Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism the Moral Self

Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity’s central writers on the question of "privacy": the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another’s process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of "self-reliance," but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship. Colacurcio’s reading results in a two-­volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays—­both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense—­that richly reward closer examination.