ABSTRACT
If Poe’s estheticism has as its basis a certain philosophical idealism, expressed most fully in Eureka (1849), his emphasis has had to compete with the moral—and in the end psychological—observations of Emerson, also a full-fledged citizen of the poet-Kantian episteme. And so, a chapter on Emerson’s “Experience” (1844): unhappy, perhaps, but too late to be helped, the fall of Western Man into reflection, criticism, epistemology. Once we talked confidently about all that is really real, and we lived in love of what we saw; now, our knowledge understood as not direct but mediated, we have to ask what (besides the condition of our own knowingness) we can possibly know for sure. And what if we admit that our knowledge of persons is every bit as mediated as that of things? You mean every man and every woman is an island? And that, rather than Ellen Tucker Emerson or even Jesus H. Christ, “the Universe is the bride of the soul”? Dammit: I told you not to tell me that. But he did—at the center of a career dedicated to the question of “Other Minds”: what can we and can we not share with beings who appear to possess the same “faculties,” but whose “privacy” is as inviolable as our own? How, now, does it feel to be a “subject”?
