Even the great ones strike out. Compensation is one big embarrassing whiff from Emerson, the less said about it the better. Instead of recounting what Emerson writes here (which, sadly, gives fuel to the argument that he’s an American Pangloss), I’ll just make a few general points:

• There’s no squaring Christian theology with Emerson’s claims in this essay. He has no obligation to do so, but the Sermon on the Mount counts as nothing if you buy Emerson’s cosmic accounting in this essay. While I’m not a Christian, I do believe that the traditional faith has a greater appreciation for injustice in the world than Emerson’s theory of morality and justice.
• Emerson’s belief in a form of cosmic accounting of right and wrong should serve as a cautionary tale about extrapolating the laws of nature too literally. Physics is our understanding of the world at this moment, based on math and experimentation. It is subject to revision based on future knowledge. Creating a cosmic theory of justice based on incomplete cosmology is perilous.
• It’s possible to tease out some interesting parallels with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, especially in regard to good/bad morality, but this essay annoys me too much to give it any credit.

In short, I believe that the universe is cold, cruel and out to kill us. We’re accidents by species and birth. To believe that every action has a reaction, every compensation a cost, is to create the conditions for massive envy and despair. Anyone who believes this as a child will be doomed to a miserable life unless he or she is lucky enough to roll the dice into the top .1 percent.

And so I’m going to leave the final word to Woody Allen:

People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.

My final look at Self Reliance focuses on rhetoric. As noted on Sunday, there are long stretches where the essay reads like poetry and deserves close reading. But there are other sections of the text where Emerson is writing for the lectern, stylizing his text for emotional impact. Over the years, these rhetorical moments have come to define our image of Emerson, but they have obscured understanding.

Take, for example, the fourth line in the essay:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.

The words pop from the page. Emerson formed them from classical rhetorical structure. Note the parallel “to believe” phrases. Speakers rely on phrases like these to create a rhythm in the text, to coil up the gathering thought so it can snap to conclusion. Also, for this rhetorical structure to work properly, it must begin simply and then extend.  Emerson starts with a generic “to believe your own thought.”  A phrase that read “To believe your own thought is genius,” is provocative, but unmemorable.

The second “to believe” phrase is the prize: what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men. That thought could stand alone as it’s own sentence. But note that Emerson never actually takes that step. What Emerson says before and after this sentence is that honestly spoken sentiment is more valuable than thought. Why would that be the case?  I’m going to turn to Nietzsche, Gay Science 354, for my theory:

Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual – there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer.

(T)he world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world; that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby meagre, relatively stupid, – a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficial-isation, and generalisation.

Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species ; and even what is here called “usefulness” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

Nietzsche’s punchline comes in Twilight of the Idols:

We stop appreciating ourselves enough when we communicate. Our actual experiences are not in the least talkative. They could not express themselves even if they wanted to. For they lack the words to do so. When we have words for something we have already gone beyond it. In all speech there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for average, middling, communicable things. The speaker vulgarizes himself as soon as he speaks.

Going back to Emerson’s quote, the genius does not lie in the “truth” of any given statement, the genius lies in the courageous self-deceit of listing to that inner voice and letting it speak your sentiment without attempting to please the herd.

So why does Emerson need the rhetoric? Two reasons.  One, rhetoric is a wonderful shorthand. It provides speakers and writers an opportunity to quickly and bluntly deliver a core message in a powerful way. It took me four lines from Nietzsche to convey what Emerson does in one powerfully designed sentence.

The second reason is more important. Rhetoric is democratic. It reaches all ears, much like fast food reaches all hungry mouths. Emerson never would have reached a popular audience without the memorable rhetoric. While there’s a risk of being misunderstood, Emerson answers that in another famous rhetorical flourish in Self Reliance:

Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

 

What’s interesting about this piece of rhetoric is how it demonstrates Nietzsche’s grain of contempt theory. Obviously, Emerson doesn’t believe that every lazily-formed, ill-considered word out of every boastful American’s mouth is as wise as the words of Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. But if you take all of these words of unfiltered sentiment together, you get what Whitman later called the great poem that is America. Let the democratic organ turn these words into generalization. We’ll end up with far greater wisdom from a democratic nation of people speaking their own sentiments than if we instruct everyone to speak carefully as if the fate of the nation rested on their words.

