Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche

Abstract

1988. If institution speaks of the setting (up) of something; and speaks of ways of taking something already set; then institutions of interpretation speaks of ways of placing what is placed. And it asks immediately whether our ways of placing are themselves already setups. The text I am submitting as my contribution to our discussions at this stage is a version of the first of three lectures (circling Emerson) delivered to the American Philosophical Association earlier this spring. Writing my lectures also in anticipation of our Jerusalem meetings, I imagined that some brief words of placement would prepare the material for our purposes. Now I find otherwise, but it is too late to do more than hope for the best. What I might call the given rhetorical situation of my lectures for the Association was my odds with the profession of philosophy, expressed by some roughly public sense of my stance as questioning the institutionalization of the study of philosophy (in American universities), and, specifically, by my roughly private sense of this institutionalization as, on the whole, taking Wittgenstein and Heidegger to be more or less incapable of interpreting themselves philosophically -and, a fortiori, incapable of interpreting philosophy for its profession (in America?). Take this as saying that even for those who regard Wittgenstein and Heidegger as useful or interesting writers or thinkers, even of genius, they would not, on the whole, be taken as paradigmatic of what serious philosophy should look and sound like. My suggestion to the Association that Emerson can be taken to lie back of both writers would fashion-to the extent it is picked up-the given rhetorical situation into a choice of