alized allegiances," as Richard Poirier puts it in A World Elsewhere (1966), made it necessary for Emerson "to claim a place and function for himself almost wholly through his style," by inventing the "ideal type of self-expressive man." Neufeldt calls for a recognition of the "rigorously descriptive, systematic, analytical, and philosophical" side of Emerson's work, as opposed to the "moral, appreciative, and privately aesthetic" side.

All these studies, helpful as they are in many respects, pay too little attention to the religious background of Emerson's thought. The same objection applies to Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (1981), which has the virtue, however, of reminding us that Emerson was interested in social as well as philosophical questions. But Emerson was interested first of all in religion. His ideas emerged out of an engagement with Hume and Kant and with the "ruling order of Boston," in Porter's words; but they emerged much more directly out of an engagement with his Puritan ancestors, with the religious traditions of his own region. If those influences are left out of the story, listening to Emerson will always be like overhearing snatches of a conversation carried on behind closed doors. The scholars of the I950s and early I960s understood this much at least, even if their work—notably Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1953), and Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul (1964)—misleadingly described the direction of Emerson's career as a falling away from affirmation to resignation and compromise. The best corrective to this particular misconception is Newton Arvin's admirable essay "The House of Pain" (in his American Pantheon, 1986). According to Arvin, Emerson's rejection of a tragic view of life should be seen as a hard-won advance beyond tragedy, not as the product of a mind unacquainted with tragedy or unable to conceive it even as a hypothetical possibility. "We are in the habit of assuming," Arvin writes, "that the most serious and profound apprehension of reality is the sense of tragedy; but ... it may be that the tragic sense must be seen as ... limited and imperfectly philosophical.... The best of Emerson lies on the other side."

Stanley Cavell makes a somewhat similar point in three essays that assert Emerson's importance not as a poet or "seer" but as a moral philosopher who, like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, attempted to replace both philosophy and theology with a discourse that construed "thinking as the receiving or letting be of something" and thus to refute philosophical skepticism and moral nihilism alike. See, in addition to "Hope against Hope," already cited, "Thinking of Emerson" and "An Emerson Mood," both of which appear in The Senses of Walden (1981). These works are of special interest to me because Cavell's appreciation of Emerson, like my own, was preceded by a long period of indifference. "Why did it take me [so long]," Cavell asks, "... to begin to look actively at his work, to demand explicitly my inheritance of him?" Many others could ask themselves the same question, the answers to which might add up to an important chapter in the cultural history of our times.

-549-