It’s this faith in democracy that separates Emerson from Nietzsche. Emerson has faith in our stupidity. He’s willing to accept it and own it. If you trick Americans into thinking they always have something valuable to say — and that they are exceptional — the end result will be a collective voice of wisdom that is exceptional.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King Day is an appropriate, opportune time to examine a commonly overlooked theme of Emerson’s Self Reliance: his critique of progress.  King, now considered a hero of progressives, was far too fatalistic to embrace that mantle.  In The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch wrote:

Near the end of his life, King told his old Montgomery congregation that he was no longer an optimist, although he still had hope.  The distinction between optimism and hope was implicit in many of his earlier statements as well. He had seen too much suffering to embrace the dogma of progress, even though he was always careful to explain that he objected only to theories of ‘automatic’ or ‘inevitable’ progress and to ‘false,’ and ‘superficial’ optimism.

These thoughts bear a great resemblance to Emerson:

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

What King came to understand – and Emerson understood intuitively even though he shrunk from fights – is that the human struggle is never ending. There is no great end point to political life, right/left, traditional/radical. Those who hold dear to an ideology believing that only the failure to enact it in full has prevented its inherent goodness will never live to see this Platonic vision.  The end of one fight merely sets off another. All progress – even technological progress – comes with a cost:

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Emerson’s disbelief in progress places his noncomformism in a different light. If struggle is a constant in life – including class struggle – it’s folly to assume another’s grand solution as your own:

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

You choose to take a mere approximation of your thought. Better to follow your own beliefs – better in fact to wrong – and to let the democracy smooth out the rough edges systematically. As Samuel Beckett wrote, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Perhaps Beckett was an Emersonian too:

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience dies with them. And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; and what the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.

Today’s essay will focus on one paragraph from Self Reliance. It’s an epic paragraph: 583 words, 27 sentences, and more ideas than most writers can fit into 10 essays. I’m going to work through it sentence by sentence.

It begins:

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

There’s a strong air of bravado in this sentence. Emerson is calling out American manhood — which places distance between him and contemporary readers for the sexist edge, among other reasons. There’s also the strange word ‘whoso’ and the unnecessary comma staring us in the face. But the comma gives the sentence balance and drama. You can feel the oratorical pause. ‘Must’ is a strong word in any context, but after the comma it takes on extra heft. Also note the negative word ‘nonconformist.’ Emerson does not look for an affirmative alternative — the rogue or maverick of contemporary political chest thumping. He’s concerned most with destroying conformity in this sentence and in this paragraph. What follows are numerous forms of conformity.

He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.

Masochistic teachers have tortured students for generations with that ‘immortal palms’ phrase. How many students have dreaded being asked the meaning of it on a final exam? I believe that these teachers are being lazy — the phrase isn’t that important and it distracts from all the ideas around it. It simply means ‘seeks glory.’ I actually find the end of the sentence far more puzzling. Don’t be hindered by goodness, but explore if it’s actually goodness … I assume that’s why Emerson meant. But that might not be correct. The ‘name of goodness’ phrase is ambiguous. Emerson may mean that one shouldn’t be hindered identifying who is good, since name probably refers to people. The conjunctive phrase is quite strange. Why did Emerson use ‘be’ instead of ‘is’? There’s another Emersonian must, signaling great importance, but what exactly is ‘it’?

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

This sentence is far more clear. It’s also close to blasphemy. Emerson doesn’t say here that nothing’s more sacred than the integrity of your mind — he’s saying that nothing at all is sacred except that integrity. I don’t believe it’s an overstatement to say that Emerson repeals the Ten Commandments with this sentence and replaces it with a single dictum.

Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

It’s so strange to see ‘absolve’ used in this context. Emerson calls for you to forgive and pardon yourself. For what? I can only assume it’s for your errors. I believe that Emerson is calling for people (men, in his context) to be brave and not fear mistakes. Then we get hit with ‘suffrage,’ which contemporary English speakers think of only as the right to vote. In Emerson’s context, it means a prayer on behalf of another — in this case you. So you could rephrase this sentence as ‘forgive yourself of your trespasses and the world will forgive you as well.’

