Another World… Inside This One

Wilderness, Eternity, and American Continental Philosophy

Abstract

Continental philosophy has maintained an abiding interest in transcendence; however, that interest has been shaped by the geographical, historical, and cultural milieu in which continental philosophy developed. But today “continental” philosophy is pursued beyond the boundaries of continental Europe, and it behooves us to ask what might be contributed to phenomenological and hermeneutic accounts of transcendence by traditions rooted in other places, other continents. Some of the first distinctive philosophical contributions of North America—“philosophical” in the sense that term is used in “Western” philosophy—are to be found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, in particular, gave voice to a very different view of transcendence. Thoreau and those thinking in his wake—Henry Bugbee, Annie Dillard, and others—think transcendence in terms of nature, particularly wilderness, in terms of contact, and in terms of wandering or itinerancy. Here transcendence is less about trans-ascendance and its focus on another world, and more about a mode of living deeply in this world.