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.

Emerson’s address to the senior class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838 set an American standard for chutzpah. Emerson had the temerity to propose that future priests and pastors should forget everything they just learned, and don’t bother creating new churches or sects because they’re a waste of time, and instead focus on creating an original definition of God, even if that definition only works for you. No wonder it took 30 years for Emerson to be invited back to Harvard.

Instead of working through the address and trying to draw parallels to today (which is especially difficult in this context, given the religious subject matter), I’m going to attempt something radical. I’m going to use Emerson’s speech as a template for a parallel address to contemporary Americans with the goal of changing their view of politics. I imagine this address being given to a senior class of political science majors.

1. People choose to enter politics for many reasons, but most of these people have virtuous ends in mind. It’s true that there’s quite a bit of ego and power hunger involved and a large number of people drawn to public life see themselves as (less attractive) movie stars with brains. But at the same time, the vast majority of people who run for office or chose a life of public service do so with virtuous goals in mind. Very few people enter politics to make money, there are far easier ways to do that and the way our system is set up, it’s very difficult to enter politics without some wealth on hand.

2. For people who participate in political life, virtue should be its own reward. Acting in the public good should lead to positive effects for constituents, which will lead to the politician being rewarded with additional terms of office. The Good is universal, all citizens want the same things for their families.

3. Eloquence and charm are useful traits for a politician and those with these natural gifts will naturally rise. Those with the ability to touch the heart will be the most successful.

4. While tradition holds that the past is a mirror of the future, in reality, nothing in the past is a good indication of the future and it should be considered no more reliable than miracles. To act robotically based on past action is to tune out the comedy and pathos of the moment and to appreciate actions based on unique conditions.

5. Every political party has its idol of the age. This idol shapes the political framework of the party. Successes are expected to be repeated while shortcomings are part of the unfinished agenda. These idols distort reality. The idioms of their language and the figures of their rhetoric have usurped the place of truth. Their parties are not built on principles, but on tropes.

6. Historical American politics has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate democratically. It has become an exaggeration of the personal and the ritual. It has become petrified into official titles and killed all general national sympathy and liking.

7. This raises a challenge for every citizen in a democracy — a need to obey thyself. That which shows the national interest in me fortifies me.

8. Trying to convert others to your point of view by extolling the miracles of the past is a profanation of national interest. A true conversion can only be made by individuals receptive to beautiful ideas and sentiments.

9. We should all learn of the political heroes and words of the past. But they should be left in the past. They should not be considered our destiny.

10. We have come to speak of our national greatness as something in the past — revelation handed down to us by dead Founding Fathers. This nostalgia saps our institutions of strength and renders contemporary leaders inarticulate.

11. Only someone who speaks in and through the national interest can teach and guide our political future. Every citizens has the courage, piety, love and wisdom to do this. Those who insist on following tired paths of dead leaders and equally dead ideologies should just remain quiet.

12. For our nation to reach new heights, we need new revolutions, new Constitutions, new Founders, new heroes and, most of all, new paths. Our government seems to be tottering toward its fall, almost all life extinct.

13. Governing ideas should blend with the light of rising and setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. We are glad when the rituals of politics are done. We can make far better laws sitting and talking amongst ourselves.

14. What a cruel injustice these rituals — not just those of election season, but day after day on talk shows and in opinion columns — have become to our democracy. They poorly emulate the way the world really works. Many angry, impassioned sounds are uttered, but not a word is articulated.

15. As our political discourse has corroded, all things have gone to decay. Genius leaves the voting booth to haunt the market. Literature follows the path of television and becomes frivolous. Science is cold and misunderstood. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not mention them.

16. In our national interest, let redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The stationariness of politics, the idea that our revolution is in the past, that our Constitution and forms of government are closed, the fear of degrading or idols, past and present, by accepting them as fallible men and women, these indicate the falsehood of our democratic condition.

17. We must learn that the American Revolution is, not was. All citizens today go in flocks to this President or that hopeful, avoiding the true goal — a greater nation — that hides in secret.

18. Recovery begins by going it alone. Refuse all models, even those sacred in our national imagination, and dare to love our country without a mediator or veil. You will find friends who hold up to your emulation, you have no need to emulate another. The imitator dooms himself or herself to hopeless mediocrity. Kennedy and Reagan are dead, let them remain dead.

19. Cast behind you all conformity and acquaint others first hand with the national interest. Make it clear that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure and money are nothing to you.

20. Visit periodically with your constituents whenever possible and when you meet them, be to them thought and virtue personified. Let their timid aspirations find in you a friend. Let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere. Let their doubts know that you have doubted and their wonder feel that you have wondered.

