Emerson's Literary Philosophy

170 Pages·2020·1.916 MB·English

by  Reza Hosseini

Emerson’s
Literary Philosophy
Reza Hosseini
Emerson’s Literary Philosophy
“Positioning Emerson within both ancient and contemporary philosophical tra-
ditions, this study goes far in revealing the great nineteenth-century American
thinker’s significance in his own time and often refreshingly in his own words.
From his Platonic and even Persian underpinnings to his relevance to analytic
philosophy, his ideas as well as the rhetoric used to express them demonstrate
how and why his way of thinking about the world in both theory and practice
continues to warrant such close attention.”
—Roger Sedarat, Queens College, City University of New York, Author of
Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry
“Reza Hosseini offers a formidable yet intimately rendered report on the rela-
tionship between philosophy and literature as expressed by Ralph Waldo
Emerson. With a keen perception of the ancient Greek and medieval Persian
influences on our writer—especially attributes of moral fervor and poetic inten-
sity—Hosseini draws us into illuminating conversations with a bountiful range
of contemporary scholarship: from Pierre Hadot and Alasdair MacIntyre on
philosophy as a way of life to Thomas Nagel and George Kateb on the secular
and the religious, and, as interpreted by Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Cavell,
literature’s claims to philosophy, and vice versa. In addition to a surprise and
satisfying analysis of Raymond Carver’s sense of ordinary language as it inter-
sects with Emerson’s prose, Hosseini’s engagement with the Persian literary
humanists (Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi) makes for a memorable transnational
appreciation of Emerson’s capacious contributions to philosophy—how it is
written and how it is lived.”
—David LaRocca, Cornell University, Author of On Emerson
and Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor
and editor of Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of
Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell
Reza Hosseini
Emerson’s Literary
Philosophy
Reza Hosseini
School of Social Science
The Independent Institute of Education, MSA
Johannesburg, South Africa
ISBN 978-3-030-54978-7 ISBN 978-3-030-54979-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54979-4
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For Ellia
Preface
Ralph Waldo Emerson was at his best when he was talking about the
beginnings: the beginning of the world, the beginning of virtue, the
beginning of wonder, and the formation of “beautiful sentiments.” He
even wrote of the beginning of despair when he found himself “in a series
of which we do not know the extremes.” He wanted his lectures and writ-
ings to be the beginning of something in his audience and his readers,
and for a while he wrote about nothing but the beginnings. “How do we
see the world?”, as a commentator has noted, was the question of his
time, and Emerson wanted to know how do we see the world anew? This
book is a collection of essays about Emerson’s thoughts on the beginnings
of philosophy, which was the same to him as seeing the world anew. As
such, seeing was an achievement to him. And, in response to the cynic,
he didn’t think seeing was overrated because he didn’t think philosophy
was overrated. This way of seeing, of course, has far-reaching implications
and in what follows I have tried to discuss ones that I found more pressing.
I have been thinking about the central ideas of this book over the last
five years, during which I have benefited from the feedback and support
of many friends and colleagues and anonymous reviewers of different
journals who influenced the orientation of my project as a whole.
I thank Kamini Naidoo, the Academic Head of IIE MSA, and Brenda
van Wyk, the Dean of Research and Postgraduate Studies at the
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viii Preface
Independent Institute of Education, for their support, and I am grateful
to Louise Du Toit and the Philosophy Department at Stellenbosch
University for their generous Fellowship during which I wrote the initial
versions of some of the chapters in the form of articles. I have secured
permissions to use some of the materials from the following essays:
• Hosseini, Reza. 2018. Emerson and the “Pale Scholar”. Dialogue:
Canadian Philosophical Review 57: 115–135. © Cambridge
University Press.
• Hosseini, Reza. 2019a. Religious Gestures and Secular Strengths:
Emerson, Kateb, and Nagel on the Religious Temperament. Religious
Studies https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412519000453. © Cambridge
University Press.
• Hosseini, Reza. 2019b. Emerson and the Question of Style. Philosophy
and Literature 43: 369–383. © Johns Hopkins University Press.
At the moment, I can think of two more debts to acknowledge here.
Late in the process of writing this work I came to realize that the
Emersonian project is an extension of the Socratic project, mainly thanks
to thoughtful works of Dylan Futter on Socrates’ search for wisdom.
Likewise, F. O. Matthiessen’s classic, American Renaissance, set up an
example of literary criticism for me, free from pseudo-profound theoriza-
tions and marked by its lively prose and shrewd observations about a
generation whose unreserved appetite for life was their common ground.
Johannesburg, South Africa Reza Hosseini
April 2020
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Socrates and Emerson on Areté 11
3 The Question of Style 35
4 The “Pale Scholar” 57
5 Religious Gestures and Secular Strengths 81
6 Experience 103
7 Emerson’s Literary Humanism: The Persian Connection 121
Bibliography 149
Index 159
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About the Author
Reza Hosseini is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Independent
Institute of Education, MSA, and the author of Wittgenstein and Meaning
in Life (2015).
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Abbreviations1
EE, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to
Cavell, 2013
EL, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 1983
JMN, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16
Vols. 1960–1982
W, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 Vols. 1883–1893.
1 The following works have been abbreviated. The full details can be found in the bibliography.
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