Chapter 1 considers how Emerson uses the essay form to present his ideas as experiments or trials, to preserve a sense of spontaneity or casualness (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics”) and to dramatize what he calls the “contrary tendencies” in his philosophy (“I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies”). While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. Emerson’s description of a poem in “The Poet” applies equally to his own essays: each is a living thing, like “a plant or an animal,” each has “an architecture of its own.” The discussion focuses on the moods of “History” and “Experience,” guided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of the essay as a carpet, or an arena for thought.

While it is important to trace Emerson’s main positions, one misses the living nature of his philosophy unless one also takes account of the motions, moods, and patterns within his essays, and the ways he dramatizes instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency. This emphasis is found in Goodman’s discussions of “History” in Chapter 1, “Friendship” in Chapter 3, “Nominalist and Realist” in Chapter 4, “Manners” in Chapter 6, “Experience” in Chapter 7, “Nature” in Chapter 9, and “Illusions” in Chapter 10. Chapter 2 distinguishes the sheer variety of skepticisms in Emerson’s thought, about the world and other minds, but also about mystical experiences that refuse “to be named” or are “ineffable.” It also attends to the differences between the “modern” tradition of skepticism as doubt, and skepticism as a form of life, with Emerson’s essay on Montaigne a key source for his idea of a “wise skepticism.”