Reza Hosseini - Emerson’s Literary Philosophy

Cover illustration: The Old Manse in Concord, MA - Norman Eggert / Alamy Stock Photo

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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 writings 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 Emersons 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 didnt think seeing was overrated because he didnt 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.

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. Matthiessens classic, American Renaissance, set up an example of literary criticism for me, free from pseudo-profound theorizations and marked by its lively prose and shrewd observations about a generation whose unreserved appetite for life was their common ground.