons analysis of Kant, is reduced to its
elements. It may be helpful initially to oversimplify even that, in non-philosophical terms; to wit:
We do not have certain knowledge of the whole of things, because we have no way to
separate ourselves from it. Kant only allows us to talk about the whole of things; he dismisses
claims to knowledge of it. Strawson distinguishes his position from Kants conception of the
noumenal when Strawson insists that it can be a legitimate kind of knowledge only if we have
something empirical attached to our talking about it. Flaknes analysis of synaesthesis can be
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interpreted to allow that we get such empirical evidence of a larger whole in touch. That is, we
can never find a place where something is not touching us, and we it. Since it cannot be
avoided or escaped, we have empirical evidence of something in which we are immersed.
When it comes to information about what it is that we are immersed in, Strawson tells us we
must let science decide. If we do that, he accepts such talk. If science accepts Cavells
warning to be very careful what it is you understand by experience, such talk can open to
fresh insights.
Emerson finds the whole of nature in every part of nature; such essential indivisibility is
the meaning of Nature with a capital N.151 In addition, a whole describes our sense of self
that is, we can recognize a whole because we, ourselves, are indivisible, are wholes.
Yet as Strawson shows, Kant found it necessary to dismiss the concept of the whole of
things. For him, the whole of things is a misconception that enables the erroneous framework
of the transcendent, which he carefully exposes as an impossibility. Appeal to the
transcendent mistakenly avoids, by its exclusive reliance on reason, the inescapable mutuality
of intuitions and understanding dependent on limits. So it can never get beyond a half truth.
The whole of thingsif understood conventionally, in terms of the universe, or total and
complete existence, or all realitydoes not work when thought of as an object projected to the
ultimate or highest degree. Nor can any other item or system of inclusiveness, as may happen
to appeal to us, work. Such a whole has no empirical referent, when we belong to it, either as
a part, or an element, or a feature, or a condition. Without an empirical referent, a thought is
empty. The full truth is better approximated only through Kants discipline of transcendental
idealism.
What if, rather than representing the whole of things, we look to languages capacity to
show us the whole of things not as an object, as the natural sciences might try to do, nor as a
subject, as classical metaphysics and religious mysticism might try to do? For the whole of
things, the best that language can give us is a picture of something we know we can talk about
but never know, as such. That is to say, the whole of things can never be a thing-in-itself, an
item of knowledge. Yet that does not mean the whole of things is beyond our capacity to talk
about it. Surprisingly, it need not be restricted to Kants noumenal either. In his summation of
Kants first Critique, P. F. Strawson provides insights that apply.
Strawsons Summary of Kants Dialectic
In summary of Kants argument for the use and interests of theoretical reason in the
Dialectic, Strawson discusses the relationships between Kants five main ideas.
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[1] The ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific explanation.152

This is the way Kant envisions the scientific enterprise, and it guides his own project. It
remains an ideal, because it proposes a goal that can never be completed. Research requires
constant revision of theory. The openness of theory is driven at the same time by the pursuit
of systematic unity.
[2] The concept of empirically unconditioned or non-contingent existence.153
Strawson explains this concept to be about something outside the framework of causal
dependence. Nothing extraneous is temporally prior to it or simultaneous, and nothing
causally necessary conditions its existence. He points out that Kants expression necessary
existence is used interchangeably with unconditioned or empirically non-contingent
existence but is not to be confused with Kants treatment of necessity in existence(. . . )in the
Postulates of Empirical Thought.154 Similarly, Kant specifically rejects a formal or logical
necessity to existence (see [5] below) determinable by reason.
[3] The conception of a transcendental, non-sensible ground of all sensible appearances.155
This summarizes one way of expressing the consequence of Kants doctrines of
transcendental idealism referred to as the noumenal.
[4] The idea of unitary divine purposive intelligence and power.156
Strawson requires the attribution of this idea to Kant at this point for the purpose of
accounting for Kants use of it later in his moral philosophy and how that has implications for
understanding the other ideas in this list.
[5] The idea of absolutely necessary existence.157
This is an illusion of metaphysics, although not a demand of reason. Strawson
summarizes this illusion as of something, not itself a concept, of which the existence is
logically guaranteed by the concept under which it falls; e.g., all men are mortal.
Reasons IllusionsThe Unconditioned
Strawsons analysis of the general structure of the Dialectic rests on his characterization
of violations to what he calls the principle of significance. That principle, derived from and
implemented throughout by Kant, requires propositional concepts to be tied to a possible
sensible intuition, the empirical conditions of the concepts application.158
Such violations are likely to come either from a) formal or categorical concepts or b)
addressing things as if they can be taken in-themselves. In other words, reasons illusions,
as Kant calls them, are systematic and necessary because they obey logics structure as much
as do the non-illusory necessities of non-transcendent metaphysics.159 It is reasons
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demand for the unconditioned,160 Kant says, that imposes completeness in the conditions
under which the objects are given.161
To understand what Kant signifies by the unconditioned, it can be compared with what
he means by conditioned. Strawson tells us that Kant offers the natural dialectic of human
reason162 by using examples of human inquiry moving in stages to reach, for example, either
to the cosmological or to the sub-atomic arenas, either out to more extensive and remote
spaces and times or into more intensive refinements of the composition of matter. These
become serial inquiries, proceeding by taking one step at a time in the direction of
inclusiveness or exclusiveness, respectively.
Any such series of inquiry, when it reaches some answer, produces a condition, where
that which the question is asked about is said to be conditioned by what is mentioned in the
answer to it.163 Strawson cautions that no significance be read into condition beyond this
mechanistic linkage. Conditions are simply a way of speaking in general about these different
types of serial inquiry.164
A SeriesAs Either a Collection or AggregateIs Not a Whole
The typical relation of the items in a series of objects is either spatial or temporal. Here
is where an inevitable problem arises, since according to Kant, the series and its system of
relationships then can be mistakenly thought of as a whole. The whole can be thought to
belong to the series, although still something other than the individual members, and,
therefore, unconditioned by any member of the series.
This is the idea of the absolutely unconditioned; and metaphysical illusion arises from
assuming, in each type of case, that there must be something answering to this idea.
This unconditioned something is necessarily conceived in one of two ways.165
Either it is conceived 1) as the ground of explanation for the series and, therefore, a kind of
ultimate member of a series of conditioned things, different in the sense that it is neither
possible nor necessary to describe it; (e.g., the outer limits of space or the ultimate elementary
particle); or 2) as the unconditioned totality of an infinite series all of whose members are
conditioned166 (e.g., all whole numbers or a totality of points that makes a straight line).
Neither of those concepts of a whole, as ground or as totality (while they can, to be
sure, be talked about) apply in any concrete fashion; neither is available to experience. We
habitually assume, because we can talk about something, that means at least we should be
able to make a determination whether it exists or it does not exist. One of those options must
surely be a possible result that can be reached; that is only logical, right? Wrong.
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If we could talk significantly about objects without considering them as objects of

possible experiencewithout in general considering the conditions of intuition or
awareness of themit would be perfectly legitimate to insist on the disjunction in each
case. But we may not; and it is not.167
For any series, it seems there either would be or would not be some final term. (If not,
then the series must be an infinite totality.) Either yes or no, the final term would allow us to
describe the series as a whole. Yet all talk of objects that are not objects of possible
experience is empty; hence talk of such objects having a final term is empty. That is
Strawsons principle of significance derived from Kants transcendental idealism. Assertion of
possibility does not measure up to or satisfy the requirements of empirical validity, nor need it
wander in the dreamland of fantasy.
Such a refutation only works with the first two Antinomies and, in fact, is not the solution
Kant finally relies on. When we are led by reason and its demand for the unconditional only by
an appeal to each relevant series as a whole, whether finite or infinite, and even when that
concluded to reveal the character of absoluteness or ultimacy, such ideas are transcendent
of any possible experience. Kant employs such an infinite alternative only as a directive or
regulative idea168 which can never be empirically demonstrated.
It is true, in some cases, that such a formula is consistent with metaphysical illusion.
Concepts can be used legitimately and significantly without in fact specifying any conditions
for their application when so employed.169 For example, seeking greater generality looks like
just a normal search for more comprehensive premises or principles of reasoning, or if
borrowing analogies to scientific thinking, as in cosmology, it just looks to more remote regions
of space and past time or, if as in atomic physics, inquires more minutely into the composition
of matter). So serial inquiry is as natural as the child continually asking why? and then what?
That is just Kants demand of reason in practice.170
But care must be taken to recognize that serial inquiry happens, essentially, only
because any one thing always is conditioned by another. It is just the way of the world.
Rather than evidence of the unconditioned, it is simply more evidence of the conditioned.
Each answer conditions whatever was being asked about. Beyond that it is no more than just
how we do that kind of inquiry, how we investigate.
The problem generated by such serial inquiry happens when we form the idea of the
series of such items as a whole.171 That makes us think that we now have a new item, the
whole, not conditioned by, and a part of, the series but absolutely unconditioned and as such
representing this (whatever it is) idea. The unsophisticated version, as an ultimate member of
the series, conceives, for instance, the limits of space as beyond all else and beyond which
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there is nothing more, or the first beginning in time, or the ultimate particles of matter. Since
none of these is explainable, we jump to the conclusion that it must be the ground of
explanation. A more sophisticated version is, rather than a member of a series, it is the
totality of an infinite series. Yet no possible experience or sensible intuition could warrant
the application of either type of concept.172
Author of Nature
Kant characterizes the demand of reason as pursuit of the unconditioned and finds that
it has a definite sense (characterized by inevitability, absoluteness, transcendence, and
regulative utility173) especially in the cosmological field. Also Kants demand of reason for the
unconditioned exploits all the metaphysical ideas.174 Actually his detailed account ignores the
demand of reason as proposed for rational psychology and cosmology. It applies more
adequately to speculative theology, but even there it is not a matter of an inevitable
compulsion of reason but as simply descriptive of the existing tradition.
However, if an account of God adds notions of absolute and ultimate, this basis is
inadequate to sustain the idea of God.175 Kants identification of a coherence between the
ideal of scientific unity and divine unity, while it is advocated by some theologians to this day,
is not, or is no longer, welcomed by all practitioners of scientific pursuits.
The situation cannot be saved by erecting the pursuit of systematic unity in science into
a logically sufficient condition of thinking of the natural order as if it were ordained by a
divine intelligence outside the world.176
Some modern theologians adopt such a position. But Strawson asks, If the two are identified,
a unified science and a divine author of nature, what is lost when limited simply to affirming the
unity of science? Logically, at least, it appears nothing changes.
Kant does exclude absolutely necessary existence, as well as divinity, from the
demands of reason. But Strawson finds that the balance Kant seeks (that is, equating the goal
of scientific completeness as finally and fully explanatory to the affirmation of independent noncausal existence) uses sciences pursuit for the purpose of an appeal to a divinely established
world order.
The absorption of [the concept of empirically unconditioned or non-contingent existence]
by [the ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific explanation] has at least
the merit of resolving these tensions. From Kants point of view it may have a greater
merit. For perhaps it is just the conflation of the ideas of the non-dependently existent
and of the finally explanatory which gives what plausibility it possesses to the doctrine
that the pursuit of [the latter of the two] is necessarily bound up with the thought of some
extra-mundane intelligent source of the order of the world.177
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What if the ideal of scientific completeness is considered an unattainable regulative idea