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.

The syntax of this sentence is maddening, but effective. ‘I remember an answer’ is, in fact, the most important fact of this sentence, which sets up a punchline behind it. The description of this old scold as a ‘valued advisor’ is a beautiful piece of sarcasm from Emerson. ‘Importune’ is a word beautifully chosen as well — I picture a hectoring bore at Emerson’s ear demanding an answer. Finally, you have to admire the mocking ‘dear old doctrines’ that Emerson cites, which pretty much declares that only an old fogey would care about such things.

On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be from below, not from above.”

The beauty of this sentence is the way Emerson sets it up. I actually think Emerson’s ‘valued advisor’ is making a solid point. Who knows where our intuitions begin? Who has confidence in every impulse? You might be tempted to have these thoughts if the sentence arrives without proper framing, but Emerson isn’t interested in having an even-handed debate on the matter. He’s rigging the contest for intuition.

I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

Once again, Emersonian bravado (and blasphemy) are on display. Emerson has full faith in his intuition and will trust it even if it’s in direct conflict with the traditions of faith.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

This is a restatement of the second sentence. Just in case it wasn’t clear to you when mentioned in the context of mind, Emerson now says that his nature stands above all laws, which I can only assume includes the Ten Commandments, U.S. and Massachusetts Constitutions, civil and criminal laws and Concord local statutes.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

Here is Emerson at his most proto-Nietzschean. This sounds very much like good/bad morality in Genealogy of Morals, as opposed to the Christian good/evil morality. Emerson is defining the good as something in synch with his nature. Except he doesn’t use the world nature here, he uses constitution. In this context, it most likely means his mental and psychological makeup. Does Emerson mean that anything that upsets his mental and psychological makeup is necessarily bad?

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.

Everything in the world is nominal and short lasting except for you. It’s important to point out that Emerson doesn’t believe this is reality — back to my earlier Matrix discussions, he’d have to advocate that we’re all brains in vats to make this literal case. Rather, he’s saying that people should behave as if we’re all living in a matrix and nothing around us is real. It’s a very dangerous thought.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

This is a critique of authority. Emerson is shaking his head in disgust for how quickly we give up when faced with authoritative opposition. The use of the word ‘ashamed’ is particularly important. There’s an element of self congratulations in this sentence, that Emerson is a superior human well above listening to the authority of police officers and the various bosses we have to deal with in life.

Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.

Perhaps realizing that the previous sentence can come across as arrogant, Emerson admits his own failing here — he is too easily swayed by decent, articulate people. He needs to check himself for this bias, remembering to stay focused on the content and not the art.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

An interesting thing is happening in these sentences — Emerson is in fact describing himself, but as the speaker, not the listener. He always came across in public performances as decent, articulate and persuasive. The anger he pretends to aim at himself is actually aimed at his weak minded listeners who applaud his words but don’t really understand him. No one would consider Emerson a rude man, but he grabs onto that word and declares that maybe his speeches should be a little more raw. Maybe his performance is getting in the way of truth.

If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?

Emerson changes gears abruptly with an attack on philanthropy. American history is littered with great monsters who were also major philanthropists. He anticipates the robber barons with this sentence.

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.

Conservatives have often used this sentence as proof that Emerson is one of them — but that’s not the case at all. What Emerson is speaking against, very specifically, is the kind of internationalist noblesse oblige that is completely blind to injustice close to home, which should be completely obvious in the next sentence:

Thy love afar is spite at home.

As clear as this statement is, it’s also oddly out of place with the argument of the paragraph so far. Why has Emerson switched from a discussion of intuition to questions of charity and political responsibility? He then characterizes what this hypothetic rebuke would mean:

Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

And now it becomes clearer what Emerson is saying. The philanthropy discussion is, in fact, a diversion — Emerson is actually illustrating why a person should be indecorous, even uncivil. He’s talking about speaking truth to power … or more accurately, truth to everyone. Damn the consequences. And there’s clear punctuation to this point:

Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none.

