Emerson and Self-Culture (review)

Ralph Waldo Emerson has attracted sustained attention from literary scholars for more than a century but little from philosophers, despite such notable exceptions as Dewey's 1903 "Ralph Waldo Emerson—Philosopher of Democracy." This situation began to change in 1979 with the first of a series of papers on Emerson by Stanley Cavell, collected in his Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, 2003). We now have the first monograph on Emerson by a philosopher, John Lysaker's Emerson and Self-Culture . Lysaker has clearly learned from Cavell, but this is very much his own book.

Lysaker is concerned neither with source criticism nor with Emerson's influences on or relations to other philosophical writers (such as Nietzsche) but, rather, with what it means to "take a text personally." In the strong first chapter, "Taking Emerson Personally," Lysaker uses his own interests and activities—as a rock musician, for example—as lenses through which to "receive" Emerson's corpus. The chapter contains a probing discussion of the receptive reading that Emerson's words demand and initiate and interesting discussions of writing by Barbara Packer—a leading literary critic of Emerson—and Walter Benjamin.

In his second chapter, "The Genius of Nature," Lysaker takes up a major theme of the book, the entwining of the metaphysical and the ethical in Emerson's thought. He considers the tangled Emersonian topic of quotation, which for Emerson is both unavoidable and problematic, for if you are quoting even "a saint or sage" (as Emerson puts it in "Self-Reliance"), you are not saying your own words, not being yourself. Lysaker argues that Emerson finds "lines of exteriority running through our very interiority," so that our "interiority" is never unmixed (37). The trick of self-culture is to "make use of inherited texts and thoughts" without being overwhelmed by them. One must learn, as Lysaker thinks of it, to "quote well" (39). Lysaker also engages the difficult question of the influence of moods on self-culture, an issue central to Emerson's essay "Experience" and to Cavell's interpretation of Emerson as offering an "epistemology of moods." Lysaker's subtle discussion and analysis end with a discussion of two kinds of genius in Emerson: genius as talent and as ecstasy. As he puts it, "One's self-culture must engage the temperament and talents into which one has been thrown, a kind of natuive affinity for certain ranges of the world." But on the other hand, one is equally subject to "the incalculable sallies of life-changing insight that Emerson terms 'involuntary perceptions'" (51).

The book's third chapter, "Reflecting Eloquence," considers the place of freedom in an eloquent or expressive life. For Emerson, we are effects of our character, but we also contribute to it. Emerson sees us as "beings who must play along with our condition" (67), who must learn to act on "what our genius affords in order to better see what our genius entails" (72). This chapter contains useful discussions of issues raised by two of the best literary critics of Emerson, Sharon Cameron and Richard Poirier.

Chapter 4, "Divining Becoming," offers a nuanced interpretation of Emerson's views about metamorphosis. Lysaker rejects the "divine" ontological backing for Emerson's confident "theodical path," in the wake of the "collapse of theistically grounded orders of meaning" that Nietzsche announced as "the death of God" (109). He also acknowledges, however, Emerson's "flirtation with a Satanic lineage" (as when he says in "Self-Reliance," "If I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil") and his "de-deification of Jesus" (113, 112).

Chapter 5, "On the Edges of Our Souls," concerns the problem of achieving self-culture in a universe without God. It contains original analyses of Emerson's complex essay "Experience," responding particularly to Cavell's many writings about the essay. Lysaker puts some of Emerson's most interesting phenomenological observations in his own apt words, for example: "What arrives with genius is a prospect" (134–35) and "Our...