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Reviewed by:
  • Society and Solitude, Twelve Chapters
  • Richard A. S. Hall
Society and Solitude, Twelve Chapters Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. H. G. Callaway. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

Howard Callaway’s new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Society and Solitude is an invaluable contribution to both the primary and secondary literature on Emerson. Its contribution to the primary sources is its use of the original 1870 edition of Emerson’s text, though with modernized spellings to facilitate the reader’s understanding. Its contribution to the secondary literature consists in the scholarly apparatus of page-by-page annotations, an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Callaway’s Society and Solitude is a worthy companion to his earlier edition of Emerson’s The Conduct of Life.

Like Stanley Cavell, Callaway treats Emerson not just as a poet, seer, and religious thinker—as important as these roles are—but as one of America’s premier philosophers. He rightly believes that a better understanding of Emerson the philosopher will deepen our understanding of him as a man of letters. Callaway’s aim is to advance our understanding and appreciation of Emerson’s philosophy in the context of both the American and European philosophical traditions. He does this through his copious and thorough annotations of Emerson’s text and his editorial introduction, both of which alone are worth the price of the book.

Like Gibbon’s footnotes in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Callaway’s footnoted annotations, which are conveniently located at the bottom of each page, are not to be missed. Here Emerson’s obscure and obsolete words are defined, his recondite allusions to historical persons and events are identified, and those philosophical ideas informing his text are noted and clarified. Thus, in his annotations, Callaway has provided the reader with a lexicon for, and both a historical and philosophical commentary on, Emerson’s text. No less valuable is Callaway’s introduction to the book, which could well stand alone as an important essay in its own right on Emerson’s philosophical thought, and to which I now turn.

In his introduction, Callaway artfully weaves together those distinctively Emersonian themes familiar to readers of Emerson—among which are individualism, freedom, law, and art—and how they figure and develop in Society and Solitude. He shows the paradoxes and tensions in Emerson’s thought together with their resolution in this book. The central tension here, as the book’s title suggests, is that between society and solitude. Emerson craved [End Page 118] solitude, associated with his advocacy of individualism and self-reliance. It has been said that reading Emerson is like overhearing one soliloquizing to himself on a mountaintop. Solitude for Emerson is the domain fitted for abstraction, theory, and the simplicity and unity of thought. However, these virtues are compromised if solitary existence is taken to extremes. Extreme solitariness invites intellectual claustrophobia and solipsism. The necessary corrective to the destructive excesses of solitude is participation in one’s larger society and culture. In this way the truth of the insights and ideas born in solitude may be tested and evaluated by informed public opinion, and what began as abstract theory may be fulfilled in practice. In Society and Solitude Emerson resists his own strong inclination toward solitude by demonstrating the necessity of tempering solitary existence with social engagement. Emerson’s nod to society is suggested by his putting “Society” first in the title of his book.

Callaway goes on to show that enfolded within the central tension between society and solitude is Emerson’s epistemological distinction between Reason and Common-Sense Understanding. Emerson’s Reason is borrowed directly from Coleridge and indirectly from Kant. Reason, which theorizes, simplifies, and unifies, is a function of solitude. His Common-Sense Understanding is derived from the Scottish Common-Sense Realists and, more broadly, from the British empiricists. Common-Sense Understanding, which is empirical and practical, is exercised socially.

Callaway notes that the tension between society and solitude also envelops the tension in Emerson’s thought between law and freedom. The concept of law, particularly moral or natural law, is a principal category of Emerson’s philosophy. Emerson, taking his...

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