only? That conflicts with Kants insistence that the empirically unconditioned is not formally
reducible to a regulatory ideal.178
Strawsons outline of Kants five main ideas weaves a web where one idea cannot be
explained without including the others. In summary, Strawson argues that Kants necessary
existence, as well as unconditioned or empirically non-contingent existence, cannot stand
apart from the ideal of fully complete scientific explanation. That reverses the direction Kant
followed, because he uses those two to move from necessary existence to the temptations of
absolutely necessary existence, which can be thought of as analogous to Kants description of
the presumed divine. For Kant, however, such claims, to knowledge of transcendental or
divine items, are not warranted. Lacking warranted knowledge, thought attempts a leap to
absolutely necessary existence in order then to stake a valid claim to knowledge.
Kants resolution of the tensions between the five main ideas, Strawson concedes, is
not without elegance.179 Kant does not require inferences forbidden by critical principles,
reason finds a proper place, as is also true of transcendental idealism, knowledge is carefully
limited, and faith can be accommodated. For Strawson, however, all is not well.
A Framework of Substance
Coordinate with the focus on a series, Strawson draws attention to the argument of the
first Analogy where Kant identified as a
necessary condition (. . . ) a permanent framework of substance, or of substances, which
retain their identity through all those alterations of the determinations which constitute
or underlie the changing states of the world.
[But the Analogies shows only] the necessity of an abiding framework of spatial things,
of which no individual member or constituent need be conceived of as permanent.
For if it is only the abiding framework of spatial things which is permanent, and if, by
the relevant part of the doctrine of transcendental idealism, however interpreted, it is
false that the set or series of individuals which constitute that framework exists as a
whole, then we may conclude that neither the set as a whole (for there is no such thing)
nor any of its members has non-contingent existence. Thus we reconcile the doctrine
that the existence of matter in general is non-contingent with the doctrine that nothing in
the field of appearances has unconditioned existence. But we must remember that this
feat is made possible only by the repudiation of the official view of substance set out in
the Analogies. 180
In the Analytic, Kant insists that permanent substances, meaning something which can neither
come into, nor go out of, existence,181 are distinct from mere formal or logical necessity.
Formal necessity was the kind of existence Kant dismissed in his refutation of the ontological
argument, where the argument for a first cause as a coherent extension of causal
connectedness does not prove that permanent substance is necessary substance.
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A claim for permanent substance turns out to require, instead, a claim for noncontingent existents. Strawson agrees with Kants conclusion but questions his reasoning.
Kant rejects non-contingent existents for two reasons. First, because the non-existence of
matter is thinkable without contradiction. Strawson asks if that is different from the claim for
absolutely necessary existence, which Kant rightly condemns as a perversion of reason.
Again, all difference disappears.
Strawson describes Kants second reason as posing a problem when Kant claims the
non-contingent existence of matter would end the free operation of the regulative principle of
scientific inquiry, by setting a limit. Strawson counters that such would only be the case if,
rather than posing the problem (is there non-contingent existence of matter?) it were somehow
an answer to that problem. But it is not. Strawson writes,
If this point itself is made a reason for rejecting the claimants claim to answer to [the
ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific explanation], then the disputed
conflation of the two ideas of the non-dependently existent and the finally explanatory is
simply being re-affirmed.
The above is an internal criticism, framed in Kants own terms, and perfectly compatible
with the acceptance of transcendental idealism. It could be met either by simply
separating the conflated ideas and acknowledging the claimants claim or by modifying
the doctrine of the necessary permanence of substance.182
Strawsons criticism here, he admits, could be met by accepting it and either separating the
conflated ideas or restricting permanent to the concept of a spatial framework. Neither of
those requires the sacrifice of transcendental idealism.
But separating the ideas would require a sacrifice. For then whatever link is understood
to exist between [the ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific explanation] and
[the idea of unitary divine purposive intelligence and power] could no longer depend on the
conflation of [the concept of empirically unconditioned or non-contingent existence] with [the
ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific explanation]. Kant already
acknowledges that the link of [the ideal of completeness and systematic unity in scientific
explanation] and [the idea of unitary divine purposive intelligence and power] cannot owe
anything to [the conception of a transcendental, non-sensible ground of all sensible
appearances] alone, because [the idea of absolutely necessary existence] is only part of the
doctrine of transcendental idealism.183 Not even Kant can have his cake and eat it, too.
Strawsons Alternative Analysis of the Noumenal
At this point, Kants five main ideas are reduced to the first two, without conflating those
two.
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Once transcendental idealism has been laid aside, there is no obstacle to accepting
Nature or the world-whole itselfempirically unconditioned existence, all-embracing
realityas the object of such an attitude. How could inquiring human reason find a
more appropriate object for its admiring and humbly emulative devotion than that which
is at once the inexhaustible topic of its questions and the source of its endlessly
provisional answers? For human reason itself is part of Nature. In a few paragraphs
towards the end of the Dialectic Kant seems even to show some sympathy with this
conception, or with a part of it; though any fully developed view of this kind, such as
Spinozas, would certainly be alien to his thought and perhaps morally repulsive to
him.184
The separation of the two main ideas is provided by the assumption that every
particular existent in the world may be empirically contingent, and yet the world as a whole
cannot be, for there is nothing for it to be dependent upon.185 The empirically unconditioned or
non-contingent escapes conditions. Again, empirically non-contingent existence provides no
term to investigation, but only its topic.186 So Kants necessary existence does not lend itself
to investigation or as a hypothesis capable of experimental demonstration.
Strawson, in other words, finds no need for an alternative to on-going scientific inquiry,
while insisting that any claim to content for [the concept of empirically unconditioned or noncontingent existence], if assumed to apply to particular existents, has only such content as the
advance of empirical discovery may, at least provisionally, confer upon it.187
It is not yet clear to this writer that Strawsons willingness to identify Nature as the
world-whole itself is completely congruent with Emersons appeals to Nature. It also is not yet
clear that it is contradictory.
That is, Nature need not even be the [3] ground of all sensible appearances; although
such a ground is what Kant is at pains to establish in the first Critique. Nor is Nature the
classic [4] idea of the divinetake your pick among all the options: theism, deism, pantheism,
etc.; Strawson generalizes all of them to unitary divine purposive intelligence and power. Nor
is Nature found as an abstraction in verbal or geometric formulae. Is something, whose
existence can be claimed because it can be talked about, or defined, or described, or pointed
to, real enough? Or if logically derived just gotta be? Not so, since Lockes and Humes
empiricism.
Strawsons offer is not limited to rational/intellectual, causally efficient, or divine things
as they have been described in the tradition. His proposal is at odds with Kants
transcendental idealism (for him, the difference is not just preferable but necessary). Yet it is
not contradictory to science. Might its dimensions be compared to Emersons self-referential
spiritual that is its own evidence?
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To get back to [1], Strawson argues that the world-whole itself is not completeness,
not even of science or rational thought. (Unless I miss my guess, that is the stumbling block
for Hegel in his work a quarter of a century later. His absolute spirit is completeness,
understood in the classical sense as perfection, historically evolving.) Nature is not the
essence of human knowledge or the essence of the world. It is different from those. That
difference is Strawsons point in demonstrating that [1] and [2] need not and ought not be
conflated.
Does such a material conception of spirit violate any of the precepts in Kants battle
against rationalism? Rather, if Kant is massaged just a bit, does not a dimension other than
matter-in-motion become legitimate, not at war with science, and one way of talking about it is
of the world as a whole? It cannot be proved because, as Emerson tells us, it is its own
evidence.188 Yet that is a kind of certainty. Being-in-the-world is a developing conception in
phenomenology.189 If being-in-the-world founds a perspective where we can think productively
about standing outside or alongside ourselves,190 a useful discussion of the world-whole may
have already begun. Being outside ourselves191 is one dimension of what being-in-the-world
means. Consequently we have the experience of ourselves as wholes but always only on the
way.
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CHAPTER 6
EXPERIENCE AS SUCCESSION, SURFACE, SURPRISE192
This examination of Emersons essay Experience concludes in the middle, as nowhere
else is his distance from Kant more evident than in the treatment of Succession, Surface, and
Surprise. They will be examined together (hereafter SSS193), rather than separately as have
the remainder of Emersons segments. SSS are considered together not just because they
are interrelated, for that is also true of the other lords/laws, but because these three have a
closer logical relationship to one another than do the other segments.
A recurring observation by both Cavell and Brown instructs readers to pay particular
attention to Emersons stylistic effortsto argue his most difficult and most significant point
about the whole of thingsby showing as well as telling. Here he tells us how a sense of
unbroken continuity can show itself even within a linear medium such as writing social
commentary or spinning pinwheels.
Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The party-colored
wheel must revolve very fast to appear white.194
Emersons style in this essay, especially in this portion, is almost a blur. The texts required
punctuation is of little help when the ideas run on as if it were all just a single sentence.
Emerson was not a plodder.
Two Worlds of Phenomena and Noumena
Cavell borrows from the later essay Fate for his interpretation of Experience. Both
essays struggle to reconcile Emersons interests with Kants epistemology. Cavell identifies
Emersons best attempt to resolve Kants two worlds through the complexities of polarity and a
characterization of humans as a stupendous antagonism,
(T)he argument of the essay on Fate, I might summarize as the overcoming of Kants
two worlds by diagnosing them, or resolving them, as perspectives, as a function of what
Emerson calls polarity. If Fate follows and limits Power [elsewhere called will], Power
attends and antagonizes Fate. . . . [Man is] a stupendous antagonism, a dragging
together of the poles of the Universe.195
Kant was a systematic philosopher; Emerson was not, as when he writes:

