In these lectures, Stanley Cavell situates Emerson at the intersection of three crossroads: a place where both philosophy and literature pass; where the two traditions of English and German philosophy shun one another; where the cultures of America and Europe unsettle one another. The tone of Cavell's writing is set in the introduction when he asks "Is Moral Perfectionism inherently elitist? Some idea of being true to oneself - or to the humanity in oneself, or of the soul as on a journey (upward or onward) that begins by finding oneself lost to the world, and requires a refusal of society, perhaps above all of democratic, levelling society, in the name of something often called culture - is familiar from Plato's "Republic" to works so different from one another as Heidegger's "Being and Time" and G.B. Shaw's "Pygmalion". What the question means, and what I will mean in proposing that there is a perfectionism that happily consents to democracy, and whose criticism it is the honor of democracy not only to tolerate but to honor, called for by the democratic aspiration, it is the principal task of these Carus lectures to clarify".
