What's the Use of Reading Emerson Pragmatically? the Example of William James

Abstract

For those who see Emerson as a seminal figure in American pragmatism, 2003 marks not only the bicentennial of Emerson's birth, but a century since William James and John Dewey delivered addresses that constitute their most explicit public pronouncements on their great American precursor. While the recent renaissance in Emerson studies has coincided with a rediscovery of Emerson's incipient pragmatism, the full import of his affinities to the American pragmatists remains under-appreciated--especially in regards to how we are to read and assess the body of his work. Much criticism persists in reading Emerson as a naively optimistic idealist of the monistic variety, and even those who stress the pluralistic nature of Emerson's vision question just how far, and to what purpose, one can claim the "pragmatic" character of his thought. This issue can be illuminated by considering how William James himself applied his pragmatic method in reading and assessing Emerson's writings. James asserts that the true meaning of competing philosophical beliefs lies in their practical consequences for human behavior--in their ability to guide our actions to results that satisfy our human needs. For James, the most "pregnant" of such philosophical conflicts is that between monism and pluralism, for only a pluralistic universe, one with genuine contingency and novelty, can satisfy our need to make moral judgments and contribute meaningful efforts toward improving our world. Moreover, James insists that pluralism is an anti-absolutist view, capable of acknowledging a great deal of determinism and unification in the world, capable of seeing the world as both "one" and "many," so long as there exists some small, yet sufficient, degree of indeterminacy. Short of adopting a truly absolutist determinism, James concludes, assertions of unity (such as one finds peppered throughout Emerson's writings) are relatively empty statements that express a sheer wonder at the existence of the universe. In his 1903 centenary address, James applies these arguments to assert that Emerson's sensitivity to "the rank diversity of individual facts" made his vision essentially pluralistic, and he pragmatically locates the fundamental pluralism of Emerson's thought in its prescriptions for human behavior: far from an "indiscriminate" monistic optimism, Emerson endorses a melioristic activism that prefigures the ethics of both James and Dewey. James' assessment helps highlight how Emerson expresses such pluralistic attitudes in essays such as "Self-Reliance," "Nominalist and Realist," and "The Uses of Great Men." In another regard, however, it is necessary to extend James' logic beyond his own conclusions. As his reaction to the conclusion of Emerson's essay "History" shows, James concluded that Emerson's voicing of conflicting perspectives, while not compromising the essential pluralism of his vision, was evidence of his failure to achieve philosophic consistency. Following critics such as Poirier and Cavell, we are much more likely to see Emerson's articulation of antagonistic views as a deliberate, perspectivist strategy that in fact anticipates James' own pragmatic emphases on action, transition, and an anti-dogmatic openness. ********** For those who see Ralph Waldo Emerson as a seminal figure in the tradition of American pragmatism, 2003 marks a double anniver-sary: it is not only the bicentennial of Emerson's birth, but also a century since William James and John Dewey, America's most influential prag-matic philosophers, delivered, on the occasion of Emerson's centennial, addresses that constitute their most explicit public pronouncements on their great American precursor. (1) Perhaps most striking, on this dual anni-versary, is the degree to which common perceptions of Emerson--both amongst academic critics and in American culture at large--have still not incorporated the significance of the legacy that James and Dewey ac-knowledged a century ago. …