I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is
a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws
itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code.196
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Cavell explores comparisons not only with Kant but also to Wittgenstein, Freud, and Marx.
The focus in the Cavell essay, Emerson, Coleridge, Kant, is on Kants
phenomenon/noumenon conceptualization and Emersons polarities.
Cavell gives us a familiar description of Kants two worlds. They come at the cost of
knowing things only as appearances and with the limited pay off justifying the difference that
Kant identifies with the distinction between Reason and Understanding. Those in turn
represent the correlate distinction between freedom and determinism.
Emersons polarity shares with Kants two worlds the problems of illusion and a sense of
alienation. Kant formulates the issues with rules reduced to the logical form of a priori
categories empirically confirmed by judgments and identified as conditions; whereas Emerson
diagnoses (to use Cavells image) illusion and alienation as features that derive from neglect
of the self-evident connections.
The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. . . . He thinks his fate alien,
because the copula is hidden. Freud and Marx say no less. (I think here of a remark
from the Investigations: It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make
contact.)197
Cavell admits that the claim, on Emersons behalf to philosophy, requires explanation.
First he assesses Emersons story of Fate as, this is all, if you like, mythology. He points
out it is also true that our past solutions to these mysteries (of fate, freedom, foreknowledge
and will) however philosophical in aspect, are themselves mythology, or, as we might more
readily say today, products of our intuitions (. . . ).
Something you might call philosophy would consist in tracing out the source of our sense
of our lives as alien to us, for only then is there the problem of Fate. This looks vaguely
like the project to trace out the source of our sense of the world as independent of us, for
only then is skepticism a problem.198
While Emerson and Kant both investigate the world as independent of us, Kants formal
epistemology in pursuit of certain knowledge functions differently from Emersons biographical
epistemology in pursuit of the whole of things and self-evidence.
Brown captures the intensity of the interlocked integrity of SSS when dismissing the
familiar but superficial criticism of Emersons cheerfulness. Emersons economy of
compensation, his rule of the game, is not only a matter of pleasant surprises and silver
linings, yet it is those, too.
Dejection is an inevitable factor within this critical economy, for succession involves loss,
failure, and sometimes disasters of the largest sort. If Emersons essays nevertheless
seem cheerful, it is due to the rapid pace of their statements, which serves not so much
to conceal dejected intervals as to compress them into useful energy. The technique of
perpetual surprise, like Emersons compositional discipline as a whole, aims to
reassume technical processes already at work in nature:
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If we were not kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal: now the
excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness, that they have been
excluded. Your turn now, my turn next, is the rule of the game. The universality being
hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form of all sides: the points come
in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed.199
Notice the interweaving of SSS that Brown employs to explain textual succession in terms of
SSS. We shall return to the topic of hindered universality shortly.
As Brown indicates, succession is not simply a technique of writing for Emerson. SSS
are self-evident connections for Emersons exposition of the dynamic of part and whole.
Brown sees evidence for the law of succession in unaccounted-facts that invariably
supersede our achievements and contradict our definitions.200 Today we usually call that
unanticipated consequences.
The succession of time always brings something new, and, in Emersons essay
Compensation, Brown finds our partial deeds trigger the backstroke of the whole.(. . . T)he
future confronts us with those aspects of the present we have somehow rejected or
excluded.201 In Emersons words, What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which
the whole appears whenever a part appears.202 Cavell apologizes admiringly for Emerson
when he writes of that,
Of course this is all, if you like, mythology, and as such cannot philosophically constitute
what Emerson claims for it: namely, one key, one solution to the old knots of fate,
freedom, and foreknowledge. But suppose I emphasize, on his behalf, that he is
offering his solution merely as a key. And, as Pascal had put it, a key is not a hooka
key has just what Pascal calls the aperitive virtue, that is, it only opens, it does not
further invite, or provide. Whether you find Emerson entitled to such a gloss will depend
on who you think Emerson is.203
How can it be that time alienates rather than accommodates? Brown writes that
Emersons compensatory equation suggests A strange fable about time, where Emerson
implicates our finitude in a circular march of time, as follows:
(T)he reason we have a future at all is because we have not measured up to the
demands of the present moment. In contrast to the fullness of the present, our efforts to
encompass the whole appear as the image of an inadequate past. Then the need to
make a more adequate enclosure opens our eyes to the prospect of a future. This is
never so painfully apparent as after we have tried, as Emerson constantly does, to
capture the present in a grand generalization. Nominalist and Realist lays out the case
with force:
Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in
every moment with a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man
is a whole, so is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your
pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You have not got
rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, but nature is
one thing and the other thing (emphasis in the original, CW 3:139).
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Nature lives as fully in the parts as in the whole; to find it as one means missing it as the
other. Nature will resist us either way. The retribution for slighting natures wholeness
with our own exclusive claims happens in the very next moment, which presents us with
an influx of unlooked-for parts. The impact of their return reduces what had seemed an
absolute stance to the pathos of a fragment among fragments.204
Emersons vocabulary and imagery of succession and surface, which are descriptive
rather than formal, do not resemble Kants definition of space and time as pure forms of
intuition. They do not even resemble conventional space and time, except in the most general
sense of offering standards for measurement. Yet to image time as succession and space as
surface has valid implications.
Space and time provide reliable reference points for Kant. For Emerson these lords or
laws of life, surface and succession, are as authoritative as space and time for Kant, but they
participate with the other lords/laws as sources of illusion. That is because, rather than just
space and time as yardsticks, at issue here is Emersons appeal to part and whole as
standards for what he calls the uncalculated and uncalculable results of life. What he wishes
to discern is the whole of things by comprehending space and time as experiences as well as
measures.
Universal Hindrance
What if it is not two worlds but the pattern of part and whole that is a perspective (what
Cavell means by Pascals merely a key) for Emerson? Brown locates Emersons critical
principle in his earlier quotation from Nominalist and Realist as the idea of a universal
hindrance,
(. . . ) in which the primary form of the whole has somehow been channeled into the
secondary form of compensatory succession. Nothing gets lost in this hindrance: what
is whole on the primary side seems to be fully distributed on the secondary side. It is the
hindering itself that stands out as the great mystery in Emersons passage. (. . . )like a
scene of initiation between the whole and the fatal economy of all the parts over history.
As the word hindered suggests, Emerson is speaking of something that strikes
universality into surface and depth, behind and before, past and futurein other words,
something that dictates the terms and possibilities of human life. Not just special
limitations but the fact of limit itself seems concentrated in this mysterious idea.205
In keeping with Kants dedication to critique, Brown then compares Emersons idea
with Freuds notion of primal repression as an act of critical creation.
Emerson and Freud share the insight that creation coincides with a deed of criticism,
with a spontaneous circumscription or determination of limit. Criticism stands at the
beginning of things, though as a matter of course its dispensation will always be judged
secondary to a previous state of unity.(. . . )
Furthermore, Emerson seizes the universal hindrance as a model for his own critical
method, which, as I have noted, redresses the problem of succession with the stylistic
technique of speed: the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of
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rotation a new whole is formed. Emerson imagines a technique that restores the
original universality in the ideal measure of a line, a meridian whose polar diameter
spans the whole but that also must appear to the perspective of an individual viewer.206
Is there justification, apart from speculation, for Browns suggestion of a relationship to

