McCall, Corey. "Review of John T. Lysaker's EMERSON AND SELF-CULTURE." NDPR (November 2008).

Update (December 3, 2008): Here is Professor Lysaker's response to the review which he kindly sent to Philosophy's Other: Professor McCall's thoughtful and kind review raises an interesting question that I'd like to share. He claims that my book "fails as a guide to Emerson's writings, but as a provocation to think along with him, it must be judged a success." And earlier, he suggests that this is not a book to "... recommend to scholars of philosophy who desire a basic overview of Emerson and his relevance for philosophy." These claims, fair on the face of it, have led me to ask: what must one do in order to "demonstrate" Emerson's "relevance" to philosophy? I fear that a basic overview will miss Emerson entirely, and not just Emerson the writer, but Emerson the philosopher. I say this because I believe that Emerson's relevance for philosophy in part lies in the ethos his work embodies, an ethos evident in how he inhabits his language, though not only there. With "inhabits his language," I have in mind his work's [1] semantic content (I think here of his puns), [2] his rhetorical forms (I think here of the essay and the interanimating sections of "Experience"), and [3] his manner of addressing readers (I think here of his provocations but also his cheering voice). Now, in writing Emerson and Self-Culture, I self-consciously chose to 'demonstrate' that ethos by working very carefully with Emerson's language. Second, I tried to embody that ethos by receiving (and transmitting) it in kind, that is, by 'taking Emerson personally,' by being provoked and provocative, by running with puns, by writing essays, and by allowing my life to be called into question by what Emerson ventures, that is, by essaying to be. In other words, what McCall terms my "profoundly Emersonian spirit" is, in its spirit and letter, very much an effort to "demonstrate" what Emerson has to offer philosophy. Original Post (December 2, 2008): Lysaker, John T. Emerson and Self-Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. Until quite recently, philosophy departments have generally proven inhospitable ground for interpretations of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. With the exception of Classical American thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, few philosophers have acknowledged Emerson as a precursor, leaving him to their colleagues in Literature and American Studies Departments. With the eclipse of Pragmatism and the ascendancy of analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, Emerson was largely forgotten by philosophers. While this situation largely remains unchanged, there are some nascent signs that philosophers are beginning to reconsider Emerson as a philosopher. Led by thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Russell Goodman, philosophers are beginning to re-assess the significance of Emerson as a thinker. Lysaker's book fits in this company, but the fit is an uncomfortable one. Unlike Cavell and Goodman, Lysaker presents a deeply personal response to Emerson through a series of close readings that center around the notion of self-culture in his work. In this way, his reading is performative, for one of his stated tasks is to sound out the dimension of the personal in Emerson's corpus through a highly personal reading of various Emersonian texts. Lysaker's own accounting of his sustained reading of Emerson is often commendable and rewarding, but at the same time his book is certainly not one to recommend to scholars of philosophy who desire a basic overview of Emerson and his relevance for philosophy. This is certainly by design, for the Emerson we find in the pages of Lysaker's book is a living, breathing, complex individual that is clearly of deep consequence for Lysaker himself -- his book is by no means about Emerson in some distant, scholarly manner. Such overt enthusiasm brings its own risks. I shall return to both the risks taken by Lysaker in this book and the question of the potential audience for this book by way of conclusion. First, I offer a brief overview of the commendable aspects of Lysaker's interesting book. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14766.