Emersonian Perfectionist Writing in Philosophy

In the book’s four main chapters (“Through the Examples”, “Stylistic Methods”, “The Outsider and the Maverick” and “Two Quantitative Studies”), I investigate three problems of style that emerge from the five criteria of Emersonian perfectionist writing introduced in this chapter. These criteria are: 1. a prose in which the boundaries between literature and philosophy are blurred; 2. metaphorical and allegorical precision; 3. the revival of embodied figures of philosophical dialogue (such as the friend, or, at the opposite extreme, the scoundrel); 4. the restitution of our repressed thoughts; 5. the importance of—or, as Cavell occasionally expresses it, the emphasis on every single word. All these criteria (along with several others) are functional to Emerson’s main aspiration according to Stanley Cavell: the aspiration to represent the human. Emerson’s prose is thus charged with accounting for our human condition. It is the aim of the first chapter of the book, called “Emersonian Perfectionist Writing in Philosophy”, to see if these criteria are instantiated in Stanley Cavell’s and Bernard Williams’s major works: that is, in The Claim of Reason (1979) and in Ethics and the limits of Philosophy (1985).