Emerson and Self-Culture (review)

We live amidst an Emerson renaissance, and a philosophical one at that: counting the books by Buell (2003), Cavell (2003) and Saito (2005), this is the fourth remarkable book on Emerson to appear in the last five years by a philosopher, or bearing significantly on philosophical matters. This is quite a few, considering that John McDermott could observe thirty years ago, truly at the time: "It is striking that in the vast secondary literature on Emerson, distinctively philosophical considerations are virtually absent."¹ With the writings of Stanley Cavell, the first of which appeared just as McDermott expressed his concern, things have changed, and most likely will continue to do so.

An inspired book calls for an inspired review. And that is what John T. Lysaker's new book is: Emerson and Self-Culture is inspired and inspiring, insightful and insight-provoking. This is a distinctive, broad and personally flavored essay on and of self-culture not according to Emerson so much as in the light of his performative provocations. My joy with this book arises mostly from the directly engaging and usually eloquent and erudite way in which the author genuinely challenges his reader to reflect on and participate in a personal project of self-culture. The greatest merit of Lysaker's book is that it is an Emersonian one—in a sense one might not expect of scholarly work: this book calls for the reader to examine and most likely (if the author's sense is right) to change her or his life. Such a personal approach makes the book at once a noteworthy achievement and vulnerable to criticism.

As such, the thematics of Emerson and Self-Culture is nothing entirely novel. The question of culture and self-culture has been explicitly taken up in some relatively recent works on Emerson, most pertinently in David M. Robinson's Apostle of Culture (1982) and Cavell's writings on Emersonian perfectionism (1990, 2004). Self-Culture, besides being a central Unitarian theme and more generally a "watch-word" of the nineteenth century, runs through Emerson's early and late work (pp. 5–6, 199 n1, n3). Lysaker acknowledges his debt (among others) to Cavell, saying that his work "ambles along a path that Cavell's writings have helped clear" (p. x). The debt runs deeper than this gentle remark might suggest: a reader of Cavell will recognize borrowings of thoughts and ideas even where the book makes no mention of debt.

Yet Lysaker's personally involving take on self-culture sets his book apart from its predecessors. As stated in the outset, the book pursues Bildung, what the author regards "a practice of self-culture, a studied, even labored effort to cultivate one's life" (p. 1) He will "explore, interrogate, mostly champion" Emerson's path, hoping also—and I would say he succeeds in this—to advance it (ibid.). In drawing attention to self-culture in Emerson, this book is successful in two respects. The question of self-culture is always an urgent one for Emerson, recorded in such remarks as (Lysaker omits to quote these, probably as being too obvious) "The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man" and "This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture".² Secondly, the stripe of self-culture that Emerson's work as a whole can be seen to advocate, is not a strict conforming to some preordained principles but just the kind of reflexive and personal experiment Lysaker fashions. It is inevitable, however, that such a book stands in a somewhat ambivalent relation to Emerson (this may also be a merit—or just the kind of book that Emerson would have hoped his work to inspire). Lysaker is quite explicit about not wanting so much to write about Emerson as to use him "as a springboard for [his] own meditations" (p. 6). He thus chooses "to pursue self-culture in a quotation of the practices, insights, and problems that...