But just when I have a handle on what Emerson is saying, he then makes a very striking statement and goes on a puzzling diversion:

The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines.

This is another Emerson sentence that can only be properly understood when the ideas are balanced. Talk about the ‘doctrine of hatred’ is striking and memorable. But Emerson is not saying that people should preach this doctrine at all times. He’s giving a very specific example of when it’s appropriate — when a ‘doctrine of love’ is expressed with ‘pules and whines.’ The phrase ‘crocodile tears’ comes to mind. Emerson is really expressing the need to call out hypocrisy. Then again, Emerson follows up that sentence with this one:

I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.

I cannot fathom what Emerson is up to with this line. Is he saying that he shuns his particular family members when ‘genius’ (which I can only assume is his intuition) speaks in conflict with them? Or is he saying that he shuns the concept of sympathetic family relations — which could also be a metaphor for all sentimental connections — when it conflicts with intuitive genius? Then he writes:

I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.

I haven’t a clue what that means. And also:

I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

Again, I’m at a loss. I guess he’s saying that he’ll put his whims ahead of sympathetic relations and hope these intuitions are, in the end, more than whims. But whether they are or not, one cannot spend his time explaining himself, so go with the whims. If he means anything beside this, I’d love to know.

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

We get a little clarity here. Perhaps these past few puzzling lines were about cloistering himself to write, at the exclusion of loved ones. Emerson is saying that his intuition — perhaps his literary muse — always has to come first and he cannot be made to explain for this. As Emerson comes to the close of the paragraph, he returns to the question of philanthropy, which is clearly an issue on his mind and bothering him:

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.

Remember that earlier, Emerson was speaking about a very different situation — about a hypocrite racist who had a sudden love of the enslaved in Barbados. Now it’s personal and specifically about his obligations. He then makes a Biblical allusion to Cain:

Are they my poor?

Is that a rhetorical question? I don’t believe it is. Emerson is trying to make a point that we do have an obligation to some, but we need to clarify who and why we have these obligations:

I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

Or, in other words, those poor Barbados slaves. He has no connection to their plight — the money is merely an expression of bad conscience and Emerson doesn’t feel obliged to them. Instead Emerson feels obligation to people with ‘spiritual affinity’:

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Note that Emerson never specifically names who has this spiritual affinity with him — and as I noted yesterday, Thoreau would choke at the idea of Emerson going to prison for anyone. The important point is that this sentence, in no way, places Emerson in the same camp with conservatives who don’t believe in government assistance for the poor. Emerson is defining how we should determine who is worthy of our help. And in contradiction to conservatives, helping the disposed in foreign lands first is clearly wrong in Emerson’s way of thinking.

And that concludes my exegesis on one particularly memorable paragraph of Self Reliance. I hope my analysis put some light on the complexity of Emerson’s ideas and style of expression. He’s not a writer to be swallowed in big chunks, he needs to be nibbled, tasted, questioned and nibbled again. And even then, I cannot be sure that I’ve understood him well.

To begin my essays about Self Reliance — which may last a weekend or perhaps even a week — I’m going to start with the darkness. I do not believe that darkness defines his essay — it’s actually an essay of light — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there or that passages couldn’t be taken wildly out of context. Millions misread Nietzsche to devastating effect and I believe that many throughout American history have similarly misread Emerson, especially Self Reliance. And how could they not? This is the essay where Emerson proclaims the foolishness and danger of intellectual consistency and also where he calls being misunderstood a badge of honor. And, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “Another feature of his rhetorical style involves exploring the contrary poles of a particular idea, similar to a poetic antithesis.” If Emerson must raise hell to reveal heaven, he’s perfectly content to do so.

Just the words self reliance today call to mind survivalists hoarding gold in a Montana cabin. Others may hear these words and think about ending government programs like food stamps and welfare or cutting taxes on the wealthy. Many literary critics have suggested that Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab of “Moby-Dick” was intended as a parody of Emerson’s self reliant man. The more serious critique of writers like Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Santayana is that Emerson’s Self Reliance is bloodless, disdainful of history and community, a disturbing guide to a shallow, naive American culture.

