Emerson's Principle of "Sufficient Reason" for Understanding the Past:

A Kantian Perspective

The following is an abstract of a paper I've prepared for a session on Philosophy and Literature at the 2001 Midwest MLA Convention. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the constructive suggestions and encouragements I received from those in this institute who read an article ms of which this paper is a segment. Members: Ed Cutler, Ted Kinnaman, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, and Co-Directors Karl Ameriks and Jane Kneller. 

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the interest in American pragmatism has included a substantial body of scholarship showing William James's indebtedness to Emerson, arguing that Jamesian pragmatism is prefigured in Emersonian Transcendentalism.  During the same period of time, Stanley Cavell's writings on Emerson have aligned him with Immanuel Kant.

While these developments would seem to pose some irony, the relevance of Kant to Emerson stems from their stance toward skepticism. Cavell's writings on Emerson have elaborated the historical and philosophical complexity of this subject. Most pertinent for the present purpose is Cavell's observation that Kant himself "described his philosophical settlement as limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. This is somewhat one-sided way of describing his effort concerning knowledge, since what he meant by 'limiting' it was something that also secured it, against the threat of skepticism and powers of dogmatism."  Kant evidently thought it important that the subtext of his philosophy be understood in this way as he repeatedly discloses that it was "remembering David Hume" that "first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction."

Emerson expressses his appreciation of Kant for "showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denomiated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature. . . ."

An alignment of Emerson with Kant--specifically with regard to Emerson's claim about understanding the past--depends upon his respect for the limits of human knowledge that Kant established. Kant demonstrates how he believes speculative reason can satisfy its desire for ultimate knowledge by discussing "the concept of the Supreme Being" (in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics). My paper will examine Emerson's explanation of how we can and must understand past human experience by comparing it with Kant's use of "analogy" and by contrasting the implicit "agreement" between Kant and Emerson with Hume's discussion of analogy in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Finally, I will proceed to ask what it is about past human experience that Emerson seeks to understand, and why Emerson insists that "every mind" understand "the whole ground" of history.  Exploring for answers to these questions will further clarify the epistemological agreement between Emerson and Kant through an extension of this analysis into the context of Kant's moral philosophy.