Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance” that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” (CW 2:33). Yet he is consistent in many ways, and not foolishly so. Among these consistencies are the main themes or “master-tones”Footnote ¹ of his philosophy, such as self-reliance, reception, succession, surprise, skepticism, abandonment, and power. He is also consistent in his allegiance to such philosophical heroes as Plato, Plotinus, Montaigne, Goethe, and the authors of the Bhagavad Gīta and Vīṣṇu Purāna. But Emerson is consistent too in practicing forms of inconsistency, producing dialectical, dynamic essays that embody and contend with a family of oppositions or “contrary tendencies” – one and many, fixed and flowing, traveling and staying at home. Emerson never comes to a satisfactory resolution of these oppositions – or, it might be better to say, never finds a lasting resolution, one with which he remains satisfied. As he writes near the end of “Nominalist and Realist,” the concluding essay in Essays, Second Series: “‘Your turn now, my turn next,’ is the rule of the game” (CW 3:142).

In Chapter 1, I consider how Emerson uses the essay form to present his ideas as experiments or trials, to preserve a sense of spontaneity or casualness (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics” (CW 3:47)); and to dramatize what he calls the “contrary tendencies” in his philosophy (“I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW 3:36)). While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency.Footnote ² Emerson’s description of a poem in “The Poet” applies equally to his own essays: each is a living thing, like “a plant or an animal,” each has “an architecture of its own” (CW 3:6).

Emerson makes sense of the inconsistencies and contrary tendencies of life that are dramatized in his essays, by developing what Stanley Cavell calls an epistemology of moods. “Life,” he writes in his great essay “Experience,” “is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus” (CW 3:30). Emerson’s essays themselves present trains of moods, none more so than “Experience.” The moods of “Experience” include the depression and lethargy of the opening, the ecstatic vision of a “new yet unapproachable America” at its center (CW 3:41), and the weary resolution at its end. Each of these moods, found in distinct passages of the essay, presents “only what lies in its focus.” The essay’s opening question – “Where do we find ourselves?” (CW 3:27) – is answered not just at the beginning, but by the entire flow or succession of moods as the essay unfolds.

Chapter 2 begins a set of four chapters on skepticism by distinguishing the varieties of skepticism Emerson discusses. The main division I make is between the “modern” tradition of skepticism as doubt, with Descartes’ Meditations the paradigm case; and skepticism as a form of life, with Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne being key figures. In the Cartesian tradition the object of doubt is crucial. Descartes doubts the veracity of his senses, then the truths of mathematics, the existence of other minds, and the existence of a world external to his consciousness. Some of these doubts imply others, as doubt about the “external world” entails doubt about the alleged minds in it. But the implication does not go the other way: doubt about minds does not entail doubt about the entire world.

I draw attention to Emerson’s claim that certain things refuse “to be named” or are “ineffable” (CW 3:42). This kind of skepticism has as its object the language we use to describe what Emerson calls an “undefinable” “immensity” (CW 2:161) or just “Being” (CW 3:42). But Emerson’s doubt about the adequacy of language to describe what he considers an ultimate reality goes hand in hand with his belief in that reality, in ways I consider through discussions of “The Over-Soul,” “Intellect,” and “Experience.”

As for skepticism as a form of life, there are two distinct cases for Emerson. In “Experience” he writes: “So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity … and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law” (CW 3:41). Here skepticism is an unsatisfactory existential condition, akin to the notion of despair found in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. But Emerson also thinks of skepticism as a way of life that is worth aiming at, a position he develops most fully in “Montaigne, or the Skeptic.” “The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game, and the chief players, what is best in the planet, art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Every thing that is excellent in mankind … he will see and judge” (CW 4:91).Footnote ³ Here skepticism is not a resolute doubting or questioning of knowledge, and not something to be refuted, but a recommended way of life. The sheer variety of skepticisms in Emerson’s philosophy is one reason I question Joseph Urbas’s claim that “the moral sentiment … solves the problem of skepticism in general.”Footnote ⁴ There is no such thing as “skepticism in general” that would embrace all the forms that skepticism takes in Emerson’s philosophy.

