Abstract
The subject of personal renewal brings us once again to the Emersonian idea of “work.” While the orientation of this work becomes variously more reflexive when viewed from the perspective of selfhood, the basic self-world materials remain identical to those contributing to cultural renewal. Put most simply, this work now takes the form of a pragmatic-poetic approach to subjectivity as an ongoing work-in-progress. Using his popular figure of circles, Emerson perceives it this way: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.”1
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Notes
As Clifford Geertz observes, this Cartesian conception of the self is far from universal: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.” See Geertz’s Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 59.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1961/1921), 57.
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 163.
Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), 106.
See, for example, Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 152.
Dewey’s Introduction to Man’s Supreme Inheritance (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918) can be found in MW 11: 350–352.
Dewey’s Introduction to Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1923) can be found in MW 15: 308–315.
Randolph Bourne, “Making Over the Body,” New Republic 15 (1918): 28–29, reprinted in MW 11: 359–360.
Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, 219n.21. The brief quotations are from Cavell’s Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995) and A Pitch of Philosophy. I would argue that Shusterman is actually offering somewhat of a gloss here. Emersonian perfectionism does indeed ask that I make myself intelligible through my bodily behavior—to the fact that I might be in pain, for example. The human body, for Cavell, is part of the field of expression of the human mind. Still, this way of acknowledging our embodiedness is very different from actively pursuing avenues for somatic improvement.
Richard H. Rodino explores this issue in “Irony and Earnestness in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in Guidebook to Zen and, the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ronald L. DiSanto and Thomas J. Steele, eds. (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990), 293–303.
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© 2006 David A. Granger
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Granger, D.A. (2006). The Poetics of Personal Renewal. In: John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12252-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12252-0_7
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