Emerson and Other Minds

Brilliant exegesis. For Michael Colacurcio, Emerson's master subject, the majesty and loneliness of the self, was there all along, from the earliest sermons to the last essays. The teasing-­out of that subject reveals Emerson's profound engagement with the philosophers of his time, but most of all with the Christianity he inherited. What stands out most vividly in this vast work is Colacurcio's conviction that Emerson was both 'deeply religious and determinedly secular,' willing to appropriate an old theological language for new ends.

~Bruce Ronda, Professor of English and Associate Dean for Faculty and Graduate Studies, Colorado State University

In full command of early American literature and thought, as well as their antecedents, Michael Colacurcio reads Emerson as the preeminent philosopher of 'the inviolable condition of subjective isolation.' Here is a rigorous idealism that would appear to preclude neither acute apprehension of the world around us nor our ability to converse intelligibly with other minds. At the same time, it insists that even our closest communion with the world and with others, not least in friendship and love, is riddled with uncertainty and the grief of unknowing. In a magisterial study that stands alone in modern scholarship, Colacurcio ranges across the whole of Emerson's essays to reveal the uncompromising thinker we have waited well more than a century to know.

~Eric Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

Emerson and Other Minds is an account of Emerson's writings by a scholar deeply learned in philosophy and committed to 'the pleasure of the text,' and to the proposition that 'an Emerson essay is better read as an imitation of what it feels like for a mature mind, of philosophic turn, honestly to conduct, without reliance on professional jargon, an ongoing internal debate about some enduring human question.' Identifying Emerson as a theorist of privacy, Michael Colacurcio traces, through 'indefatigable close analysis,' Emerson's examination of a fundamental question: 'in what sense is the individual mind quite alone in the "splendid labyrinth" of vision and value which it in a very significant sense creates?' This question embraces epistemology, human relationships, and language. In examining the interrelationships of these strands, Colacurcio offers us a rich and challenging book. Exploring the problem of 'other minds' in Emerson's writings, Colacurcio reveals not only Emerson's extraordinary mind, but his own as well.

~Lisa Gordis, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College