Abstract:

In recent years, there has been a growing attempt within the field of academic philosophy to revive a practice of spiritual exercises typically known as "care of the self." Such scholarship has tended not to construe these practices as a bona fide religious affair. Nor has that work thickly considered them as being consistent with the democratically social. On the other hand, scholarship on religion has appeared hesitant to bring its full powers to bear on the issue. This appears to be the result of philosophy's preemptive assimilation of spiritual practice to a truncated aesthetic concern disengaged from matters of religious sociality. I suggest that neither philosophy nor religious studies has given the art of living its full due, particularly within the context of theories of contrariety.

This dissertation offers an account of the religious dimension of the art of living in a modern tradition that centers on Emerson and descends within a heritage of affinity from the rite of sacred marriage (hieros gamos ), rendering explicit such concerns as piety, redemption, the witness-bearing jeremiad, and the problem of evil. The theory developed is a thematic rather than a prescriptive one. I refer to the object of this theory as "living in return." I argue that this religious and democratic practice---which embodies a particular mood of life---revises much of what the recent scholarship has referred to as the art of living in the contemporary period as, rather, a form of spiritual signifying, which such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Ellison have tended to model and to often exemplify themselves.

This dissertation will also show that in modern American and European thought, more generally, the art of living has been a basic hierogamous theme considerably amplified anywhere that Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche have had influence. What one finds is that this amplification has been most keen where a sensibility has emerged in which conditional contrariety is viewed as a mainstay of life.