In his Thinking of Emerson, as in numerous essays, Stanley Cavell – a staunch defender and an expositor of Emerson, in short, a canonical Emersonian apostle – offers a philosophical portrayal of the great 19^th century American transcendentalist. For Cavell, situating Emerson in traditional philosophy is both to explicate the philosophical genius of Emerson as it is to account for America’s early contribution to the discipline that has come to be known as philosophy, or the business of thinking. That Cavell undertakes this task, one would agree that he in fact embodies, exemplifies the message, and hence adheres to Emerson’s invitation to American scholars – philosophers included – in The American Scholar to be thinkers of the age; to explore the deepest questions about human nature and human mind: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds”.

Like Emerson, Cavell is concerned with reviving or articulating what he thinks is American philosophy in its embryonic stage. In this light, it is appropriate to categorize both these American thinkers as patriots. But their patriotism is not blind loyalism to America, for they expose the evil as much as the good implicit in American life. In writing, they hope that America can be made a better place; that America can contribute to the universal tradition of intellectual life. Thus, it is only right and dutiful that we call them patriots, rather than nationalists, since nationalism has an aura of blind, unquestioned, and unexamined loyalty to the homeland.

It is therefore expedient that in this essay Cavell, while locating rigorous philosophy in Emerson’s thought, recalls and begins with a question he had once posed: “Why has America never expressed itself philosophically? Or has it – in the metaphysical riot of its greatest literature?” This question is at once serious and sarcastic. It carries a tone of seriousness because its subject matter is the project of the American scholar (as I mentioned earlier), and it is a source of sarcasm because Cavell seems to suggest that America has expressed itself “philosophically”, however, in the realm of literature, properly speaking. Thus, as he asks the first question, he answers it with another question. Since the latter question makes a claim to literature proper, Cavell must thus turn to Emerson’s literary writing – of course all of Emerson’s writings can be called literature – to show that in it, there are themes and topics which have been the subjects of philosophical speculations for ages.

First, Cavell turns to Emerson’s Experience and argues for a nexus between Emerson and Kant, although he interprets Emerson as cautioning Kant as to what “experience” means. (It seems that a theory could be that in establishing Emerson as a philosopher, one needs to compare him to the philosopher of philosophers; the one who remains a man as much as a myth, Immanuel Kant. For in juxtaposing Emerson with Kant, one elevates Emerson to the highest ranks of philosophers). The caution, as Cavell frames it, is not so much an objection to Kant as it is a feedback. On Kant and Emerson, Cavell writes: “But I hear Kant working throughout Emerson’s essay on ‘Experience’, with

his formulation of the question, ‘Is metaphysics possible?’ and his line of answer: Genuine knowledge of (what we call) the world is for us, but it cannot extend beyond (what we call) experience.” Cavell continues: “To which I take Emerson to be replying: Well and good, but then you had better be very careful what it is you understand by experience, for that might be limited in advance by the conceptual limitations you impose upon it, limited by what we know of human experience, i.e., by our limited experience of it.” Here, Cavell seems to be suggesting that Kant’s claim that experience is only possible because of concepts we bring to it does not fully tell us what experience is. Emerson, Cavell argues, is thus right to suggest that the very possibility of experience is itself limited by Kant’s insistence on concepts. In other words, Emerson contends that mere conceptual foundation is not enough to account for full human experience, since it is in human nature to continuously seek or engage in a variety of experience. Thus, one can never get to a point where one feels satisfied experientially. This is what “by our limited experience of it” means, i.e., the experience of limited experience.

Moreover, it seems Emerson does not contend with Kant’s argument for the necessity of concepts in experience, but rather that simply having concepts does not account for full experience as such, by which Emerson, I think, means sensual experience. To this extent, I suggest that Emerson is in fact objecting to Kant, although Cavell wants to portray the former as in a dialogue of mutual understanding with the latter; an objection which seems insurmountable, or it is one for which Kant does not seem to have answers. 

Kant, in the section called Analogies of Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, wants to show that full, objective experience is possible through the categories or concepts, which he takes to be a priori. However, Kant admits that experiencing an object is quite different from what the object is in-itself, and hence, knowledge of it is only based on sensual experience that is made possible through a priori concepts such as space and time. What Kant does not tell us is the very meaning or nature of experience. How do we know what we are experiencing is a true experience at all? Suppose my experience of a thing or event keeps changing, how do I account for it? For example, the egg-sandwich I had yesterday may taste quite better than the one I had a few days ago, and hence may even determine whether I change meals or start going to a different restaurant for a better, tastier sandwich. It follows that one cannot fully explain what “experience” – the true taste – of an egg-sandwich is, since this experience seems to vary over time and place. This is what Cavell seems to be suggesting as well when he writes that Emerson’s answer to Kant is “you had better be very careful what it is you understand by experience.”

