Word: emerson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that 19th century writers should write a prose that seems so stabilizing in the late 20th. Ralph Waldo Emerson is good to have beside the bed between 3 and 6 in the morning. So is the book of Job. Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration...
Unlike many who seek to revive Emerson, Cavell does not apologize for the excesses and eccentricities of Emerson's prose. He cultivates them, demonstrating the sense in which Emerson's writing constitutes a manner of thinking that can be characterized as a kind of "transfiguration"--of the terms and images of Plato, of Kant, of everyday experience...
Cavell takes this writing (a "conversion of words") as representing a dissatisfaction with what is traditionally understood by 'thinking' and as spurring an alternative mode--one securely tethered to natural language yet which represents the overcoming of thinking as grasping (what Emerson calls that "most unhandsome part of of our condition"). Here Cavell aligns his Emerson with Heidegger...
Cavell's treatment of the Kripke reading reflects his longtime concern with establishing the "seriousness of Wittgenstein's investment in the ordinary." According to Cavell, Wittgenstein shares with Emerson an attitude toward thinking characterized by an "entrustment of ordinary words." This attitude, if I understand it, is also the condition for the "Conversation of Justice"--the conversation whereby a democratic society comes to know and to criticize itself from within...
Although Cavell's Moral Reasoning course draws on much of the material found in the book, Conditions is not an introduction to philosophy. It presupposes considerable familiarity with Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Rawls. But the book does serve as an introduction to Cavell's thought, to his stunning literary interpretations, his mind-bending prose and his commitment to the future of American philosophy. As Cavell himself notes, the lectures are open-ended--their achievement, in part, lies in the relations they establish and the foundations they lay. And so, while not as satisfying as some of Cavell's other work...