D.H. Lawrence, building on this anti-Emersonian critique, famously described American culture this way:

But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

That line reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. As Harold Bloom would no doubt agree, McCarthy is a direct literary descendant of Emerson:

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover His own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

There’s no more terrifying character in American literature than The Judge in Blood Meridian, an old west Ahab with a touch of Charles Manson. There’s a touch of Emerson in Ethan Edwards from The Searchers and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. A particular type of American terror can grow from seedlings of thought like:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.

Imagine a psychopathic loner, one who instead of reading Salinger picks up Emerson, and comes across this out of context:

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.

Or how about this grand rationalization for evil acts:

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

Or to the Internet blow hard who spouts his opinions with complete conviction that his thoughts both reflect truth and mirror the mind of America, Emerson provides this cover:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

Finally, darkest of all, there’s this nugget:

Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.

All of these quotes are taken out of context and I will return to them in subsequent essays to remove some (but not all) of the sting. Judging Emerson by these quotes in isolation doesn’t concern me because his writing is clear enough to rebut all but the most irrational misreaders. However, these quotes should remind all Emerson readers that as much as we might like to read his most colorful lines as epigrams, there’s peril in that practice. If he’d intended to be read like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, he would have written that way.

A more serious criticism of Self Reliance returns to the D.H. Lawrence quote above, which was highlighted in Richard Slotkin’s seminal work Gunfighter Nation. As Slotkin notes, the lone American has been mythologized into this heroic figure who does the world’s dirty work, whether it’s killing Native Americans or fighting pre-emptive wars. Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West mythologizes this triumph of the Anglo-Saxon world. Roosevelt called our ultimate triumph over Native America:

The crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.

TR’s blunt truth — much in Emerson’s fashion — is obscured today. Throughout the book he lauds the United States expansion for leading to far less “blood mingling” than had occurred in other American conquests. This idol, the man of toughing talking hard truths and indecorous action in the name of God, has appeared to many through the generations to echo Emerson as well.

This too is false, which will only become fully apparent when we get to Thoreau’s eulogy many weeks from now. But as the closing words of History hinted, Emerson was not on the side of conquest, but rather of the natives and all of history’s losers. He felt that the long march to national identity should include an effort to become more like the natives of this land, which was a call his disciple Thoreau heeded.

Neither was Emerson a believer in laissez-faire political economy. In a particularly harsh moment, Emerson seems to attack the entire concept of a compassionate progressive state:

Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

A close reading of this passage, however, reveals a far more subtle political message. Emerson is not refusing redistribution because he feels entitled to “his money,” as we often hear in politics today. Instead, Emerson wants to share his largesse with “a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold.” Far from wanting to distance himself from communities, Emerson wants to build them. In fact, he is willing “to go to prison” for their justice.

Emerson never did spend time in prison — and he criticized Thoreau’s tax-protest imprisonment as pointless. According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?”

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience inspired Gandhi, who in turn inspired Martin Luther King. And as Harold Bloom has written on numerous occasions, there are always two sides to Emerson and his influence. There’s the cold, dark Emerson of American individualism and self assuredness and there’s the idealistic, hopeful Emerson of non violent, sacrificial social reform.

I don’t believe that either extreme genuinely captures the Ralph Waldo Emerson on the page. The truth is both and neither. Emerson is a man who saw an economic depression as a great opportunity for freedom. He’s strange and harder to comprehend than he at first appears. But the longer I linger on his works, the more hope I see for America’s future. Emerson’s influence doesn’t have to end nor does it have to follow established paths. Blazing a new path of Emersonian wisdom, based on your own experiences, is precisely what he’d like you to do with his work.

Through reading, we can find empathetic connections with people from all ages. This is Emerson’s theory of history, and this is his destination:

History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

This destination includes a surprisingly abrupt conclusion that warrants an essay of its own – that humanity is owed a form of history not written by the “winners:”

Broader and deeper we must write our annals—from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience— if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

I can almost see Foucault in that description. Emerson’s idea of history reads much like Nietzsche’s genealogy. He’s eager to see beyond a strictly factual description to determine how people lived in each era and how that style of life can illuminate what it means to be human.

