Abstract

With its poetic and highly paratactic style and its reliance on the essay form Emerson’s program, I believe, is best captured with the expression ‘speculative pragmatism’. I will attempt to give this expression some consistency. The trajectory I have chosen for this task is as follows: I will begin with considerations concerning the fundamental relation between metaphysics and aesthetics for Emerson, then move on to the more specific relation between aesthetics and the work of art with literature as its prime example, and end with some thoughts on the relation between art and ethics. What emerges at the end of this trajectory is an understanding of art as the primary means of metaphysical inquiry apt to disclose the fundamental nature of Being. In Emerson’s romantic-idealist framework, such ontological disclosure at the same time amounts to the unearthing of the ethical injunction to attune oneself to the Idea. Emerson’s speculative pragmatism accordingly preaches ‘the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life’. The primary site of such practice, that is, the paradigmatic speculative pragmatist enterprise is precisely art; hence the form that Emerson’s writings take.