"Some flying scheme": teoretico e pratico nel trascendentalismo di Emerson

Abstract: On the back of the studies devoted by Stanley Cavell to American transcendentalism, this essay examines the gap between Kantian transcendental philosophy and Emerson’s transcendentalism. Although he conceives of time as “infinite” time and the subject-object relation as an oblique and discontinuous one, Emerson does not neglect to address the fundamental question about the conditions of possibility of knowledge. In this way, his transcendentalism takes the form of a transcendental philosophy without transcendental schemes, the insufficiency of which he realized. Therefore, both on the theoretical level and on the level of morality and politics, Emerson’s transcendentalism does not rep- resent a relapse into pre-Kantian dogmatism, but rather one of the earliest and most conscious forms of contemporary philosophy.