Freud? We know that Nietzsche wrote of his appreciation of Emerson,207 and Cavell and
others find portions of Nietzsches work that parallel Emersons closely. While I do not know
that Freud confessed to being influenced by Nietzsche, it seems likely. 208 One cannot read
both without noticing obvious similarities. Freuds discontented civilization operates with a
dynamic much like Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals.
In recent times, a topic that can be described as hindered universality has been
examined by Paul Ricoeur. To oversimplify, what Brown calls hindered universality Ricoeur
will portray in his classic analysis of freedom of the will as not only the polarity of the voluntary
and involuntary but also the additional return of a simultaneously doubled involuntary impact
on the voluntary dimension of human behavior, which takes place along with the familiar
voluntary/involuntary options.209 To the extent that can be correlated with a complication in the
familiar linear conception of time, Emerson anticipated Ricoeur.
The issue of time, when treated in terms of moments or even in the three ecstasies of
past, present, future, mimics Emersons universality as hindered. My speculation is that the
basic dynamic of the laws of SSS is equivalent in Emersons work to Kants with space and
time and then some. Because this writer is not qualified to investigate at the fundamental level
of Kants space and time, it remains only a speculation. Were someone with the requisite
knowledge willing to reconsider Kant in the light of Einstein, the question might be answered
more suitably.210
The hindered universality in Emersons appeal to the whole results in an immanence
even more radical than Kants. Emersons reliance on what he calls the law of compensation
(what today are called unexpected consequences and what Emerson named retribution)
eventuates in measurable events, but as a contingent non-contingency Brown sees it as
evidence for the whole. The test is whether it can rest on the same measure Strawson applies
to Kant, which is coherence with scientific advances viewed from Cavells and Browns
perspectives211
Epistemology
For Emerson life, in its varied expressions, determines time, not the other way around.
It is the difference between fragmentary immediacy and the prospect of the whole, found in
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dimensions of the compensatory process of life that Emerson labors to keep from being
viewed as mechanical.
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that
which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious,
knows not its own tendency. So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because
immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value.212
Recall Emersons comment cited earlier about Nature (Emersons preferred referent for
part/whole) as one thing and the other thing. While it is convenient to see the whole as built
up from or larger than its parts, if it is another thing, it cannot be understood as just the
numerical accumulation of the parts.213 As Brown, quoting Emerson, writes, Nature lives as
fully in the parts as in the whole.
Emerson also applies a harbinger of what will later be called the pragmatic theory of
truth, as Brown writes,
Emerson raises those doubts within a framework of further uses, uses pertaining to ends
other than epistemological ones. In the Idealism chapter of Nature, for example, he
almost offhandedly grants the noble doubt . . . whether nature outwardly exists; but
then he subjects it to the criterion later made famous by pragmatists such as Peirce and
James: What difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some
god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of
the whole remaining the same, what is the difference? (CW 1:29)
For the epistemologist, the answer to such questions makes all the difference in the
world, as it defines for us what we can or cannot know about the existence of objects.
Emerson makes clear, however, that for him the difference depends on what we can do
with the answer. As far as it concerns his ability to make use of nature, the answer
makes no difference: (. . . ) At the same time, Emerson finds that a noble raising of the
doubt makes a great deal of difference. Doubts, especially extreme doubts, work even
better than knowledge in provoking us to try out new experience.214
Belief/Doubt as a Polarity
For Emerson, skeptical moments are biographical before they are epistemological. They
befall us, as moods do, in the course of our empirical passages and endeavors. As a
matter of course, they generate epistemological doubts of all sorts, but these doubts
arise from within the economics of endeavor 215
The economics of endeavor will, much later, be identified by Edmund Husserl as

intentionality; human beings are always aiming in some direction, whatever we do.216 To ask
about knowledge apart from human intentions may be suitable for Kants formal logic of
judgments. Human behavior, on the other hand, has only logical consequences that permit us
to act on the basis of intentions, among which are expectations, to be realized, perhaps, in the
future. For Emerson, Kants certainty of knowledge founded on times moments is secondary
to engagement and orientation to a standard attribute of timethe future.
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Belief has the same transitional function as doubt. Both are ways of resisting what is
immediate. If not in a condition of belief/doubt, and therefore not resisting the impact of the
immediate but participating in the immediate, Emerson calls it Temperament. For Emerson,
Temperament rules more ruthlessly than either belief or doubt, and for Emerson it is
biographical before it is epistemological. Then where does the surprise of the new fit into the
complexity?
Surprise
Rather than Emersons interpreters, Emerson can speak for himself on the topic of
surprise.217 In addition to allowing us to enjoy his remarkable wit, which sadly is frequently
missed, here are some of Emersons affirmations of possibilities, in keeping with Strawsons
extension of formal concepts that are valid when connected to the empirical. Strawson
mentions identity, existence, class and class-membership, property, relation, individual, unity,
totality.218 Emerson shows us how formal categories apply to very ordinary experience.
[Totality] The child asks, Mamma, why dont I like the story as well as when you told it
me yesterday? Alas! child it is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it
answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole and this story is a
particular? The reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in
respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in
regard to persons, to friendship and love.
[Individual] There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as
representatives of certain ideas which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the
brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would
bring them there.
[Property] To finish the moment, to find the journeys end in every step of the road, to
live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
[Existence] Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next
millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and
women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.
[Relation] I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and
refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious as the
mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.
[Class and class membership] Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the
church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor.
She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the
beautiful, are not children of our law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh
their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength
we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences
of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of
wrath, past or to come.
[Existence] Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it
were not.
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[Individual] I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love,
and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter,
and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force
supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The
years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our
company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and
somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken.
He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarreled with some
or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the
individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he
promised himself.
[Existence] By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it
were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if
the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveller the
inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon
flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought
is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what
was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before
the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of
innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And
what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am
ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I
have found in the West:
In what sense do these comments on Surprise contribute to measurements of space

and time? Rather than as analytical standards, the list provides comprehensive but
uncalculated and uncalculable results. Might that not be to measure space and time by the
whole rather than by the part? Emersons insight that The years teach much which the days
never know suggests larger and more complete dimensions.
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CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Emerson should be read in the context of what we know of all of his work and the times
in which he lived and wrote.219 Until recently, however, that methodology has given us the
popular description of transcendentalism as just another form of what Aldous Huxley called
The Perennial Philosophy, which shapes metaphysical religions. Emersons examination of
divinity in the central essay The Over-soul certainly lends itself to such an interpretation,
along with his reputation for Oriental largeness.220 However, his philosophical point of view
deserves to be differentiated from his religious or theological point of view. Interpreters have
only begun recently to take that path. Some of those interpreters have been selected and
used in this thesis commentary on Experience.
In his own time, Emerson enlarged both philosophical and religious perspectives
through his mutual accommodation of East and West, Orient and Occident,
Hebraic/Greek/Christian and Chinese/Hindu/Buddhist thought. Those various world
civilizations serve not only themselves but each other. We, his Western readers, have
traditionally made the connection to religion, rather than philosophy, by virtue of Emersons
unhesitating employment of the term God throughout his writings. Insofar as this review of
one essay in detail offers anything, it might be that Emersons philosophy is only now available
to a better understanding, as a consequence of the philosophers who, if they have not been
influenced directly by his work, share similar goals.221
To take just one clear example, the following comment bears on the earlier discussion
here of Kants two worlds as that is compared with a similar pattern of duality in the Romantic
tradition. Cavell tells us that both leave us betwixt and between.
Kants portrait of the human being [is] as living in two worlds, in one of them determined,
in the other free, one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human Understanding,
the other to the satisfaction of human Reason. One romantic use for this idea of two
worlds lies in its accounting for the human beings dissatisfaction with, as it were, itself.
It appreciates the ambivalence in Kants central idea of limitation, that we simultaneously
crave its comfort and crave escape from its comfort, that we want unappeasably to be
lawfully wedded to the world and at the same time illicitly intimate with it, as if the one
stance produced the wish for the other, as if the best proof of human existence were its
power to yearn, as if for its better, or other, existence. Another romantic use for this idea
of our two worlds is its offer of a formulation of our ambivalence toward Kants
ambivalent settlement, or a further insight into whatever that settlement was a settlement
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ofan insight that the human being now lives in neither world, that we are, as it is said,
between worlds.
Emerson and Thoreau joke about this from time to time. Our moods do not believe in
each other. Emerson says in Circles; I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
And Thoreau identifies his readers as, for example, those who are said to live in New
England.222
To take a less cogent example, the more recent wit of comedian Woody Allen
comments in a similar fashion but about some problems that remain with Spinozas pantheism,
(He) dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and its intimidating
to wolf down a knish if you think youre ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.223
Even beyond his precocious religious and cultural ecumenicity, for mid-19th Century
America, something highly original appears in Emerson. It offers a Western contribution over
and above the standard East-West dialogue that has developed since Emersons time. In
contrast with the Orients reliance on the universal as transcendent, Emerson enlarges Kants
identification of the a priori foundations for the possibility of human experience.
In that case, Emerson is misunderstood as simply an advocate of Oriental mysticism,
supposedly borrowing from it in order to nestle someplace in the framework of Western
religiosity and theology. Rather, that conventional portrait of Emerson misses his philosophical
point in the same way as those who interpret current philosophy may still be immersed in an
extreme platonism.224
As Aristotle tells us, the only place to begin is in midstream.225 Nothing is more difficult
to understand than originality, since we can only understand it in terms that we already know.
One practical reason for taking Emersons originality seriously is that, as all the commentators
cited here show, it helps to expose some of his most difficult texts to better understanding. We
need the help, because Emersons work takes risks. For instance, the question remains, even
if it were possible for him to show us the whole, not as an object-in-itself but as, say, an
aesthetic moment: then what? So what?
I understand the intersection of the aesthetic and the moral to be expressed in
Emersons sentence (as often with his sentences, not especially remarkable, yet
eminently remarkable) from Self-Reliance: You are constrained to accept his [namely,
the true mans] standard. This (. . . is) fair warning, of the sort of interpretative demand I
place on certain texts that other philosophical temperaments will deplore or will not give
recognition as philosophy. Would it help for me simply to assert that a perfectionist
relation to a text (words ordered by another) is an emblem of the relation perfectionism
seeks from another, as if there is no respite from attention to the course of ones life? Is
this morality? (Compare A Theory of Justice, page 50: If we should be able to
characterize one (educated) persons sense of justice, we would have a good beginning
toward a theory of justice. We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form
of a moral conception. So for the purposes of this book, the views of the reader and the
author are the only ones that count.) Emersons sentence just cited is an Emersonian
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rethinking (. . . ) of two fundamental concepts of Kants Foundations of the Metaphysics

