Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This book examined the evolution of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s ideas with careful attention to change and continuity with normative Shi‘i conceptions of political and religious authority, doctrine, and practice. It analyzed his reformulation of Islam’s place in Middle Eastern modernities by investigating discursive themes, issues, and features with reference to the broader Arab regional context and cultural currents, twentieth-century Iraqi experiences, Shi‘i Iraqi encounters with the state, and the Najafi milieu in which Sadr operated. The study traced the central intellectual traditions, relevant discourses, and political, social, and economic contexts that shaped Sadr’s intellectual activity. It thereby identified the interactions between contextual and discursive influences that explain the very change and continuity between his project and established Shi‘i religious norms. It located Sadr’s efforts and achievements within the broader realm of not only Shi‘i but also Arab, Sunni, modernist, and Islamic thought and explored the predominant force of Marxist ideology and communist politics in his articulation of an Islamic program. These hitherto understudied factors helped fashion his conceptualization of modernity and modernization and contributed to his endeavor to reform essential Shi‘i doctrines and praxis.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.

This chapter examines Sadr’s Falsafatuna and Iqtisaduna as seminal Islamic responses to the ideological and philosophical upheavals of mid-twentieth-century Iraq. Against the backdrop of the radical political transformations that culminated in the 1958 July Revolution and the subsequent contest over Iraq’s national identity – between Pan-Arab and territorial nationalists, communists, and Islamists – Sadr sought to articulate a civilizational project rooted in Islamic metaphysics, social ethics, and epistemology. Through a rigorous critique of Marxist materialism, Western empiricism, and behavioral psychology, he constructs a modern Islamic philosophy grounded in rationalist epistemology and natural theology. Engaging with Sunni revivalist thought, Arab existentialism, and emerging discourses in psychology and economics, Sadr formulated elements of an Islamic moral economy and philosophical paradigm that confronted the ideological pluralism of his time. His work repositions metaphysics within the intellectual struggle for decolonization and articulates a modern Islamic worldview aimed at promoting theism, spiritual renewal, and social justice.

Now we have to dwell on the question of how we can achieve those objectives of Islamic qawmiyyat [nationhood; selfhood] in India which we defined in the previous publications. As far as we know, no ‘Muslim’ individual or group disagrees with this objective. The difference, if there be any, lies in determining the correct path to achieve this objective. Now, we need to critically analyse the various paths before us. The correct path will become evident after such an analysis.

This chapter revisits Sadr’s production from the mid-1970s until his execution in 1980, analyzing two overlooked texts – Manabi‘ al-Qudra fi al-Dawla al-Islamiyya and Al-Madrasa al-Qur’aniyya – that challenge portrayals of Sadr as an unequivocal supporter of Khomeini and Wilayat al-Faqih. These writings reflect Sadr’s engagement with Arab Leftist thought and Marxist determinism, as well as his commitment to developing a political theology centered on human agency. In contrast to Khomeini’s model of absolute clerical guardianship, Sadr advanced a participatory theory of Islamic government. His writings articulated the cultural and civilizational aims of Islamic governance. Notably, Sadralso staged a rare intervention on veiling and gender norms, marking a striking but forgotten episode. The chapter situates Sadr’s thought within ideological currents of the 1970s, including intra-Shi‘i debates in Iraq, the emergence of the Islamic Left, and evolving conceptions of turath (heritage). It argues that Sadr’s vision represented a distinctive alternative to both leftist models and clerical authoritarianism: a Shi‘i Islamic framework for cultural renewal, moral agency, and constitutionalism. By theorizing an Islamic notion of free will and social contract, Sadr carved out a critical space within post-1967 Arab political thought – one that remains vital to rethinking modern Islamic political thought.

In one of the most macabre scenes of modern Iraqi history, just moments before Saddam Husayn’s execution on December 30, 2006, spectators chanted and jeered in the death chamber. Saddam mocked the crowd’s chants for Muqtada Sadr: “Is this the bravery of the Arabs?” The crowd retorted, “Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!” The viral shaky cell-phone footage of this spectacle captured onlookers celebrating the meting out of what they viewed as poetic justice. For, when challenged, the crowd deployed the powerful memory of the martyrdom of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr – the Shi‘i cleric and Iraqi intellectual executed at the hands of the Ba’th regime on April 9, 1980. Hours after Saddam met the same fate he had inflicted on Sadr in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Iraq’s national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubay‘i appeared on national television to hail a new era for Iraq, He proclaimed: “This dark page has been turned over … Saddam is gone. Today Iraq is an Iraq for all the Iraqis, and all the Iraqis are looking forward.”1 Since 2003, as Iraqis have negotiated what an Iraq for all Iraqis means, many political and social actors have called upon the thought, activism, and martyrdom of Sadr; the difficulty being that his rich oeuvre and symbolism offer a reservoir of meaning and paths forward.

It is an irony of fate that, nowadays, the demand for the enforcement of Islamic law has become surrounded by such a thick mist of misgivings that a mere reference to it, even in a Muslim country like Pakistan, raises a storm of criticism. Thus, for instance, the questions are asked: can a centuries-old legal system be adequate to fulfil the requirements of our modern state and society? Is it not absurd to think that a law which had been framed under certain particular circumstances in bygone days can hold good in every age and every clime? Do you seriously propose to start chopping off the hands of thieves and flogging human beings in this modern, enlightened age? Will our markets again abound in slaves and deal in the sale and purchase of human beings as chattels and playthings? Which particular sect’s legal system is going to be introduced here? What about non-Muslim minorities, who will never tolerate the dominance of Muslim religious law and will resist it with all the force at their command? One has to face a volley of such questions while discussing the problem, and, strangely enough, not from non-Muslims but from the Muslim educated elite!

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.