[MD] Emerson and Pirsig

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dave,

DMB said:
>From the little I recall, Emerson's term for the larger mind was the 
"All". This has a different flavor than the Hegelian Absolute. You 
know, the "All" would be more like a pluralistic totality rather than a 
single, unified, rationally intelligible Mind.

Matt:
Maybe a different flavor, I think.  (I'm also not convinced that the 
common notion of what Hegel's "Absolute" amounted to was 
interpreted very well by his immediate descendents, this on the basis 
of recent interpreters like Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, and Robert 
Brandom.)  Emerson's patterning of concepts like "unity" and "rational" 
and the like make it hard sometimes to see just what kind of flavor 
this is.  At some points, unity is colored brightly, as a natural extension 
of, as you say, "All."  The "unity in variety" (in Part V of Nature) has 
your sense of "pluralistic totality."  But at other times "unity" is colored 
differently.  Compare in Part VIII of Nature, when he says "this 
tyrannizing unity in [humanity's] constitution," to the young mind's being 
"tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct" in "The American Scholar," 
and then with the good version again of "The Over-Soul," as Emerson 
equates at the beginning the Over-Soul with Unity.  And the Over-Soul 
is explicitly not reducible to "intellect," and is basically his stand-in for 
what is often termed the viewpoint of Dynamic Quality.

DMB said:
I very distinctly remember being impressed by Emerson. Maybe even 
a bit astonished. He's more like a prophet than a philosopher. But I 
still tend to see him as William James's godfather and have lots to 
learn. Also, in emails, Pirsig gave me the impression that American 
Transcendentalism is an natural extension of the Protestant 
movement in the sense that even more emphasis is put upon the 
individual to grapple with truth and meaning even more 
independently of traditional forms. I also got the impression that 
Transcendentalism begins and ends with Emerson.

Matt:
In an interview, Rorty once suggested that Transcendentalism's 
relationship to Emerson is analogous to Deconstruction's relationship 
to Derrida: both are names for people trying to figure out what a 
genius is doing, and the codifications that came out of it don't stand in 
very well for the genius.  (That goes for Absolute Idealism to Hegel, 
for that matter.  And religion in general, come to think of it.)  The only 
other geniuses worth susssing out of the movement, I think, are 
Thoreau and Margaret Fuller.

I think seeing American Transcendentalism as an extension of 
Protestantism is about right.  (I've, too, used Protestantism, following 
Rorty and many others, as a marker in the history of thought for the 
increased role of the individual, most lately in a piece on Rorty 
(http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/02/religion-utilitarian-ethics-of-belief.html), 
but in regards to Pirsig in "Pirsig Institutionalized" in articulating what 
I mean by "antiauthoritarianism," a sense potted in shorter form in 
"Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism" 
(http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/12/philosophical-antiauthoritarianism.html).  
I also have some early reflections on Emerson here: 
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/01/american-lit-notebook-emerson.html)

Cornel West is one of the only people to spend a lot of time trying to 
fit Emerson into a narrative of American philosophy, as specifically the 
fountainhead of pragmatism (in The American Evasion of Philosophy).  
West also defends a notion of "prophetic pragmatism" in that book.

Matt