This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Frederick Ives Carpenter lectures ;) by Cavell Stanley

Author:Cavell, Stanley [Cavell, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

II. Finding as Founding

Taking Steps in Emerson’s “Experience”

Claiming, in my first lecture, the inheritance of a Wittgenstein who perceives the world to exist in a process of decline as pitiless as that described by Spengler, hence say by Nietzsche, a world beyond recovery by morality, in which moral relationship itself declines society (though not perhaps private relationship altogether), I claimed that, into the balance against this existence, Wittgenstein stations nothing more nor less than a practice of philosophy — and moreover a practice that is based on the most unpromising ground, a ground of poverty, of the ordinary, the attainment of the everyday.

My basis for such stakes, it is more and more clear to me, is the inheritance I ask of Emerson, of his underwriting, say grounding, of this poverty, this everydayness, nearness, commonness. But since my earlier inheritance of the later (of Wittgenstein, and before him of Austin) is equally the basis of my later inheritance of the earlier (of Emerson, and before him of Thoreau), what is basic?

In this second lecture I go on to describe the Emerson in question by asking in what way, or to what extent, or at what angle, Emerson stands for philosophy. The location from which I anticipate an answer here is the essay “Experience,” published in 1844, a work that good readers of Emerson generally agree represents some breakthrough in his enterprise.

The question concerning Emerson’s standing in or for philosophy is meant to question what is I believe the most widely shared, fixated critical gesture toward Emerson both on the part of his friends and of his enemies, from the time of James Russell Lowell in A Fable for Critics in 1848 to Harold Bloom in The New York Review of Books in 1984, in a review entitled “Mr. America,” namely the gesture of denying to Emerson the title of philosopher. I think of no one else in the history of thought about whom just this gesture of denial is characteristic, all but universal, as if someone perversely keeps insisting — perhaps it is a voice in the head — that despite all appearances, a philosopher, after all, is what Emerson is. But, of course, despite all appearances it must be Emerson himself whose insistence on some such question it is so urgent to deny. Yet we know that Emerson was himself convinced early that his “reasoning faculty” was weak, that he could never “hope to write Butler’s Analogy or an Essay of Hume” (Journal, March 18, 1824, Porte edition, p. 45). And nothing I find could be more significant of his prose than its despair of and hope for philosophy. Then maybe he is insisting on something else just as disturbing, for example to be pre-philosophical, to call for philosophy, as from his inheritors. But what is the state in which the claim of philosophy is refused and yet a claim upon philosophy is entered? It might be quite as remarkable, or rare, as the state of philosophy itself, so to speak, and no less urgent to deny.

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