In approaching Emerson’s “Friendship” essay in Chapter 3, I take a cue from yet another account of lived skepticism, Stanley Cavell’s idea that we live our skepticism concerning other minds. Cavell conceives of such lived skepticism not only as a failure to acknowledge others (as Lear fails his daughter Cordelia), but as rooted in a deep disappointment with even the best cases of knowing others. Emerson expresses such disappointment near the end of “Friendship” when he writes: “We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables” (CW 2:125). Emerson’s critique, however, is not directed at our best cases of friendship, whose satisfaction and promise he credits, but at friendships that fail to deliver on their initial promise, or that we outgrow. The soul, he writes, “puts forth friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf” (CW 2:116). Emerson’s ideal friend is one with whom we can be completely sincere, and at times in honest conflict: “two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared” (CW 2:123). In these cases, Emerson counsels us to “enhance” and “fortify” the friend: “Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered” (CW 2:124). Emerson values moments of great friendship as he values his books, but he is prepared to turn aside from both when he is doing his own work: “I do then with my friends as I do with my books,” he writes. “I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them” (CW 2:126).Footnote ⁵

Chapter 4 concerns “Nominalist and Realist,” where Emerson sets out the competing metaphysics of particulars and universals but reaches no firm conclusion or reconciliation. Near the end of the essay, he draws a skeptical lesson from his epistemology of moods. We have no “security against moods” (CW 3:144), he observes, adding that “I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods” (CW 3:145). This might be cause for despair, but Emerson’s tone in this final paragraph is more in tune with the skepticism of Montaigne, who, Emerson finds, can neither “affirm nor deny” competing claims (CW 4:89). Emerson ends “Nominalist and Realist,” the last in his Essays, Second Series, by withdrawing from the dispute. Bidding farewell to “a pair of philosophers,” he writes that he “could well consent to their living in Oregon” (CW 3:145) – that is, on the other end of the vast American continent. But this does not mean that Emerson gives up inquiring. Skepticism can be both a withholding of final judgment, and, as Herwig Friedl observes, “a constant looking around, skopein, as to what the case may be without any attempt at closure.”Footnote ⁶

Emerson was thinking about his long engagement with Montaigne’s Essays in the spring of 1843, while working on his Essays, Second Series. “No book before or since,” he writes in his Journal, “was ever so much to me as that” (JMN 8:376). In the first part of Chapter 5, I consider some basic affinities of these writers that are evident in Emerson’s essays even before “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel; their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. “I myself am the subject of my book,”Footnote ⁷ Montaigne tells his reader at the beginning of the Essays; “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me” writes Emerson at the end of “Experience” (CW 3:47).

In the second part of Chapter 5, I consider the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to “the moral sentiment” that “outweighs them all.”Footnote ⁸ (A similar leap occurs at the end of “Nature”.) In evaluating this leap, I deploy Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?” (CW 4:89).

In “Manners,” the subject of Chapter 6, and in subsequent chapters, I continue to focus on Emerson’s oppositions, while the subject of skepticism recedes. “Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” (CW 3:87); and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed” (CW 3:76). In a variation of the “beautiful enemies” passage in “Friendship,” Emerson depicts a “society of the energetic class [which] in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidate the pale scholar” (CW 3:74). But near the end of the essay he turns from these forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society” (CW 3:88); and then “Osman,” an invented character Emerson developed for years in his journals, depicted here as a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah. Osman does not contend with others in “friendly and festive meetings” and does not seem to be a member of what Emerson calls “the energetic class” (CW 3:74). Rather he is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it (CW 3:90). The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes: Washington, Montaigne, and Socrates, let alone the Cid or Alexander. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

Chapters 7 and 8 contrast the two great opening essays of the Second Series, “The Poet” and “Experience.” “Experience” takes a journey from a dark opening to a “sunbright” center and then a resolute, sober ending. “The Poet” is what I call in Chapter 1 (following Adorno) a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Their moods differ too, a difference that Packer points to in saying that these two essays are “the manic and depressive sides of the same coin.”Footnote ⁹ But the metaphor also asserts their identity, visible in the importance that flux, succession, and transformation have for both.

In treating “Experience” I emphasize its connections to journeys depicted in Plato’s Republic: the “journey of ascent” (as Cavell calls it) up and out of the cave; and “the journey from here to there and back again” described in the myth of Er in Republic’s Book 10. But “Experience” also contains the sentence that gives me my epigraph: “I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies.” I pay careful attention to this clangor as manifested in the various moods and outlooks of the essay.

