A Philosophical Commentary On Emerson S Essay Quot Experience Quot

Emerson‟s Essay “Experience”
A PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY ON EMERSON’S 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 Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s Critique of Pure Reason provides a foundation for
Emerson‟s ideas. They differ over whether his additions to Kant are warranted. Stanley
Cavell argues that Emerson resolved Kant‟s phenomenal/noumenal split, and Lee Rust
Brown agrees. Cavell identifies Emerson‟s contribution as a philosophy of mood. Brown
explores the dynamics of biographical epistemology. David Van Leer does not agree.
Van Leer admires Emerson‟s respect for Kant‟s dilemmas and adherence to them. Is
Kant‟s duality also Emerson‟s? Yes and no.
PREFACE
Comments from four different books1
and a recent philosophical paper provide the
primary resources for this thesis on Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s system.
David Van Leer‟s careful textual analysis of Emerson‟s major philosophical essays
concludes that Emerson preserves his philosophical integrity by confirming Kant‟s two worlds‟
division of phenomenal and noumenal and thus remains under Kant‟s influence. Accordingly,
Emerson‟s uncertainty of coherent knowledge about nature‟s 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 Emerson‟s self-concept with Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s 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

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 Kant‟s
help, painted himself.
Stanley Cavell suggests that Emerson carried Kant‟s 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
Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s
two worlds by diagnosing them, or resolving them, as perspectives, as a function of what
Emerson calls “polarity.”4
Lee Rust Brown‟s book explores Emerson‟s interest in the empirical science of his day.
That perspective amplifies Cavell‟s comments on “Experience,” as Brown‟s 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. Strawson‟s analysis of
“condition” provides a foundation for the discussion that follows.
All the comments on “Experience” agree that Emerson‟s essay divides roughly into
seven segments that, although not subtitled as such, conform to Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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, Strawson‟s analysis of Kant‟s 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 Emerson‟s essays. Emerson‟s positive regard
for doubt allows Brown to relate empiricism to belief and an affirmation of holism, consistent
with Strawson‟s requirements.
“Experience as Illusion”: Emerson relies on Kant‟s analysis of the elusiveness of
knowledge. Emerson praises skepticism as a beneficial tool to evaluate perceptions. He

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 Ricoeur‟s 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-Ponty‟s 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 Emerson‟s struggle with the topics of subject,
object, self, other, and world are framed by Strawson‟s analysis. Strawson‟s suggestions for a
concept of the whole of things are outlined, which he describes as in harmony with Kant‟s
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 Emerson‟s relation to Kant becomes readily
evident. The three themes are grouped into a discussion of time, space, and Strawson‟s
notion of valid formal concepts for empiricism that can be applied to Emerson‟s 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 Cavell‟s 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 Emerson‟s relation to Kant. This
thesis does not ascribe preferences either to the Cavell/Brown reading or the Van Leer

reading. Instead it concludes that rethinking Emerson‟s work offers the opportunity to locate
him as understood best in a context of post-Romantic philosophical developments.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER
PREFACE..................................................................................................... 1
1. INTRODUCTION: CONDITIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ............... 7
Strawson Compares Kant‟s Conditions and Formal Concepts .......... 8
Sensible Intuition and Intellectual Intuition......................................... 13
Cavell on Emerson‟s Empiricism: Language Conditions Empirical
Experience .............................................................................. 13
Dictation Enacts Condition ...................................................... 16
Doubt Generates a Mutuality of Skepticism and Belief ...................... 17
2. EXPERIENCE AS ILLUSION ................................................................... 21
3. EXPERIENCE AS TEMPERAMENT ........................................................ 28
Other Views of Temperament and Mood ........................................... 30
Mood as a Topic of Philosophy ............................................... 32
Erazim Kohak on Paul Ricoeur ............................................... 34
What or Who Is a Self?...................................................................... 34
Problem of Memory as the Touchstone of Self-Identity........... 35
Merleau-Ponty and Chiasm..................................................... 36
Prospects for Ethics ................................................................ 39
4. EXPERIENCE AS REALITY..................................................................... 43
Emerson‟s Principle of Compensation ............................................... 48
5. EXPERIENCE AS SUBJECTIVENESS.................................................... 51
Self-Object as Self-Subject as Self-Subject/Object............................ 53
On the Whole of Things ..................................................................... 56
Strawson‟s Summary of Kant‟s “Dialectic” ......................... .... 57
Reason‟s Illusions—The Unconditioned ............................................ 58
A Series—As Either a Collection or Aggregate—Is Not a Whole 59
Author of Nature...................................................................... 61
A Framework of Substance..................................................... 62
Strawson‟s Alternative Analysis of the Noumenal.............................. 63

