ABSTRACT
In this essay I investigate the unity of Emerson’s sentences. I begin by describing the phenomenology of reading Emerson and use that phenomenology to orient the investigation. I propose to understand the unity of Emerson’s sentences by using a variation of Frege’s strategy for understanding the unity of sentences generally. I then address how the unity of the Emerson sentence serves to create the unity of the Emerson paragraph and even of the Emerson essay. Along the way I compare Emerson’s essays to Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons. I finish by using the results of the investigation and comparisons to provide a partial reading of “Experience” in which I shed light on the nature of Emerson’s encounter with the problematic of skepticism.
To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of “undergoing” an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. It is this something itself that comes about, comes to pass, happens.
To undergo an experience with language, then, means to let ourselves be properly concerned by the claims of language by entering into it and submitting to it. If it is true that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language—whether he is aware of it or not—then an experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our existence. We who speak the language may thereupon become transformed by such experiences, from one day to the next or in the course of time.
—Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language” 1