There’s also a touch of Heidegger in the essay when Emerson describes the importance of seeing historical figures in context:

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.

This is the basic plot of Emerson’s “History,” but it doesn’t come close to revealing it’s strange beauty. The essay is packed with colorful diversions that have the power of aphorisms. This one, for example, is very insightful about how Americans view financial wealth:

We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.

This is a far more accurate description of how Americans really feel than the oft-repeated cliché that Americans admire the rich because they aspire to be rich themselves.

The way Emerson describes men of virtue is similar to the way Nietzsche describes the good in traditional good/bad morality (as opposed to good/evil morality which has held sway for the past 2000 years or so.) Emerson also has an answer to Tolstoy’s theory of history. Why Tolstoy posits that history has a force that swallows up personality (who are mere objects of this force), Emerson focuses instead on ideas:

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age…. The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the shipbuilder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

But the central feature of Emerson’s theory of history is it’s subjectivity. Emerson believes that all history is biography – a biography of both people living and dead. The story takes a form in the original subject, then is born again in the mind of the reader:

Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.… All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.

In working through the issues of history, people learn to solve problems that have existed through the ages:

In that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.

Tomorrow, I tackle Emerson’s magnum opus, which is also America’s national epic, “Self Reliance.” The essay contains multitudes, so I will probably approach it from several different angles this long holiday weekend, ending with a view of self reliance through the prism of Martin Luther King on Monday.

Everyone in my family — my wife and all three kids — have had Scarlet Fever in the past few weeks. Only I was spared, until yesterday, when I started to feel a sore throat coming on. Feeling weak and miserable, I rushed through The Transcendentalists, made a hasty connection to Wittgenstein and drew a very poorly thought out conclusion.

I should be wrong more often, because two of my most loyal readers picked me up with comments that pointed out 1) that my reading of Emerson’s views about idealism and materialism could be improved by reading Stanley Cavell, 2) that I missed something very beautiful and important in The Transcendentalists that relates to how 1960s idealists continue to influence our culture, 3) that Wittgenstein (especially the Wittgenstein of the Tracticus) should never be called a materialist and 4) there’s a very interesting University of Chicago symposium coming up about Transcendentalism and Wittgenstein next month.

Thank you for the comments, it’s good to know that someone’s paying attention. And it’s good to have another shot at The Transcendentalists because it’s a beautiful lecture after a couple doses of penicillan.

I now see that if any part of this lecture should be ignored, it’s the opening section where Emerson sets up his idealism vs. materialism dichotomy. I don’t think Emerson defines his terms very well up front and he promises a comparison of modes of thought that he doesn’t fully deliver. In fact, I think most of the lecture can be skimmed up to the point where Emerson starts speaking of the Transcendentalists as a unique generation.

He makes a fascinating comparison between them and other historical eras. The equivalents of the Transcendentalists, in Emerson’s view, were responsible for some of the most important intellectual and spiritual movements in history. Then he describes the current generation:

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do is done only because they are overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems drudgery.

Instead of seeing these Transcendentalists as lazy or antisocial, Emerson sees them as a commentary on the accepted mode of American life:

Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial—they are not stockish or brute—but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved.

It’s a sad commentary that we now live in an age where protest, much of it angry, has become highly material. The great debates of our age revolve around sharing our economic largesse. Obviously, the political economy in a democracy should always be open to critique and conflict. I do find it sad, however, that instead of directly confronting institutions, young people today seem to have surrendered their greatest weapon, which is subverting the culture.

The counterculture of the 1960s was in the great American tradition, which the Transcendentalists were also a part. But occupying city parks is not a form of dropping out or creating utopian communities. It’s a massive drain on urban city budgets, requiring more money to keep the parks clean and safe.

Imagine if young Americans instead declared that if America no longer wants us, we’re going to drop out. We’re going off the grid, we’re not consuming your culture anymore, we’re going to make our own. If you really want to frighten America’s economic powers, take away the people who buy the clothes, music, movies, cellphones and lattes. Most of all, deprive our urban centers of sex.