CHAPTER Page
6. EXPERIENCE AS SUCCESSION, SURFACE, SURPRISE..................... 66
Two Worlds of Phenomena and Noumena ........................................ 66
Universal Hindrance................................................................ 69
Epistemology ..................................................................................... 70
Belief/Doubt as a Polarity........................................................ 71
Surprise ............................................................................................. 72
7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY............ 74
Mood as a Sensible Intuition.............................................................. 77
Emerson‟s Claim to be Taken Literally............................................... 77
Consequences for Transcendentalism............................................... 79
Additional Questions.......................................................................... 80
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................... 82

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.” Emerson‟s reputation as a
thinker has been overshadowed by his achievements as a rhetorician, both writer and speaker,
such that one comparison of Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s 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 Emerson‟s view of human experience does
not ignore the achievements of Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s 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. Strawson‟s reading of the Critique of Pure
Reason. After that, the primary goal will be to test Stanley Cavell‟s contention that Emerson
can be understood as a descriptive philosopher of mood. In this “Introduction,” Emerson‟s
essay “Experience”—as interpreted by Lee Rust Brown and Cavell (along with Cavell‟s
comments on the later Emerson essay “Fate”9
)—will be compared with Strawson‟s
suggestions (and others) for what works and what does not work in Kant. The examination
intends to show that Emerson‟s view of the nature of experience approaches coherence with
what Strawson projects as valid extensions of Kant‟s conditions for empirical experience.

Strawson Compares Kant‟s Conditions and Formal Concepts
In a study of Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s contribution but pursues several paths that follow some
developments since Kant and that offer worthwhile advances supporting what ought to be
preserved of Kant‟s 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
objects—ultimately 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 Kant‟s 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. Kant‟s point is that, were we to
separate concepts from those conditions, the concepts become useless for knowledge of
objects. Strawson draws the reader‟s attention at this point by calling that cluster of ideas a
“truth” and pointing out that Kant‟s “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 Kant‟s 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.
Kant‟s 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

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.” Kant‟s “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 Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s “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 transcendent—not transcendental—idealism. 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

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
statements”—that 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.” Kant‟s “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 Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s subsequent employment—as a fixed, final, and
complete schema—of the distinction between “objective reality as it is in itself, things as they

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—
color—because 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 theory-
making 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 Kant‟s
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. Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s determined limitation for the noumenal, where Kant insists
that—while he does operate with one feature of his system allowing “a reality transcending
sensible experience altogether”—we 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 Kant‟s 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.

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.
Strawson‟s 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 possibilities—when absent any experience whatsoever—deserve to be taken
seriously. In Strawson‟s 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 ad-
vance by the scope of our actual knowledge and experience.14
At the end of this paper, the discussion will return to Strawson‟s analysis of Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s limits
and coherent with the natural sciences.

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 Kant‟s 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 Emerson‟s Empiricism: Language Conditions Empirical Experience
A better beginning for the Emerson/Kant comparison emerges from their references to
the concept of “condition.” Cavell uses Emerson‟s “Fate” to found the claim for viewing
Emerson as a philosopher. The examination there of the conditions of fate, freedom, and
foreknowledge rely on Kant‟s foundations but in order to include a wider array of experience.
It is as if in Emerson‟s writing (not in his alone, but in his first in America) Kant‟s 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 language—not 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
Wittgenstein‟s Later Philosophy” that what Wittgenstein means by “grammar” in his
grammatical investigations—as revealed by our system of ordinary language—is 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
Emerson‟s essay “Experience” receives most of the attention here, but Cavell employs
a later Emerson essay “Fate” to expose Emerson‟s philosophical framework in “Experience,”
located in the critical significance of “conditions.” After warning that Emerson‟s writing “is as
indirect and devious as, say, Thoreau‟s is, but more treacherous,” because more genteel,
Cavell writes,

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 Emerson‟s sense of “intellectual” intuition in the following fashion.
“Condition” is a key word of Emerson‟s “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
Cavell‟s assertion that Emerson is turning the Critique upon itself appeals to the
distinction between one‟s 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 Kant‟s interest in
skepticism but not Kant‟s distrust of it. Cavell‟s contention is that Emerson (as for Cavell)
respects skepticism that deserves to be taken seriously. He portrays Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 language—to the fact that we are subject to expression and comprehen-
sion, victims of meaning—is 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