Yet, while I interpret Emerson’s reply as an objection, Cavell calls it “Emerson’s most explicit reversal of Kant.” The reversal seems to imply that since Emerson contends that Kant’s metaphysical claims leave open the problem of the limit of experience, which comes about due to the distinction between the subject and object, or between the individual and the thing-in-itself (nature), thus, Kant’s concepts or categories and his theory of experience would avoid this problem if said distinction is reversed. Kant claims that the universe as we experience it is distinct, i.e., it is “in itself” not the same as “what it is for us”. Thus, Emerson’s solution or reversal is that the “in itself” and the “what it is for us” must be reversed, so that the former only becomes explicit through the latter, and hence the “in-itself” is simply the “what it is for us”. (This point, I must note, has a certain Hegelianism to it).  In other words, the universe must be seen as conforming to our concepts. Cavell puts it even better: “the universe…is as intimately part of me, as one on whose behalf I contest, and who therefore wears my color”. He quotes a line from Emerson, “the soul attains her due sphericity”, and then adds, “This no doubt implies that we do not have a universe as it is in itself” and “The universe is what constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions. It is what can be all the ways we know it to be, which is to say, all the ways we can be.” 

Furthermore, according to Cavell, Emerson reverses Kant by taking the realm of knowledge, thinking or the life of the intellectual who seeks to know things in themselves, as something passive or receptive, while treating the instinctual or intuitive as something active or spontaneous. (A point to note here is that Emerson’s reversal, however, still maintains the two spheres: the receptive or passive and the active or spontaneous. Heidegger will treat both the active and the passive as originating in one source, something which Emerson describes as ‘Man-Thinking’, or simply thinking).

Having placed Emerson in conversation with Kant, and having shown that there is metaphysics or rigorous philosophy in Emerson’s writing, Cavell goes on to compare, or rather contrast, him with Heidegger. Cavell achieves this through the subject of thinking. Philosophy has come to be known as the field of perpetual thinking, i.e. philosophers are constantly engaged in thought; thoughts about the individual and the collective, mind and nature, good and evil, subject and object, autonomy and duty, and so on. In discussing the relation between Emerson and Heidegger, Cavell expands Emerson’s Man-Thinking concept, which appears in The American Scholar, and Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?, a collection of a series of lectures delivered between 1951 and 1952.

Cavell begins by pointing out that Heidegger aims to show what true thinking is, i.e., he wants to show how thinking resolves the schism between the active and passive. True thinking is, Cavell writes, “the receiving or letting be of something, as opposed to the positing or putting together of something”. Cavell thus seems to be suggesting that in Heidegger thinking is reception, or the act of thinking is receptive. Perhaps, Cavell does not recognize that Heidegger also suggests that thinking is active. Or perhaps, Cavell ignores active thinking because his focus is to show how Emerson reverses Kant by making thinking or “the intellectual hemisphere of knowledge” – which Kant argues is active – something receptive. While not denying Cavell’s interpretation, it is important then that we summarize Heidegger’s conception of thinking. This task is only but a further explanation of Cavell’s reading of Heidegger, and it will allow us see the relation between Emerson and Heidegger. (I do not cite passages directly from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?).

As Cavell claims, thinking, for Heidegger, is one’s reception or response to what stems from the natural world, or from Dasein (Being). To think is not something exclusively dependent on one’s will. Thinking, however, requires that the individual be ready and responsive when confronted with a thing or matter. Thus, thinking is determined by two factors: by what is thought and by the person who thinks. It follows that thinking is not only the individual’s receptivity to Dasein (Being) or that which is thought; it is also Dasein’s receptivity to the individual, the thinking subject. Moreover, Heidegger claims that thinking brings about the concretization of the world, i.e., it is the way of experiencing and explaining the way the world is. Since the individual is part of the world or Dasein, the only way the individual comes to know or understand it is to incessantly inquire into it. Thinking, Heidegger maintains, determines what it means to be human, and thus the more thoughtless the individual is, the less he is a human being.

The individual who learns to think is essentially learning to discover. But this presupposes that thinking is inherent in individuals. Thus, in discovering or coming to know Dasein, the individual comes to know his or her own nature. Moreover, Heidegger criticizes conceptual and systematic thinking. In other words, he urges us to think non- systematically and non-conceptually. (Thus, it seems Cavell rightly interprets Heidegger as objecting to systematic philosophy). The reason for this is that Heidegger wants to escape the trap of subjectivity, which characterizes the philosopher’s quest to distinguish the subject from the object, i.e., thought from being (Dasein). Thus, Heidegger endeavors a kind of thinking – true thinking, he calls it – that is both active and receptive: active in that it responds when called upon, or when it is confronted with a thing or subject matter, and receptive in that it accepts, listens, and attends to what Dasein presents it with.

As I mentioned above, Heidegger claims that thinking is something inherent in the individual, and that the individual can only come to know the world or nature through thinking. This is what is both explicit and implicit in Emerson’s notion of Man-Thinking. In The American Scholar, Emerson writes: “In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites”. The individual, as Man Thinking, comes to have knowledge of the things – past and future – through thinking. His ability to think brings him closer to the truth. 

For Emerson as for Heidegger, one needs not be a philosopher to engage in thinking as such. In other words, one needs not develop a certain mode of thought or be indoctrinated into some dogmatic philosophical system for one to discover reality, have knowledge or engage in speculative science. One only needs to have the ability or capacity to think. Thinking and metaphysics (and we may even add, epistemology) are as such available both to the philosophers and non-philosophers. Lastly, inasmuch as philosophy is often taken to be the vocation of thinking, the one who thus thinks can be said to be a philosopher.