of Morals: Emersons standard alludes to Kants two standpoints, the ability to take
which, to take both, defines the human; and constraint alludes to Kants defining of the
moral (hence human) realm as characterized by a constraint expressed by an ought. (I
assert these connections thus starkly, not because on another occasion I could not list
plenty of preparatory connections between Self-Reliance and Kants Foundations, but
rather precisely to indicate that there is no pure or necessary philosophical preparation
for the connections, none that would show Emersons allusions, granted that they are at
work, to be philosophical rather than literary, or serious rather than parodic, or polemical
rather than ironic. I might say that the question whether morality has a foundation in
reason is given the following slant of answer in Emerson: Perfectionism has its
foundation in rethinking.)226
In Emersons Epistemology, David Van Leer offers interpretations of Emersons most

celebrated essays. Only Van Leers comments about Experience will be referenced here.
Those stand at a distance in a few particulars from Cavell and Brown as already examined.
The final segment in Experience falls under Emersons category of Subjectiveness, about
which Van Leer writes,
In absolute terms, the noumenal ruins relative existence: there is no continuity between
the evidence for self-belief and the assumption that experience is grounded.227
Van Leers concise case against some of the arguments reported in this thesis reaches
the conclusion that Emerson added nothing substantial to alter Kants ontology or
epistemology. More specifically, Van Leers reading does not concur with the claims from
Cavell and Brown 1) in the words of Cavell, that Emerson undermines Kants
phenomenal/noumenal conceptuality by diagnosing, or resolving it or 2) that Emersons
appeal to mood suggests empirical evidence or even the possibility of evidence of the whole of
things. To the contrary, Van Leer admires Emerson for a philosophical sophistication and
honesty resigned to accept the two worlds view given us by Kant.
By contrast Cavell adds a new dimension to valid evidence when he suggests feeling,
understood as mood, is a legitimate kind of sensation. As quoted earlier in chapter 3, he
writes,
The idea is roughly that moods must be taken as having at least as sound a role in
advising us of reality as sense experience has; that, for example, coloring the world,
attributing to it the qualities mean or magnanimous, may be no less objective or
subjective than coloring an apple, attributing to it the colors red or green. Or perhaps we
should say: sense experience is to objects what moods are to the world.228
The question to ask can be formulated as whether Emerson is a Romantic intuitionist

in the fashion of one who imagines access to conclusive information from immediate nonverbal contacts with other people and thingsavoiding the empirical requirements for
knowledge? Or is Emerson a Kantian who goes further to argue for the legitimacy of mood as
a dimension of sensation?
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Mood as a Sensible Intuition229

Coordinate with Cavells identification of the role of mood with Emersons reliance on
Temperament, a correlation between mood/feeling and interpersonal sensations was already
discussed in the paper by Flakne in chapter 3 above. She expands the possibilities of
sensation by illustrating the difference between sight and touch in the work of Husserl. We
regard sight as directed one waythe observing subject looks at objects. Touch, however,
produces an ambiguity. Am I currently touching my keyboard? Yes. Is not the keyboard also
touching me? Yes. Well, then, who or what does the touching? (Whether a distinction needs
to be examined between touch and contact with inanimate objects is left open.) That is,
does not sensation as seen most clearly in touch when a human is involved depend on a
simultaneous mutuality?
The self emerges from mutuality in the fluidity of the experience of synaesthetic
improvisation as defined by Flakne. Our sense of self, explained as what Flakne calls
choreo-graphy, is congruent with the consequence that Emerson describes as, We believe
in ourselves as we do not believe in others.230 Mutuality with otherness retains an imbalance
within the interaction. If feeling/mood is sensation, might Emerson then not be better
understood by placing him in a framework as is offered by non-romantics like Husserl, as
analyzed by Flakne?
Emersons struggle is intellectually coherent when it shows that certain knowledge of
oneself is questionable. If he is philosophically coherent (and all sources cited here, while
differing in their interpretations, insist that is so), then at least his philosophical writings ought
not to be viewed in traditional Romantic terms, despite the shared doubts about traditional
rationalism. When mood is a sensation, reliance on it as evidence and even its prioritizing, as
with touch, does not locate it within Kants noumenal or purely intellectual intuition.
Emersons Claim to be Taken Literally
It is not yet clear that one must choose between Cavell/Brown and Van Leer on
Emerson. The careful reading Van Leer offers, particularly in this writers opinion as directed
toward the very end of Emersons essay, confers on his analysis a persuasive value justified
by his detailed and precise reading of the text. Rather than text-as-its-own-theory claims about
what the appearance or format might suggest, Van Leer attends to the philosophical
arguments found in Emersons language.
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This reader finds both credible and questionable dimensions in Van Leers description
of the rhythms he sees in individual segments, particularly its alleged connection to the
preceding lord/law.
A kind of pattern, then, may be discovered in the lower argument of Experience. Each
lord in turn is offered both as an explanation of the general problem of the illusoriness of
nature and as a possible means of curbing the excesses of the previous lord. All are
thus presented as initially liberating forces that turn enslaving when left unchecked. And
the measure of each lords powerpositive or negativeis how it alters mans view of
other people. Not only Illusion, with its famous denial of Waldo, but each section builds
to and is tested by its effect on the selfs relation to otherswhether as optical illusions,
unexpansive partialists, hypothetical people, or mistaken individuals. And, as in Nature
the whole lower argument finally collapsed into the noble doubt of Idealism, so here the
lower procession of the lords of Temperament, Succession, Surface, and Surprise halts
with the introduction of the more absolute condition of reality.231
The observation each section builds to and is tested by its effect on the selfs relation to
others is a cogent insight and confirms the inclusion of Flaknes argument. Evidence for the
notion of successive thrusts relating the segments cumulatively to each other, however, seems
belied by Emersons own modest self-estimate, I dare not assume to give their order, but I
name them as I find them in my way. Van Leer instead attributes that to Emersons refusal of
absolutes and an affirmation of the contingency of all experience.
Yet Van Leers close reading harmonizes some of Emersons most difficult passages.
For example, Van Leer recognizes the obvious regret in the quintessential irony distilled in
Emersons admission that, rather than disparaging knowing and the intellectual life, as people
do, he would be very content with knowing, if only I could know. (. . . ) To know a little, would
be worth the expense of this world. Van Leer points out the modesty of such a counterfactual
reply if only I could know, as confirmation that Emerson concludes the essay without
reaching a satisfactory resolution of the issue of certain knowledge.
The forceful statement, I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the
farms, is not the world I think Van Leer equates as evidence in the end that Knowledge thus
remains only as the recognition of its impossibility.232
By All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I
had gotten anything, I found I did not Van Leer understands,
Epistemology posits two worlds, both stable and real in their way. Thought is always
possible, as is experience or conversation. But the interconnection between the two,
which lies at the heart of all epistemological questions, though it may occur, is logically
unknowable.233
In Emersons interpretation of the Flaxman portrait of Apollo, Van Leer identifies

