The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp.

549–560, 2009

The Nexus of Unity of an Emerson Sentence

KELLY DEAN JOLLEY

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
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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

GETTING STARTED
The phenomenology of reading Emerson is easiest to capture if we consider the serious
virgin reader of Emerson. Such a reader finds the sentences of an Emerson essay a string of
pearls loosely strung.2 Emerson sentences seem pearly, lustrous, and the sentences seem
self-contained, even self-centered, wholes—hard and indivisible. The sentences seem as
though they could be rearranged without injury to any one. Each sentence’s nexus of
unity appears epigrammatic.

Auburn University, Department of Philosophy, Auburn, AL 36849-5210, USA. Email: kellydeanjolley@gmail.com

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/050549–12 ! 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770903128620