Emerson's Literary Philosophy

This new study of RalphWaldo Emerson deserves praise for its effort to place his writing within the tradition of philosophy as a way of life. Drawing on the work of Pierre Hadot, Reza Hosseini proposes a long-overdue reframing of Emerson’s philosophy that departs from epistemologizing readings and returns to the fundamental question of the conduct of life. To this end, the author draws on the influence of the Socratic tradition but also on Emerson’s abiding passion for the Persian poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi. This combination of classical and Eastern sources constitutes by far the most original contribution of the book. What the two traditions share, on this account, is a vision of literary excellence as furthering a philosophical mode of existence. The ‘essence’ of Emerson’s ‘literary philosophy’ lies in the adoption of this transcultural model for his own writing (145). The Introduction and the second and final chapters (‘Socrates and Emerson on Areté’ and ‘Emerson’s Literary Humanism: The Persian Connection’) define the concepts informing the study as a whole. Areté, or ‘excellence’—with Emersonian self-reliance being the ‘arêté of the mind’ (26)— serves the ends of psychagogia, or ‘influencing the soul through the power of words’ (6), which enables a move beyond the aporiae of the early Socratic dialogues (12). Thus literary excellence is less an end in itself than ameans of ‘moral persuasion to change our way of seeing the world’ (5), the better to escape aporetic impasses by responding positively to philosophy’s call for a new art of living in the world with intelligence, beauty, and grace. In the author’s view, the Persian concept of Adab, or ‘literary humanism’ (7, 122), best captures this broader cultural, philosophical, and practical aim that takes us beyond the merely belletristic, on the one hand (123–124), and the egoistic limits of self-culture or Bildung, on the other (7, 123). The third chapter focuses on Emerson’s style, and it is here that the most serious conceptual and methodological problems first appear. Taken together, they reflect unresolved theoretical difficulties with the term literary —by which the author really means ‘humanist’—and a problematic practical relation to the Emersonian text itself—a relation all too often distant or mediated where it should be direct and demonstrative. ‘The question of style’ (35) is answered with summaries of scholarly opinion on the subject Philosophical Papers