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(2010) European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2).
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.
Publication details
DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.899
Full citation:
Kovalainen, H. A. (2010). Emersonian moral perfectionism: an alternative ethics – but in what sense?. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2), pp. n/a.
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