2 - Emerson, Moore, America

Summary

It was perhaps simply the coincidence of my having recently worked on an essay about Marianne Moore that caused me to note in the margins of a passage of Emerson's Nature,“like Marianne Moore.” It seemed, at the time, a wholly spurious connection; aside from the coincidence of Emerson and Moore having edited, respectively, the first and last issues of the Dial magazine, there seemed no reason to press this odd echo for meaning. As I read further into Emerson, however, the echo lingered, and I felt increasingly that the atmosphereof Moore's poems was related to that of Emerson's prose. I came to feel that both writers sought to respond to what we typically think of as problems of philosophy — questions about the basis of our knowledge and the limits of our perception — in the language of lived experience. A further hypothesis suggested itself: that this response itself marks the tradition of one strain of American thought from Emerson to Dewey, and that Moore's work might fruitfully be reconsidered as part of this tradition.

It seems important, at the outset, to acknowledge that I come to philosophy by way of an abiding interest in twentieth-century American poetry, and that I am therefore a kind of tourist in the territory of philosophy per se. Such amateurism, while a constant source of frustration to me, is perhaps not wholly inappropriate to a discussion of an American philosophical orientation. Emerson established passionate amateurism as one kind of American thinking, and it has the advantage of enabling unlikely correspondences between distant regions of thought — a hallmark of both Emerson and Moore's best writing. I will endeavor, therefore, to model my own thinking after theirs, and to use what must be owned as a limitation as, simultaneously, a kind of tool.

As Dalia Judovitz has demonstrated, Plato's exclusion of poetry from the Republic may be seen as philosophy's founding gesture.