Not Following Emerson: Intelligibility and Identity in the Authorship of Literature, Science, and Philosophy

case of Emerson's reception--or points of resistance it reveals--in intellectual culture he helped found reminds readers in any discipline that criteria frame an interpretation even while it is being made. diversity of opinion about nature of Emerson's writing prompts a reader's wider concern about intelligibility and identity of text under examination. Do I understand it? And what is it, anyway? As shown Laura Otis's anthology of works in literature and science pressed up beside one another, there are times when negotiated boundaries of thought are meaningfully apparent. Emerson's nineteenth century, such a time, and Emerson's writing such a space for exploring those boundaries and definitions. When those liminal spaces are filled and sometimes ossify, possibilities for reading are narrowed or confounded. If ongoing dominance of natural science, mostly by reason of its empirical success, has eclipsed innovations in literary, historical, and philosophical arts, varied reading of Emerson's work by critics--even up to present day--suggests that we still inhabit an age of negotiation and discovery. ********** IN THE INTRODUCTION to her masterfully curated anthology, Literature and Science in Nineteenth Century, Laura Otis usefully describes how nineteenth century a time when disciplinary boundaries between literature and science were still permeable, still under negotiation. She emphasizes that the notion of a 'split' between literature and science, of a 'gap' to be 'bridged' between two, never a nineteenth-century phenomenon (xvii). It a period, as she notes, when the two commingled and were accessible to all says Otis, was not perceived as being written in a 'foreign language'--a common complaint of twenty-first century readers. As a growing system of knowledge expressed in familiar words, science in effect a variety of literature.' If only this were still case! In contemporary scene, methodologies and modes of expression in natural science are largely assumed to be remote from--and often at odds with--poetry, literary art, history, politics, and philosophy. In short, science has been professionalized in ways that have alienated both its practice and its comprehension by a lay public. And in recent decades, contours of literary criticism--for example, in deconstruction--have left otherwise committed and competent readers feeling abandoned and excluded. For this reason, it is worthwhile to look back for a moment, perhaps as a way of finding a way forward. There are few figures in nineteenth century whose work better reflects evolution of literature and science as disciplinary activities--and their attendant impact on philosophy, religion, history, and politics--than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Because his work forms such a useful and rare specimen of written material in which to explore and understand what Otis emphasizes--the negotiated borders of disciplinary definition, practice, and crucially, demarcated fields of investigation--I spend some time in what follows trying to assess how this nineteenth-century development in literature and science informed inheritance of Emerson's writing. Part of what inheritance of Emerson's work highlights for us that is, for everyone thinking about or contributing to range of humanistic and scientific endeavors; for poets and physicists, literary critics and philosophers, technology theorists, historians, artists, and educators--is how discerning radical variability is not necessarily at odds with continuity of inquiry. Giving lectures with titles like Method of Mental Philosophy, The Powers and Laws of Thought, and The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science, Emerson registering effects of his reading in works by scientists such as John E W. Herschel (e.g., in his A Preliminary Discourse on Study of Natural Philosophy [1831]) and philosophers of mind like Sampson Reed, in his Observations on Growth of Mind (1826). …