By leaving society, Emerson said his Transcendalists, like the hippies of the 60s and my fictional utopians of today, made a profound statement about the default man of the age and this will create a backlash:

Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial—they are not stockish or brute—but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved.

But as it has become increasingly clear in our culture, loved they are not. (Except by their overprotective parents.) The Baby Boomers and Generation Xers for the most part see the Millennials as nice kids who are too quiet to make a difference. After they graduate college and get into the workforce, they become an army of work-for-free interns. Their politics are mocked as naive and market-driven. The older people who shove a stale pop culture down their throats mock them behind their backs for failing to invent new art forms as they did in their youth. Toyota runs commercials making fun of their addiction to social media and pretend friendships. And as Great Recession turns into the Mild Recovery, they are becoming a generation lacking the necessary work experience to take on the kinds of jobs that people in the 30s build their careers upon.

None of these criticisms are fair. The blunt reality is that this generation has grown up with so much ugliness and mediocrity around them that they probably would not recognize beauty before their eyes. It’s not their fault, it’s the fault of the Silent Generation for taking part in the sexual revolution, then disowning all knowledge of it once it went sour and then becoming hypocritical moralists. It’s the fault of the Baby Boomers for staking a claim for idealism, then becoming the most demanding consumers the world has ever known. And it’s the fault of Generation X for promising cultural change, then giving up on it at the first sign of difficulty.

The Millennials cannot look to their elders for help, then must find their salvation from within. Emerson recognized this phenomenon in his own age:

Where are the old idealists? where are they who represented to the last generation that extravagant hope which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly world, to these? Are they dead—taken in early ripeness to the gods—as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet, announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be better with the new generation?

Why is this so? Why do people not only lose their youthful values but grow disdainful of them as they age? Emerson suggests that people expect less of themselves over time:

A man is a poor limitary benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits—a great influence, which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones; so that though absent he should never be out of my mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

This failure to pass on idealism has cost the current generation. They grew up with too much protection and therefore too much expectation of care in times of trouble. Idealistic generations have more self reliance. They feel confident enough to step away from the culture — whether literally like the Transcendentalists or figuratively like the counterculture 60s. Here is how a self-confident, idealistic generation thinks:

As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the experiment and found that from the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.

Faced with an economy that doesn’t want them and a culture that takes them for granted, it seems only logical that this generation would simply choose to reject it, to take their lack of employment as a gift to form a new culture where they are front and center. Here’s how a young person today might constructive confront the “new normal:”

Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting; it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state. The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

It will take leadership for this generation to go there. The Millennials have proven to be great followers. They help movements achieve critical mass at a speed other generations could not imagine. Emerson calls on young people to use this energy and to seek out approaches far from the mainstream:

Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable deserts of thought and life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the highway of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of our nature but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what is permanent?

And what is the end goal of all this? Like Emerson, I believe that movements like the Transcendentalists are necessary not to bring on utopia, but to restore balance. It’s my opinion that our culture has become so dependent on the financial sector because we’ve paid so little attention to building an enriching culture. A society with a greater balance of artists, writers, craftsmen and, yes, philosophers can go about creating complicated instruments of wealth without going off the deep end. Instead of creating great art to fill up the 1000 channels of TV, we created reality shows about getting rich by flipping real estate properties … and, inevitably, lots of people went broke on those facile dreams.

Here’s how Emerson describes his good society:

In society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or ‘line packet’ to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.

Earlier in the essay, Emerson had this insightful commentary about the banking industry:

The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither—a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness.

While the goal of the idealist might be to do away with bankers, sharing these metaphors widely so that the public understands the instability of institutions might be good enough. Emerson believes that a good, stable, soulful society needs these voices. And while a full generation may not be capable of moving in this direction, it may take far fewer voices to make a difference:

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business; for a political party, or the division of an estate; will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes: all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

And the beautiful thing about young people is that there are always more of them working their way to adulthood. With them comes new ideals.