In treating “The Poet” I consider Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4) and his theory that language “is fossil poetry” (CW 3:13). I note the proto-pragmatic picture of language when he writes: “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead” (CW 3:20). As we see in this last sentence, “The Poet” emphasizes flux, transition, and succession – like “Experience” with its description of life as a “train of moods.” Although “The Poet” is more consistently upbeat than “Experience,” moments of disappointment and doubt are there too. “I look in vain,” Emerson writes near the end of the essay, “for the poet I describe” (CW 3:21).

Nature as our home and as a place of insight are central themes of Emerson’s romantic philosophy. “In the woods,” he writes in Nature (1836), “we return to reason and faith.” But I argue in Chapter 9 that nature as he presents it is a humanized one, tinged by what he calls “the colors of the spirit,” as when he reports “the sky is less grand” after the death of a “dear friend” (CW 1:10–11). In his later “Nature” essay, published in the Essays, Second Series (1844) along with “The Poet,” “Experience,” “Manners,” and “Nominalist and Realist,” Emerson moves from the praise of nature for moments of fulfillment and serenity, to the skeptical sense that we are always missing something, that “Nature is still elsewhere” (CW 3:111). Human beings are elsewhere too, he maintains in one of the essay’s darker moments: “It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction” (CW 3:112). Near the end of “Nature,” however, Emerson launches a recovery, first finding that another look at nature “soothes us to wiser convictions” (CW 3:112) and then taking one of his metaphysical leaps: out of the dialectic of “motion or change, and identity or rest” (CW 3:105) to something that generates both, a “power … which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel” (CW 3:113). As with my discussion in Chapter 5 of the leap at the end of “Montaigne,” I favor an experiential or phenomenological, rather than a metaphysical, approach to these matters, taking instruction both from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and from Wittgenstein’s 1929 “A Lecture on Ethics,” where he finds “absolute or ethical value” best understood or illuminated through certain authoritative experiences, such as “seeing the world as a miracle” or “feeling absolutely safe.”Footnote ¹⁰

Emerson’s citations of Confucius and Mencius in “Experience,” and his employment of Persian imagery in “Manners,” reveal his interest in non-Western literature and philosophy. In 1842, as the new editor of The Dial, he announced “the printing of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious writings of men. … Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations.”Footnote ¹¹ Although he thought that a synthesis of all these bibles was “inevitable,” what Emerson achieved (with substantial help from Thoreau) in the pages of The Dial, and in his essays, was the presentation of what Isaiah Berlin calls a “plurality of ideals, each of which has its own validity.”Footnote ¹²

In Chapter 10, I chart Emerson’s long engagement with Hinduism, from his college years, when he rejected what he thought of as “Indian Superstition,” to the presence of the Vīṣṇu Purāna and Bhagavad Gīta in some of his greatest essays. In “Plato, or the Philosopher,” Emerson finds in these works the idea of a fundamental unity (“‘The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu’” (CW 4:29)) and credits Plato with absorbing, enhancing, and representing the “unity of Asia and the detail of Europe” (CW 4:31). Emerson’s Plato is a representative of Emerson himself, a man who in the summer of 1845 began making lists of opposing East-West properties and tendencies on the same pages where he recorded passages from the Vīṣṇu Purāna.

Emerson also finds a skeptical strain within Hinduism, particularly in “Illusions,” the final essay in The Conduct of Life (1860). “I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life,” he writes. “Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion … is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. … There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream” (CW 6:167). He returns to the image of “snow-storms of illusions” in the extraordinary last paragraph of “Illusions,” but he now weaves in the contrary vision of deep, but momentary, insight: “by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, – they alone with him alone” (CW 6:174). Here in Hindu guise are the “brief moments” Emerson describes in “The Over-Soul,” with a “depth … which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences” (CW 2:159).

In “Illusions” as in many of his major essays, Emerson inscribes a series of oppositions: one and many, reality and illusion, nature present and absent, living language and fossil poetry, nominalism and realism, the commanding ethics of the gentleman and the receptive loving ethics of Osman, and so on. Much of the life of the essays consists in Emerson’s motion with and against these opposing tendencies, which are mostly bipolar; though in “Experience,” they take the form of the eight categories that he calls the “lords of life.” If Emerson accepts the “clangor and jangle” of these “contrary tendencies,” he also finds it reasonable at times – as at the end of “Nominalist and Realist” – to practice a form of skepticism he finds in Montaigne’s Essays, suspending judgment about the ultimate truth of the terms of these oppositions, while continuing to investigate, experiment, and look around.