Emersonian Moral Perfectionism

Abstract

Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism is not a compete theory of moral philosophy alongside utilitarianism or deontology; it seeks to get a grip of a dimension in any moral thinking, less of a hierarchy of what to value most in life and more a sketch on how we come to value anything in the first place. Emersonian perfectionism tries to understand what it means to be a moral subject, an authentic self, and to do this it cannot stay solely within the conventional sub-disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. First and foremost, Cavell intends his outlook as a way of discovering the philosophical uniqueness of Emersonian thought; he asks us to take very seriously what Emerson has to say on the self and its coming to itself. But such themes are never confined within the narrow framework of a particular author, essayist or a poet, and Cavell traces related topics in works of art as diverse as Ibsen’s Doll House and the poetry of Whitman, philosophers as seemingly distant as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. While Cavell is oftentimes suggestive rather than elaborate on the relevance of Wittgenstein and Heidegger for his version of moral perfectionism, a critical reader ought to spell out the senses in which the two thinkers are essential to the perfectionist project. In brief, neither one of them had much to say on ethics by way of explicit commentary, yet both of them have given rise to a host of reasonable studies in ethics, following them. Thus philosophers like Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch have made their name drafting a new kind of ethics, sometimes bluntly dubbed Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and authors such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Luc-Nancy have done the same in the Heideggerian footsteps, drawing attention to his “originary ethics.” The key issue regarding the aforementioned exemplars in moral philosophy, and arguably Emersonian ethics, is that they speak to ethical issues without explicitly addressing ethics; they touch on something crucial to our ethical conduct without laying out ethical norms. They are not so much interested in the normativity of ethics in the first place. They seem to grasp that ethics has to do with something more fundamental, perhaps something like an original encounter with the being of the world, a genuine attentiveness to the particularity of our experience, rendering ethics possible in the first place. Such an outlook on morality may not be unambiguously called ethics, at least not as something separate from epistemology and ontology, yet its affinities with contemporary moral philosophy are wide-ranging, in particular, with the work of Iris Murdoch.