Abstract

Expérience, pragmatisme, transcendantalisme. The article returns, in order to reflect upon experimentation, to the transcendentalism of R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. The better-known pragmatist tradition has absorbed, or, as Stanley Cavell suggests, has repressed such authors. However, the central concepts proposed by Emerson - Self-Reliance, the common, the low - not only announce pragmatism, but suggest a use of practice and a redefinition of experimentation which, in their radicality, go beyond pragmatist inquiry. Self-confidence and ordinary life are instruments to reflect upon radical democracy and to reformat the idea of experimentation, on the basis of concepts like confidence, importance, subjective constitution, and experimentation as an adventure of the self