Hermeneutic Circles : Emerson, Peirce, Heidegger

In his own time Emerson was hugely famous and much admired even beyond American borders. In Europe Nietzsche read him enthusiastically and nearly knew him by heart, while in the United States Charles Sanders Peirce and William James listened to him in packed conferences. Almost no one, however, has accurately noted this dual influence of Emersonian thought, which has had enormous repercussions on 20th-century thought on both sides of the ocean. In this paper, I will emphasize how great Emerson’s influence was on hermeneutic thought – through Nietzsche’s work – and, on the other hand, I will also mention the Emersonian valence on pragmatist thought, and – through Peirce – on modern semiotics. Two of the most important contemporary philosophical currents, so influential in the twentieth century, thus draw cues, motifs, styles of thought from Emerson (and resonate sometimes with a kind of family resemblance). I will argue conclusively that Emerson's thought heralds the hermeneutic shift that was to have its most famous exponents in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The central text I will comment on is Circles, where the perspectival and circular idea of interpretation appears; this was an idea that would be echoed in the notions of the Heideggerian hermeneutic circle and Peircean infinite semiosis.