THE ARGUMENT OF LITERATURE: EMERSON, PHILOSOPHY, AND TRADITIONS OF CRITICISM by Matthew Kundert __________________________ Copyright © Matthew Kundert 2019 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2019 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Matthew Kundert, titled "The Argument of Literature: Emerson, Philosophy, and Traditions of Criticism," and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: J. Paul~ Hurh Q~ Date: $ /3/ <1 J. Paul Hurh Date: s;-111 Date: Charles Scruggs Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Date: 5/'3/t'f J. Paul~ Hurh Dissertation Committee Chair Department of English 3 Table of Contents Abstract 4 Prelude 5 Chapter One 16 Chapter Two 78 Chapter Three 124 Chapter Four 183 Postlude 239 Works Cited 254 4 Abstract The Argument of Literature: Emerson, Philosophy, and Traditions of Criticism offers four interpretations of critical moments of the career of Emerson’s work. It argues that putting Emerson’s work in the canon of philosophy requires one to redefine what philosophy is— roughly, thinking really hard about sometimes abstract questions, being able to go up and down the scale of life, back and forth across the knowledge of our times. The particular argument Emerson makes on behalf of literature is that since philosophy should be defined loosely and blandly as the “love of wisdom,” and wisdom can be found anywhere, one should construct the conversations of philosophy across time with more liberal principles of inclusion, such as the abstract conversations about critical self-image found in every humanistic discipline. Chapter One charts how Emersonians came to be trained in English departments, and what affect that has had on their view of Emerson. It addresses what happens if one focuses too much in one’s education on argument and loses track of one’s self-image, how one fits into the rest of the world. Chapter Two then takes up the specific moment of argument surrounding Emerson’s Divinity School Address, treating Unitarianism as a microcosm of democracy. It argues that Emerson’s rejection of authority forces the philosophical question, “How do we treat authority over ideas if there is to be freedom of thought?” Chapter Three then works out, in a systematic way in the sphere of theory, how one can maintain certain existential commitments, like a coherent self or social relations, if one takes seriously Emerson’s radical antiauthoritarianism. Chapter Four gives a full reading of Emerson’s essay on Plato, Emerson’s clearest account of what he thinks good philosophical work looks like once one relinquishes authority in the way he has. 5 Prelude Toward a Philosophical Large Criticism Jerome B. Schneewind’s Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy would be a good paradigm for the study of Emerson undertaken here, but while his preface begins, “Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics is an acknowledged masterpiece of moral philosophy” (vii), we could not substitute any title of Emerson’s into that sentence. Despite being acknowledged masterpieces, Emerson’s writings are not acknowledged masterpieces of philosophy. This fact, more than any other, has dictated the odd shape of the following chapters—where Schneewind could begin with a simple biography of Sidgwick, move to chapters condensing the most important predecessors that were his philosophical context (Reid, Coleridge, Bentham, etc.), and end with a prolonged reconstruction of the argument of the masterpiece, that we aren’t even quite sure what Emerson’s works are masterpieces of makes such reconstruction less straightforward. To be sure, there has been growth in reading Emerson as a philosopher in the last 40 years. However, this growth has occurred among literary critics, and is not mirrored in American philosophy departments. This further fact has had an effect on the way we then receive Emerson as a philosopher. The very idea of reconstructing the argument of Emerson’s work is a good signpost for this divide—American philosophy is largely driven by the exchange of arguments, and American literary critics are largely interested in other things and indeed are sometimes attracted to Emerson because he doesn’t seem to offer any arguments. So Emerson hasn’t become part of the American philosophy canon, and received reconstructive treatment like a Sidgwick, because there hasn’t seemed anything to reconstruct. And literary critics aren’t 6 generally interested in doing it because many tend to agree—Emerson’s doing something different, so why reconstruct arguments? There have been, though, a mounting number of fine efforts at reconstruction. For one of the central reasons for such reconstruction is to put a philosopher in conversation with other philosophers—what Wilfrid Sellars calls a “philosophical space.” But the principal effect on the reception of Emerson as a philosopher-kind that is opaque to American philosophy departments is that good work done on him can feel out of touch with each other, sometimes confined to different disciplinary contexts. One reason for this is that philosophers in America are often the only curators of their figures, and so the philosophical problems that arise from the form of reception don’t often have challengers. As the space closes itself off, the problems ossify and become themselves the means of protection from outsiders. Changing this, though, is difficult as new critical-reception spaces arise to fill the gaps, but themselves ossify their own different problems, vaguely resembling the problems of previous spaces but in not enough detail to make anyone sure they’re talking about the same thing. And while this, too, is changing, the pace is much slower. The present study has as one hope that the pace might be quickened by the work done here. The individual studies undertaken by the chapters hang together by taking up several different aspects of Emerson as a philosopher. They are bound together by the same braid of themes, and these themes are internally related to each other. Since a common precept for the philosopher is to have explicit theses, the first idea is a broad methodological precept, necessary to philosophical reconstruction: the interchangeability of literary themes and philosophical theses. Very simply, a thesis is the explicit reconstruction of the implicit point or significance of a theme. If a thematic in a writer is a tune returned to over and over, then to elicit its 7 philosophical significance is to give a reason for the rhythm of its return that connects to the preoccupations and positions of philosophers. Without this connection, there can be no conversation. “Thesis,” in this sense, can be taken in the old Greek musical sense of a stressed downbeat, just as “theme” is still used to talk of musical patterns. The first theme, then, is the conversation theme. The central metaphor for reconstructing the history of intellectual endeavor for philosophers like Sellars, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Rorty is the conversation. It is a metaphor that allows us to imagine intellectual interactions across time and space about topics of mutual interest. And of course, imagining such a topic for conversation partners using different languages and from different cultures almost always involves beginning with the conversations each had more locally—who or what they were responding to by saying something “philosophical.” The metaphor also suggests the process of reconstruction via the idea of translation—just as strange sounds have to be reconstructed into a language one knows how to negotiate, so do odd attitudes, techniques, and tones have to be treated as conversational transitions that make a kind of sense. This further underscores the ethical and practical nature of philosophical activity. For a contrarian might deliberately frustrate a conversation, and prove to be annoying at best; likewise, someone who never means what they say might not be someone worth talking to. But what if such frustrations had a further meaning for that particular conversation? What if techniques of frustrating the surface of what one says like irony, allusion, tropes of all kinds, were pointed? The creation of a meaning “below” the surface of a text, often through trope, is of course a hallmark of literature, especially as opposed to philosophy (often from the philosopher’s point of view). The philosophy and literature theme therefore comes to the surface often from the point of view of Plato’s “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” It has mainly been 8 philosophy picking the fight and setting the terms by enforcing associations between the activity of philosophy and things like argument, system, reasoning, reflection, inquiry, etc. This has given weight to the quarrel as a charged thesis that some in our recent history, like Rorty and Jacques Derrida, have wished to challenge. In a polemical situation, however, it can be easy to forget that genres are both found and created. So while Rorty wants to challenge the distinction between philosophy and literature in order to blur the difference between the two, he is on the other hand perfectly well aware that real differences do occur between writers self-consciously opting into different genres. This creates a temporal dimension to generic differentiation. The intentions, functions, and valences of writings are historical products of creating traditions, and being put into traditions by later writers.