Emersons references to disparity and discrepancy as condition[s] of human experience
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that prevent any thought of self as other than experience.234 By the time of this essays
writing, Emerson had matured beyond his youthful Swedenborgianism.
Finally, Emersons sentence, But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law
by a paltry empiricism,since there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded, Van Leer
interprets as a resort to an empty hypothesis.
He now rejects mans identifications of failures (or by implication successes) as a paltry
empiricism, even while hypothetically admitting the necessary connection between right
action and success.235
So Emerson settles for a tautology; right action and success are synonymsa feeble
philosophical victory over the powers of illusion after such a tortuous effort.
In addition to Van Leer knitting together the logical relationships in Emersons
peroration, the question remains whether Cavells diagnosing, or resolving, as a description
of Emersons substitution of polarity for Kants two worlds, are conceptions capable of doing
useful philosophical work.
Emersons use of polarities does work, exactly, in terms of diagnosing and resolving
Kants two worlds. Davidsons anomalous monism, as an account of human freedom and
scientific reliability, also works, and so does McDowells reenchanted Nature and human
second nature.236 Realizing that we freely contribute, amid lifes polarities, to our own
predicament provides some diagnostic leverage for resolving. To what extent that holds true
is another continuing project for philosophy. In the context of this thesis, the resolution sought
is at least for our lives of quiet desperation as Thoreau puts it or silent melancholy as
Emerson writes.
Renaming our predicaments can help us only when the new names lead us to new
paths where we behave differently because we see more clearly. Cavell does mention Hegels
aufhebung as likely related to use of the term annul when Emerson relates intellect and
fate. The context for annul there is in a struggle with language for meaning.237 Extending
that sense to resolving is but a short step. If Emersons analysis of mood and Flaknes
analysis of sensation fit with Cavells image of diagnosis, another usefulness also is apparent.
Consequences for Transcendentalism
When Galileo and Newton began to relate their astronomical information and laws to
our solar system, a change in human self-consciousness took place that we familiarly
designate as forcing an alternative to the then existing view of anthropoi () at the
center of the universe. That shook the dominant view in our civilization dating back to the
ancients. The new view developed slowly and, since existing social customs reinforced the old
Page 80
view, changes only came gradually. Yet that created our history so that we now take it for
granted. One consequence is usually referred to as the Warfare of Science and Religion.
Today the pattern continues in the struggle over the teaching of Darwins theory of evolution in
the schools.
If we can produce a philosophical account for the affirmation that all is one, or at least a
serious engagement with its questionsof our location in a single material universe, and a
shared understanding of what is required for such an affirmation as an alternative to the
dualistic metaphysical traditionit will not necessarily mean that Emersons affirmations of
purity, unity, the ineffable, etc. have standing. For the issue remains whether such a whole is
limited or unlimited, bounded or unbounded. It does mean that in addition to materialistic
monismwhere background and foreground will not budge and are undeniable and yet
insufficient in themselves to account for human freedom or the whole of thingsthe terms of
the dialogue can change without inescapable contradiction and without an antipathy to the
natural sciences.
If antagonistic viewpoints dissolve in a perspective that accepts and permits a greater
complexity, new doors and windows in Western thinking are opened. Thinkers, who have not
or do not ordinarily listen to each other, will find a mutually acceptable conceptualization along
with reasons for a respectful regard. Yes, the complexities of such an abundance of
viewpoints become mind-boggling. Adding complications does not always lubricate the task of
exploring the conditions for human understanding. If it also means that former insurmountable
barriers to conversation now become practical, we may fulfill the hint of Emersons the true
romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical
power.
Additional Questions
In addition to the distinction between touch and contact, an issue that needs to be
examined is the extent to which what is constant is also permanent. Strawson poses that in
terms of the necessary in Kants thinking, which depends on Kants usage of time and
space.238 Emersons view from the whole differs from Kants analytic view. The extent to
which that is a continuous theme, through Emerson and back to Heraclitus is an on-going
research task for Western thought.
Does Emersons notion of man as a stupendous antagonism239 presuppose that duality
must become a contest, when duality can also be a combination or mutuality, as in a dance? If
the two are independent wholes, then must there necessarily be a struggle between them? If
Page 81
neither is divisible, the shorthand definition of a whole, might their mutuality not be as much
one of attraction and balance as of repulsion and competition?
Van Leer writes that it depends on whether one adopts the perspective of Kantian logic
or of a psychological context. He writes,.
For Kant, true originality measures logical nonderivativeness, not psychological integrity.
( . . .)[I]n Emerson, the most precise meaning of "original relation" may also be the most
Kantian. It is not simply that we should see nature clearly, without interference from the
past. Nor is it quite that in clear-sightedness we create nature. Instead the call for an
original relation asks us to realize what is already, necessarily, the case: that anything
we call experienced must be simultaneously both given and ours, that objectivity and
originalityrelationship itselfare the logical preconditions of our ability to perceive
anything at all.240
Are all dualities governed by the same dynamic? Does not the issue of a genuine
dialectic, whose terms are independent rather than degrees on a simple scale, remain open?
For the possibility/impossibility dialectic that this reader finds operating in Experience, which
of those supplies the necessary limit? A similar question can be raised about Cavells
identification of a constancy/change dialectic.
Page 82
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary
Brown, Lee Rust, The Emerson Museum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Cavell, Stanley, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (London: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Cavell, Stanley, Emersons Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Davidson, Donald, Mental Events in The Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (NY: The
Modern Library, 1940).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Conduct of Life (URL = <http://www.emersoncentral.com/fate.htm>).
Flakne, April, Derridas Reading of Merleau-Ponty in Refiguring Continental Philosophy: Selected
Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Volume 32 (Chicago: DePaul University,
2007).
Heidegger, Martin, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1990).
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Ricoeur, Paul, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense (London: Routledge, 1966).
Van Leer, David, Emersons Epistemology: The argument of the essays (NY: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
Secondary
Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason (NY: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert Spiller, Alfred
Ferguson, et. al. 3 vols. to date (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971-).
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Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol XVI, Nos. 1, 2 & 3 (Saratoga Springs, NY:
Saratoga Printing Company, 1979).
Goodman, Russell B., Pragmatism (NY: Routledge, 1995).
Page 83
Greenham, David Locating an American romanticism: Emerson, Cavell, Experience in

Comparative American Studies, Vol. 1(1) (UK: SAGE Journals, 2003).
Guerrire, Daniel, Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
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1909).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage Books, 1974).
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of Philosophy (Winter 2007 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/aristotle-logic/>).
Thayer, Robert E, The Biopsychology of Mood and Arousal (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Webb, Theodore A, Seven Sons: Millionaires & Vagabonds (Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford
Publishing, 1999).
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University of Chicago Press, 1937/1980).
1. P. F. Strawsons review of Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason titled The Bounds of
Sense, Stanley Cavells collection of lectures and essays titled Emersons Transcendental Etudes, Lee
Rust Browns The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole, and David
Van Leers Emersons Epistemology: The argument of the essays.
2.
See material referenced by note 131 below.
3. David Van Leer, Emersons Epistemology: The argument of the essays (NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1986) p 184, where he also writes, [Emerson exposes a] sense of self that admits the
logical priority of the private, what here he calls the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two
spheres and elsewhere the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man.
(. . . I)f he [man] wishes to follow the logic of his assumptionsto court epistemic honestyit is to the
divine answer of disparity that he is inevitably led. The twoness that Emerson has felt from the
beginning now reveals itself as a kind of Cartesian schizophrenia: not merely a dualism that he happens
to meet whenever he tries to think unity, but a tension between experience and its presuppositions that
logically requires a simultaneous unity and duality. Subsequent notes from this source are identified as
EE, and this content repeated in note 227.
4. Stanley Cavell, Emerson, Coleridge, Kant, in Emersons Transcendental Etudes
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) p 68 quoting Emersons essay, Fate. Subsequent notes
from this source are identified as ECK.
Page 84
5. R.W. Emerson, Experience in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (NY: The Modern Library, 1940) p 362.
6. Material in this and the following subsection of the Introduction in quotation marks or
format, unless for emphasis or otherwise noted, is taken from Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London:
Routledge, 1966) Part Four The Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism, the final two sections 7 and
8, where Strawson comments on Kants arguments from Division One Transcendental Analytic, Book
II Analytic of Principles Chapter III titled, On the ground of the distinction of all objects in general
into phenomena and noumena. Subsequent notes from this source are identified as BOS.
7.
Peter A. Angeles, Dictionary Of Philosophy (NY: Harper and Row, 1981) p 297.
8. Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
And all viable paths begin in doubt, p 225. Subsequent notes from this source are identified as
Brown.
9. R. W. Emerson, Fate The Conduct of Life (URL = <http://www.
emersoncentral.com/fate.htm>)
10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781] (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
A 51/B 75.
11. William M. Johnson, Although both intuitions and concepts are the building blocks for
Kants version of experience, space and time are the foundation. But space and time also belong with
appearances, because they can be instanced. Space and time are pure forms of sensibility or pure
intuitions when they are the fundamental systems of relations between, or fundamental modes of,
particular items encountered in experience. Thus these forms of intuition are not the same as
categories, yet they are also a priori. Class handout, California State University at Long Beach,
Department of Philosophy, 2005.
12. BOS, p 267.
13. As will be examined ahead, mood as a sensation plays a central role in the reinterpretation of
Emerson proposed here.
14. BOS, p 266.
15. Material in quotation marks or format in this subsection of the Introduction, unless for
emphasis or otherwise noted, is taken from Cavell, ECK.
16. ECK, p 70.
17. See page 76 ahead.
18. ECK, p 71.
19. ECK, p 68.
20. ECK, pp 70-1.
21. ECK, p 68, quoting Emersons Fate.
Page 85
22. ECK, p 69.

