From self-reliance to that which relies: Emerson and critique as self-criticism

Abstract

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s teachers for example—is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world.

Keywords:

• Emerson
• critical thinking
• exemplarity
• teacher student relation

Notes

1. For a good overview of the history of the concept of ‘criticism,’ see Koselleck (1988).

2. Cf. Kant (1972, §7), and Cavell (1976, p. 90).

3. Cf. Wittgenstein (1958, §§19, 23, 242 and pp. 174, 226). See also Forsberg (2012).

4. Cf. Cavell (1994, p. 39).

5. In a similar vein, Cavell reads Emerson as ‘proposing, or provoking us to, a task of transfiguring, reconceiving, the everyday threads that have unnoticeably wound together our present forms of subservience and of violence.’ (Cavell, 2003, p. 9)

6. This line of thought is reminiscent of the line of argument that. Michel Foucault brings into view in Technologies of the Self, where he argues that ‘We are inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality,’ because we have inherited a Christian morality in which ‘self-renunciation’ functions as ‘the condition for salvation’ (p. 22). This is contrasted with ancient thinking in which ‘taking care of oneself’ rather functioned as a prerequisite for a care for others and one’s society. Foucault’s example of how Alcibiades fails as a politician due to him not taking sufficient, or the right kind of, care for himself is here illuminating. Foucault (1988, pp. 22–26).

7. See Foucault (1986, pp. 88–96). (My thanks to Sharon Rider for reminding me of these passages in Foucault’s work.).

8. See Cavell (1989, pp. 79, 81, 114).

9. Cf. Cavell (1992, p. 26), and Forsberg (2015).

10. It should be noted that this is not to be seen as a simple task that one can perform once, and then be done with. Finding oneself at home in one’s language, in the everyday as it were, is therefore a task that needs to be undertaken over and over again. One can see how this thought is suggested in Cavell’s remark ‘as soon as you have one word to cling to, it fractions, or expands into others.’ Cavell (1992, p. 13)

11. I am here borrowing a formulation of Iris Murdoch’s. Murdoch (1999, p. 12). For a more substantial discussion of these themes, see Forsberg (2013).

12. See Cavell (1989, p. 10).

13. My thanks to Nora Hämäläinen and the editors for valuable comments. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Program Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Center for Ethics as Study in Human Value,’ registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.