So one of the interesting things about Emerson as a writer is that he claims that he is writing
to an unknown friend.
And the friend is sort of a key figure for him.
If we were to read the Friendship essay, he talks about friends in terms of commended
strangers or beautiful enemies.
And friends are for him both present personages who propel him outside of himself or draw
him outside of himself and that sense of the sense who draws you outside of yourself, makes
you better than you otherwise would be because you feel the judgment of their gaze and their
expectation, and also you want to do right by them.
You want to be a source of energy and stimulation for them.
This informs his writerly practice.
And so he imagines himself writing to the unknown friend.
Someone yet to come.
And his influence on Nietzsche is not subtle and sometimes I think when Nietzsche views
himself as a philosopher of the future you see something similar there.
When I think of him writing to unknown friends, I sometimes think about him as the theorist
of the American Scholar who would never allow the term American to congeal into a hegemonic
identity, into a homogeneous sense of self.
Because then our friends would be known and that would, I think, be a profoundly anti-pluralist
moment, because we would know ahead of time who our interlocutors were.
And so I don't view his self understanding as a writer to be so thoroughly American that
he wants to reproduce this emerging tradition, or so thoroughly American that he only ever
wants to talk to Americans.
I think he wants to talk to people capable of living and reading in the present.
And this is a source for him of radical and yet finite transcendence.
Radical because it can effect a radical dislocation in the trajectory of a life.
Finite, though, because what performs that shift is just another aspect of your life,
say your friend, say a text you open.
Say a walk we take.
Say, an invitation to address you through the medium of a camera.
Ways in which occasions arise and if we enter them genuinely we won't be able to say at
the end of the day, or we won't be able to say at the end of the day, I know how this
is gonna end.
Now this sense of being able then to both belong to but not be limited by one's context
and to sort of hungrily seek a way of dislocating oneself from one's context, I don't think
is about being placeless.
I don't think it's about a kind of cosmopolitanism which is really a kind of cultural tourism.
Because it's all earned in the heavy, slow work of reading and writing and thinking and
talking and walking and being together.
And its requires translation-transformation.
And I think there's a moment of real powerful freedom here in thinking about our own work
as addressed to someone we, as of yet, do now know as our interlocutor, and that draws
us out of ourselves but also potentially makes us more responsive.
Because we wonder how could this be heard by someone I don't know but I presume is a
friend?
I'm not going to try to convince the skeptic.
I'm not gonna try to convince someone I know hates thinking, hates me, isn't really interested
in this.
I'll deal with those people as I have to deal with them in the conditions in which I meet
them.
But as a philosopher I address the unknown friend.
I presume a little bit of sympathy but that's all I presume.
And so I reach out towards them and, lastly, try to create the conditions for the reception
too.
That's part of the generosity of Emerson's texts.
Is.
He writes in such a way that invites the unknown friend in and says I think I have a place
for you.
Not, I know I have a place for you.
Because I know your essence.
But he performs a kind of invitation and I think people really are drawn in and that's
why when people read him they feel singled out and they're embarrassed but they're thrilled.