23. ECK, p 72.
24. ECK, p 70.
25. ECK, p 73.
26. ECK, pp 71-2.
27. Paul Ricoeur developed this theme in his classic lecture on human will, The Unity of the
Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limiting Idea, trans. Daniel O'Connor. This lecture before the
Societe francaise de philosophie is a summary and defense by the author of the central theses of his
major work, La Philosophie de la Volonte, Part I. The complete lecture and ensuing discussion are
found in the Bulletin de la Societe francaise, Vol. XLV, No. 1 (January-March 1951). Refer also to
note 74 below.
28. ECK, p 71.
29. ECK, p 73.
30. ECK, p 73 (emphasis added).
31. ECK, p 72.
32. ECK, p 69.
33. Material in this subsection of the Introduction in quotation marks or format, unless for
emphasis or otherwise indicated, is taken from Brown.
34. Brown, p 233.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. See Browns reference to the segments in the essay Experience, in Brown, p 238. Such
segmenting also orders this thesis inquiry into that essay.
38. Brown, p 234.
39. Ibid.
40. Brown, p 235. His notation of CW refers to The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
ed. Robert E. Spiller et. al. 5 vols. to date. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press,
1971-).
41. Brown, p 237.
42. Ibid.
43. Brown, p 238.
Page 86
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Brown, p 236.
47. Brown, p 237.
48. Brown, p 239.
49. Brown, p 240.
50. Ibid.
51. Brown, p 235.
52. Material in this segment in quotation marks or format, unless for emphasis or otherwise
noted, is taken from Emerson, Experience.
53. Brown, p 247.
54. EE, p 155 comments, Generally, of course, it is one of life's little ironies that we understand
least when we try most to do so. But in the more precise Kantian distinction between the phenomena we
know and the noumena we can only think, if any of us did know our actions and directions, it
would be when we think [that] we [should] best know.
55. Emerson, Experience, p 343.
57. Emerson, Experience, pp 344-45.
58. As quoted in material referenced by note 78 below.
59. Brown, pp 246-47.
60. Brown, p 248.
61. Further discussion can be found ahead in chapter 4 under Emersons Principle of
Compensation, p 55.
64. Brown, p 247.
65. Brown, p 233-34.
66. BOS, pp 162-63. The diagnosis of the sources of the illusion is that the rational
psychologist ( . . .) confuses the unity of experiences with the experience of unity.( . . .B)y a natural and
Page 87
powerful illusion we mistake the necessary unity of consciousness for just such an awareness of a
unitary subject.
A recent paper by Batrice Longuenesse, Kant On The Identity Of Persons in The Aristotelian
Society: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. CVII, Part 2. 2007, p 165, amplifies Strawsons
point: Where Kant falls short, according to Strawson, is in having not gone far enough in his diagnosis
of and response to the rationalist metaphysician. For Kant only goes so far as to maintain that the
rationalist metaphysician mistakes the unity of experience for an experience of unity. That is to say,
the rationalist metaphysician mistakes the self-ascription of representations in which I expresses
nothing more than the connectedness of our representationswithout any determinate reference to an
empirically determinate subject of these representationswith the ascription of these representations to
a mysterious entity escaping ordinary criteria of spatio-temporal identification and re-identification.
This is quite right, says Strawson.
But what Kant should also have said is that even in this indeterminate, and thus criterionless,
use of I, the link with empirical self-identification is not in practice severed: what is being referred
to, even in this case, is an empirically determined, spatio-temporal, living, sensing, thinking body: a
person. Instead, Kant maintains that in the use of I that is (in our terms) immune to error through
misidentification, no entity is referred to at all. The only referring use is supposed to be the objective
use, in which I put myself in the place of another. This, says Strawson (1966, p 174) is a mistake,
related to the disastrous model of transcendental idealism. The result of Kants not recognizing that
the I of apperception is a mere abstraction from the empirically determinate subject of experience is
that, instead, he ends up claiming that it refers to an unknown and unknowable transcendental subject.
Also refer to note 216 below.
67. Brown, p 252.
68. Ibid.
69. A discussion of Emersons moral perfectionism, as introduced by Cavell, is not taken up
here. However, the recent book by Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light (NY: Fordham University Press,
2005) elaborates the idea.
70. Henry A. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism (NY:
Haskell House Publishers, 1970).
71. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990) p xviii, writes of Paul Franks's remarkable study of Hegel, most immediately of his
description of the introduction Hegel wrote for the Critical journal he edited with Schelling, in which
Franks makes outon, as it were, the opposite side of German philosophy from that represented by
Nietzschea non-elitist perfectionism of an Emersonian cast, associated with Hegel's account of the
present, passing historical moment of philosophy's esotericism.
73. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998) p 283
(A158/B197).
Page 88
74. Erazim Kohak, Translators Introduction in Paul Ricoeur Freedom and Nature: The
Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966) p xxiv identifies the
philosophical problem of temperament as character when he writes: What is at stake in consent is a
philosophical problem of ultimate compatibility of freedom and nature. To the extent to which these
two are essentially incompatible, the only possibilities for the will are defiance or surrender. Consent
would then become either impossibleor a masked surrender.
Character. The guiding insight of Ricoeur's analysis of the absolute involuntary of character is that it
is, precisely as necessity is experienced internally, at the limits of objective knowledge that it can be
matched by voluntary consent. Only as I recognize my temperament as an incoercible datum can I begin
to use it in my service.
The empirical ethology with which Ricoeur deals has not figured prominently in Anglo-Saxon
philosophical discussion and much of its terminologyespecially that of the Dutch ethologists to whom
he referstends to acquire a rather quaint and dated flavor in translation. ( . . .) With the inevitable
increase in administrative reliance on objective indices of temperamenthowever describeda
philosophical analysis of the problem of character becomes crucially important. Subsequent notes from
this source are identified as Kohak.
75. Cavell, Thinking of Emerson, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, pp 11-12.
76. Brown, p 234.
77. See material referenced by note 35 above.
78. Brown, p 234.
79. Richard Rudner, The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments Philosophy of
Science 20 (1953) 1-6. (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins Co., 1953).
80. Ibid.
81. Eugene T. Gendlin, Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology, Review
of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol XVI, Nos. 1, 2 & 3, 1978-79 (Saratoga Springs, NY:
Saratoga Printing Company, 1979).
82. Gendlin, pp 44-45.
83. Kohak, p xix.
84. Ibid.
85. As cited ahead (see note 89 below) Van Leer, EE, note 75, p 254, finds this to be less the
case than I.
86. See the quoted material referenced by note 131 below.
87. EE, p 169.
88. Ibid.
Page 89
89. EE, p 170, where the note is Emerson makes this distinction explicit later in the essay in his
comparison of the primal Intuition to all other tuitions, p 37. Cf. Cavell, Emersons Transcendental
Etudes, p 93.
90. EE, p 171.
91. EE, p 174.
92. EE, p 175.
93. April Flakne, Derridas Reading of Merleau-Ponty in Refiguring Continental Philosophy:
Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Volume 32 (Chicago: DePaul
University, 2007) pp 42-3. Subsequent notes from this source are identified as Flakne.
94. Flakne, pp 41-2.
95. Flakne, p 45.
96. Flakne p 42.
97. Flakne, p 47, citing Jacques Derrida, Tangent III in On TouchingJean Luc Nancy, trans.
Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
98. Flakne, p 43.
99. Flakne, p 45.
100. Flakne, p 47.
101. For example, see Daniel Guerrire Introduction Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to
Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990) p 2. [The popular view is] that physical reality is simply
there without us, and ( . . .) that numbers are simply in the head and then applied to reality. Rather,
for phenomenology, objectivity of whatever type does not lie out there, waiting to be mirrored by an
isolate mind whose representations may or may not correspond to it. Nor does subjectivity of any kind
lie in here, looking out upon isolate things that may or may not impassively subsist. Phenomenology
affirms that objectivity means presence-for the subject, and subjectivity means presence-toward the
object. Guerrire footnotes texts there relating this to natural science.
102. Flakne, p 43.
103. Flakne, p 47.
104. Flakne, pp 44-5.
105. Flakne, p 46. Such a near miss belongs with the idea of the whole of things discussed
ahead, but naming its exact contribution is beyond this writers current skills.
107. Flakne, p 47.
Page 90
108. Flakne, p 48.

109. Or, as Wittgenstein put it in Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Rush Rhees
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937/1980) p 11,It is humiliating to have to appear like an
empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.
111. David Greenhams paper Locating an American romanticism: Emerson, Cavell,
Experience in Comparative American Studies, Vol. 1(1) (UK: SAGE Journals, 2003) footnotes the
poetry with the Andrew Brown translation of the original, I did not suppose that your decrees had such
power that you, a mortal, could out run the gods unwritten and unfailing rules. For their life is not of
today or yesterday but forever, and no one knows when they first appeared.
112. Brown, p 245.
113. Brown, p 248.
114. Ibid.
115. Brown, p 247.
116. Brown, p 248.
117. Brown, p 247.
118. Brown, p 234.
119. Brown, p 246.
120. Brown, pp 249-50.
121. Brown, p 249.
122. See material ahead referenced by note 224 below.
123. Brown, p 254.
124. See note 69 above.
125. Brown, p 250.
126. Brown, p 254.
127. Donald Davidson, Mental Events in The Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992) p 148, quoting Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals,
trans. T.K. Abbott (London, 1909) p 76.
Page 91
129. Cavell, Thinking of Emerson, p 13.

130. Ibid.
131. Ibid. Also recall the earlier quote from Strawson, BOS, p 267, In refusing to commit
ourselves to the dogmatic position that, though we do not know everything, we know at least every kind
of thing there is to know about every kind of thing there really is, we do not have to deny that we know
things of some kinds about some kinds of things there really are.
132. Kohak, p xiv.
134. Cavell, Preface And Acknowledgments, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, pp
xxxiv-xxxvi.
135. Ricoeurs study of human freedom, Freedom and Nature, finds active and passive, the
voluntary and the involuntary, to be a complex dialectic.
136. An alternative that substitutes touch for sight is examined in chapter 3 above in the material
from Flakne.
137. The awkwardness of this heading finds its excuse in the earlier reference to D. Guerrire,
Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion. Refer to note 101 above.
140. In the Conclusions here (see the material ahead referenced by note 227 below) a brief and
inadequate consideration is given to Van Leers negative estimate of Emersons success at explaining
the connection between the self as a concept and the self as an experience.
141. See the quoted material ahead referenced by note 146.
142. Brown, ibid., p 250.
143. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p xxxi.
144. Brown, p 244.
145. Brown, p 243.
147. See the material referenced by note 131 above.
150. Brown, pp 244-45.
Page 92
151. Emerson, Compensation, in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, p 175.
152. BOS, p 227. Material in this and the following subsection in quotation marks or format,
unless for emphasis or otherwise noted, is taken from BOS.
153. Ibid.
154. BOS, p 213.
155. BOS, p 227.
156. Ibid.
157. Ibid.
158. BOS, p 156.
159. Ibid.
160. BOS, p 212.
161. BOS, p 156.
162. BOS, p 158.
163. BOS, p 157.
164. Ibid.
165. BOS, p 159.
166. BOS, p 158.
167. BOS, pp 158-59.
168. BOS, p 229.
169. BOS, p 157.
170. BOS, p 156.
171. BOS, p 158.
172. Ibid.
173. BOS, p 159.
174. BOS, p 160.
175. Ibid.
Page 93
176. BOS, p 228.