Cavell asks if Emerson‟s 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 Pascal‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 language—dictation 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 Emerson‟s
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 Emerson‟s 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

emerging in the usage of “dictation.” The problem of human freedom is also a problem of
human bondage, as freedom itself becomes a bond. Emerson‟s 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 dictation”—we 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 God‟s or nature‟s 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 mine—Emerson spoke of circumstances as “tyrannous”—were 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 Fate—for example as predetermination, providence, calculation,
predisposition, fortune, laws of the world, necessity—and 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 Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 words—not 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.
Emerson‟s 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

wistful admission of human contributory negligence, represented by, “This dictation
understands itself,” and “the essay [Fate] sets this understanding as our task.”
Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s “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 man‟s 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
Emerson‟s 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 èpoche.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 world‟s 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, 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, Brown‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 skepticism‟s 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.‟” Emerson‟s 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

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 Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s paradoxical dilemma between
nature‟s 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 sides—both the limits and the
arrayed meanings—of 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

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.

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 life‟s 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 question—but 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

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 man‟s” 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 fir-
tree. 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:
“Yonder…rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow.” But my own land “only holds
the world together.”

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 man‟s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of
literature—take 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
Emerson‟s 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
stumblebums—who are perfectly healthy but just cannot stop wandering, and whose energy
levels, we complain, are minimal—we 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.”

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?
Emerson‟s 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 world‟s 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 activity—it suggests itself in senses of
something freestanding and absolute—and 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 is—it 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

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 Kant‟s 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 Kant‟s approach to
skepticism is not Emerson‟s.
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 Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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 world‟s 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,

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 Emerson‟s loss of his dearest object, it is the dry
irony of perception‟s 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 Emerson‟s reality is what Cavell
calls “Emersonian Moral Perfection,” which is realized progressively.69
Emerson‟s 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 person‟s experience of experience, Emerson‟s 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 Hegel‟s work, one must assume he was well
aware of it—particularly since Transcendentalism‟s 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 Hegel‟s
work.71
Emerson‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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

other reason than its resonance in the Western tradition, which reaches back at least to Plato‟s
portrait of Socrates.

CHAPTER 3
EXPERIENCE AS TEMPERAMENT72
Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s 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.
Emerson‟s 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 cliché, “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 Emerson‟s 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

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 Emerson‟s
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
Emerson‟s 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 War‟s 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.
Emerson‟s 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, Emerson‟s 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

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.
Emerson‟s 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 Kant‟s 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 ex-
perience. But I hear Kant working throughout Emerson‟s 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

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 Emerson‟s 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
Emerson‟s point in Nature, that “few adult persons can see nature.”78
We feel handicapped when we are faced with “chastening contradictions.” In
Emerson‟s 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
Emerson‟s 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

time) results in a distortion—a 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
investigator‟s personal history or ambitions. Only then is there some assurance that what the
investigator has found anyone else can also find. Kant‟s 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 investigator‟s 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 science‟s 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 Cavell‟s
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

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 don‟t 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 thought—and 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 doesn‟t 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 doesn‟t
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 other‟s speech, is part
of what we are, the living we are. And so it is—always already involved in our living,
whatever we may then actually say or not say.82

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 Ricoeur‟s 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 ends—the 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 Ricoeur‟s 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 Emerson‟s difficulties points to his reliance on the notion
of intuition. Emerson‟s use of that term stands in contrast with Kant‟s 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
Emerson‟s 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.

Since Emerson‟s time, those issues have occupied the attention of any number of
philosophers. In a recent paper the philosopher April Flakne analyzes Merleau-Ponty‟s 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 Derrida‟s 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
Emerson‟s work.
Problem of Memory as the Touchstone of Self-Identity
To set the stage, a brief review of Van Leer‟s interpretation of Emerson‟s 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. Emerson‟s first sentence
is, “Where do we find ourselves?” Van Leer puts it in this context:
In terms of the essay‟s initial question, how can I distinguish between a single self at
many places—where do I find my self?—and a simple multitude of persons—where 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.
(Emerson‟s) 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 Wittgenstein‟s famous analogy, to use
one memory as the subjective justification of another is like using a mental image of a
timetable to check the train‟s 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 self-
understanding. 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.

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 Hume‟s 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 Emerson‟s 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
consciousness—the 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 Emerson‟s opening question of „where‟ is
“In the Ί 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 one‟s own.91
Thus Emerson‟s 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 itself—a 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 Derrida‟s 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 self-
knowledge. Flakne summarizes her essay as follows:

A Philosophical Commentary On Emerson S Essay Quot Experience Quot

A Philosophical Commentary On Emerson S Essay Quot Experience Quot

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