Ralph Waldo Emerson stands in a paradoxical situation with regard to the idea of national philosophy. On the one hand, a small band of literary critics led by Harold Bloom have declared that he is the definitive American philosopher, the one who sets the standard of what it is to be not only a philosopher in America but an American philosopher, one whose work serves as a conduit for articulating what it means to be an American. On the other hand, few professional philosophers, analytic and non-analytic, have engaged with him as a philosopher, labelling his work, and ‘American Transcendentalism’ as a whole, as too unashamedly ‘literary’ in presentation to sustain ‘properly’ philosophical argument. This latter group thus place his achievement and output not alongside the German Idealists, who inspired him to write in the first place, but instead, solely within literary circles. Ellen Kappy Suckiel, for instance, does not believe on the whole that Emerson deserves the title ‘philosopher’, stating that she thinks he is better described as a ‘preacher’, since Emerson

She thus repeats the well-known mantra that Emerson is not a philosopher because he does not argue, because he replaces tuition with intuition rather than reconfiguring the relationship between them both. The ‘birth’ of American philosophy is thus usually identified in academic philosophy, but also elsewhere, not with American Transcendentalism, which is seen primarily as a literary, religious and, more lately, a socio-political movement, but with the rise of American Pragmatism. As Douglas R. Anderson notes in his Philosophy Americana, ‘for many argument-riffers and intellectual historians Emerson does not appear to be doing philosophy. For most of the twentieth century his work lived only in literature programs, never in philosophy programs’ (Anderson 2006: 189).