177. BOS, pp 228-29. The brackets here and in succeeding quotations in this section indicate, for
ease of reading, the specific main idea referred to in Strawsons list.
178. BOS, p 229.
179. BOS, p 228.
180. BOS, pp 218-19.
181. BOS, p 229.
182. Ibid.
183. BOS, p 219.
184. BOS, pp 230-31.
185. BOS, p 230. Strawson footnotes Kants first Critique, op. cit., A 699-701/B 727-9.
186. Ibid.
187. BOS, p 231.
188. A discussion of the problems and possibilities of self-evidential thinking receives a brief
reference from Van Leer in the Conclusions of this thesis. See the material ahead referenced by note
227 below.
189. See the earlier references to Gendlins work in chapter 3 above.
190. See the Conclusions that follows for a more adequate description.
191. The awkwardness of the notion is examined below with the suggestion of Being-in-theworld as more adequate.
noted, is taken from Cavells Emerson, Coleridge, Kant.
195. ECK, p 68, quoting Emersons essay, Fate.
197. ECK, pp 68-9.
198. ECK, p 69.
199. Brown, pp 215-16, quoting Emersons essay, Nominalist and Realist.
Page 94
200. Ibid.
201. Brown, p 211.
202. Emerson, Compensation, p 175.
203. ECK, p 69.
204. Brown, pp 215-16.
205. Brown, p 216.
206. Brown, pp 216-17.
207. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 92 trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage Books, 1974).
208. Also to be mentioned are Leibnitz and Schopenhauer. See Rudolf Bernet, Drive: A
Psychoanalytical or Metaphysical Concept? in Refiguring Continental Philosophy: Selected Studies in
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Volume 32 (Chicago: DePaul University, 2007).
209. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, op. cit.
210. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990) p 136 writes, In fact, space in a certain sense is always and necessarily
equivalent to time so understood.
211. See notes 195 and 206 above.
213. Strawsons extended discussion of the topic of a whole is examined in chapter 5 above.
214. Brown, p 233.
215. Brown, p 234.
216. Erazim Kohak, Translators Introduction, in Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, op. cit., p
xiii, writes Central to Ricoeur's methodological apparatus is the concept of intentionality, brought to
the fore by Brentano and elaborated by Edmund Husserl. Intentionality here provides a disciplined
expression for the vague recognition of unity of experience by recognizing that consciousness is always
a consciousness of (. . . ). This does not mean simply that a discreet, given subject is conscious of an
equally discreet object, but rather that the basic datum of experience at its most immediate level is the
intentional unity of subject and object from which both the concept of a pure subject and of a pure object
are subsequently derived by reflexive consciousness. As recent experiments on sensory deprivation
have confirmed, there is no consciousness unless it is a consciousness of an objectand, conversely, an
object presents itself as an object only for a consciousness.
218. See Strawson Compares Kants Conditions and Formal Concepts, page 8 above.
Page 95
219. T. A. Webb, Seven Sons (Victoria, BC, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 1999) illuminates the
ages character through an intimate true story of the influential Washburn family as they engaged in
public service and rose to prominence across the North American continent.
220. It remains to be seen whether Emersons Over-soul takes on dimensions different from the
conventional interpretations of divinity in terms of self (synonymous since the ancient Greeks with
soul and until now as when Flaknes interpretation of synaesthesis is brought to bear for moderns as
well).
221. Russell B. Goodman, Pragmatism (NY: Routledge, 1995) p 23 writes, Long ignored not
only by students of pragmatism but by professional philosophers, Emersons writing received new and
inspired attention in the 1980s from such philosophical writers as Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier, and
Cornel West. Emerson now appears as not only a formidable thinker in his own right but also as a
source for Nietzsche and Heidegger and, in America, James and Dewey.
222. ECK, p 64.
223. Woody Allen, Thus Ate Zarathustra, New Yorker Magazine, July 3, 2006.
224. ECK, p 65. That Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be understood to share this romantic
perception of human doubleness I dare say helps account for my finding its problematic unavoidable
Wittgenstein perceiving our craving to escape our commonness with others, even when we recognize the
commonness of the craving; Heidegger perceiving our pull to remain absorbed in the common, perhaps
in the very way we push to escape it. For a variation of that comparison, see Richard Rorty,
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language in Heidegger (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
225. Aristotle's account of knowledge of the indemonstrable first premises of sciences is found
in Posterior Analytics II.19, long regarded as a difficult text to interpret. Briefly, what he says there is
that it is another cognitive state, nous (translated variously as insight, intuition, intelligence) which
knows them. There is wide disagreement among commentators about the interpretation of his account
of how this state is reached; I will offer one possible interpretation. First, Aristotle identifies his
problem as explaining how the principles can become familiar to us, using the same term familiar
(gnrimos) that he used in presenting the regress problem. What he is presenting, then, is not a method
of discovery but a process of becoming wise. Second, he says that in order for knowledge of immediate
premises to be possible, we must have a kind of knowledge of them without having learned it, but this
knowledge must not be as precise as the knowledge that a possessor of science must have. The kind of
knowledge in question turns out to be a capacity or power (dunamis) which Aristotle compares to the
capacity for sense-perception: since our senses are innate, i.e., develop naturally, it is in a way correct to
say that we know what e.g. all the colors look like before we have seen them: we have the capacity to
see them by nature, and when we first see a color we exercise this capacity without having to learn how
to do so first. Likewise, Aristotle holds, our minds have by nature the capacity to recognize the starting
points of the sciences. Robin Smith, 6.4 Knowledge of First Principles: Nous: Aristotles Logic,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2007 Edition) Edward N. Zalta (ed.) URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/aristotle-logic/>).
226. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, p xxix.
227. EE, p 184. [Emerson exposes a] sense of self that admits the logical priority of the private,
what here he calls the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres and elsewhere the
Page 96
incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man. ( . . .I)f he [man] wishes to
follow the logic of his assumptionsto court epistemic honestyit is to the divine answer of
disparity that he is inevitably led. The twoness that Emerson has felt from the beginning now reveals
itself as a kind of Cartesian schizophrenia: not merely a dualism that he happens to meet whenever he
tries to think unity, but a tension between experience and its presuppositions that logically requires a
simultaneous unity and duality.
228. Cavell Thinking of Emerson, pp 11-12.
229. For a current discussion of mood, see Robert E. Thayer, The Biopsychology of Mood and
Arousal (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989.)
231. EE, p 168.
232. EE, p 185.
233. Ibid.
234. EE, p 186.
235. Ibid.
236. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
237. ECK, p 73.
238. BOS, p 229.
239. ECK, p 68, quoting Fate.
240. Van Leers insightful description of Emersons accurate reliance on Kant, as early as
Nature, identifies a psychological paradox in Emersons original relation to the universe. Van Leer
writes, originality-in-relation implies [that] an original relates to other things by allowing them to
imitate it. Thus the implied equality between man and nature turns hierarchical, with man as the original
and nature as the copy. EE, pp 54-5. Kant escapes solipsism by logic; Emerson by anticipating a
philosophical confirmation of mood, or temperament, as a reliable reality free of paradox or, as Derrida
writes, anterior to logic.

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Page 1

Emersons Essay Experience

A PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY ON EMERSONS ESSAY EXPERIENCE

Emersons Essay Experience

That organizes this discussion into chapters corresponding to Emersons segments.

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

1. INTRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ...............

Strawson Compares Kants Conditions and Formal Concepts ..........

2. EXPERIENCE AS ILLUSION ...................................................................

3. EXPERIENCE AS TEMPERAMENT ........................................................

Other Views of Temperament and Mood ...........................................

4. EXPERIENCE AS REALITY .....................................................................

Emersons Principle of Compensation ...............................................

5. EXPERIENCE AS SUBJECTIVENESS ....................................................

Self-Object as Self-Subject as Self-Subject/Object ............................

Emersons Essay Experience

6. EXPERIENCE AS SUCCESSION, SURFACE, SURPRISE .....................

Two Worlds of Phenomena and Noumena ........................................

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY ............

Mood as a Sensible Intuition ..............................................................

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Strawson Compares Kants Conditions and Formal Concepts

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Sensible Intuition and Intellectual Intuition15

Emersons Essay Experience

Cavell characterizes Emersons sense of intellectual intuition in the following fashion.

Emersons Essay Experience

In his comments on Fate, Cavell illustrates that process of antagonizing antagonism

Emersons Essay Experience

Dictation Enacts Condition

Emersons Essay Experience

wistful admission of human contributory negligence, represented by, This dictation

Cavell interprets that as a key to Emersons conditions.

Doubt Generates a Mutuality of Skepticism and Belief33

So Brown holds for Emerson that,

Emersons Essay Experience

Emerson prefers to speak of belief and skepticism in dynamic terms of compensation,

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

The governance of temperament may limit an opposite excess in the constitution.

Emersons Essay Experience

Other Views of Temperament and Mood

Emersons Essay Experience

We feel handicapped when we are faced with chastening contradictions. In

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience

Emersons Essay Experience