21. Seek a certain solidity of merit that has nothing to do with opinion and which is so essentially and manifestly true that it is taken for granted that the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken.

22. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

23. A belief in and devotion to the national democratic interest makes great leaders. All attempts to contrive national progress based on a system are as cold as the radical ideologies of the Soviets and Nazis. They may begin with good intentions and great plans, but they end with madness and murder. Use the forms that already exist, but breathe life into them by making them plastic and new.

24. And so I look to the new teachers, leaders and public servants who will follow the laws of nature to guide the laws of man and thus bring our nation full circle, making the world a mirror of nature, seeing in the identity of the law of gravity a pureness of heart and showing that the natural laws of science and humanity are one with governing, beauty and joy.

I’m tempted to start with a grand statement about the historic importance of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. But you probably know that already. There’s a more serious question I have to address in this essay: does Emerson’s speech still speak to us? Did it speak to a moment and begin a process or can each generation rediscover it’s call?

I think that question has to be answered one by one. Does this statement speak to you or not?

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man …. Man is thus metaphormosed into a thing, into many things.

Does it bother you that you are defined by your job? Do you feel like you are something more — and that your defined role is sucking some of the life out of you? Our employer are entitled to a reasonable amount of our time, but are they entitled to anything more? Are you entitled to anything outside of your work except for family and leisure time — are you entitled to your thoughts, opinions and other callings?

I tend to believe that many, maybe even most, Americans don’t care about having an intellectual life outside of their jobs. They read little and write even less. To the extent that they think about politics, it’s mostly to speak their opinions as loudly as possible.

While America is in a continuing economic crisis, we’re in an even longer continuing spiritual crisis. You can call it the Culture Wars if you’d like, but that tends to reduce everything to opinions about the sexual revolution, as if that’s the defining issue in American life. From what I’ve heard, last night’s Republican Presidential debate featured a 30 minute discussion about whether contraception should be banned. What an absurd waste of time — why not use that time arguing whether the Mexican War was a good idea, it’s equally relevant to our political future.

My view of America’s spiritual crisis is that our democracy has become dangerously imbalanced. The national assumption is that only money matters, who has it, how some can make more and what we can do to make some things cost less. Americans spend very little time talking about everything that makes our lives worth living. Robert Kennedy spoke to this in 1968:

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

What Emerson spoke about in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR mattered to Robert Kennedy and probably for many of his followers. During the 2008 campaign, it seemed to matter to Barack Obama as well. He often quoted RFK’s speech when talking about his economic values. But he doesn’t quote this speech anymore. Could he? Would Americans understand it — or would they call it “coldhearted” and remote from their economic concerns and fears?

In one respect, President Obama could not repeat RFK’s cry because they were words of the late 1960s, not our age. Emerson understood the importance of putting all discourse into the vernacular of their time:

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

And it must be noted that Barack Obama did write his own book. DREAMS OF MY FATHER remains his greatest lasting contribution to American culture, a remarkably honest, existential book by a young man writing with far too much honesty to ever rise to the Presidency. And yet it happened. How? Shouldn’t people who write heartfelt autobiography in their early 30s keep writing and contribute to the culture that way? Emerson believed not:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books…. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence it is progressive.

Emerson believes that the great man is required to be active in his world and of his world. Too much influence can become a dead weight on his back. But even if President Obama sees something in RFK’s words that speak to him today, Emerson believed that he must chalk up these parallel minds to foresight in the original speaker. It is then the duty of the contemporary leader and philosopher to also look ahead and find someone in the future who can relate to his or her words and thoughts. And so it becomes the duty of the true scholar to relate to the world heroically:

Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

So Emerson believes that American Scholars (and President Obama is my chosen example) have a duty to do more than copy RFK and other thinkers of the past, scholars have a responsibility to set the stage for future Americans. It seems like the first task Emerson would demand would be for this scholar to call out the lies and misconceptions in our culture:

He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions—these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day—this he shall hear and promulgate.

I’ve used our current President as an example, but is it even possible for a President to fulfill this role? Perhaps Democrats made a mistake in 2008 casting a Philosopher King … perhaps Barack Obama would have been better suited to critique from the outside. This isn’t to criticize President Obama — the Presidency cannot escape politics, which is nothing other than the world of appearances:

The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this’ particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly.

Maybe a President can’t do this — he can’t shrug off a vote as being irrelevant or stay above the fray. A President needs to be engaged in the battles of the day, and this simply isn’t President Obama’s natural countenance. A President’s job is to help guide the national herd. A great, heroic character to Emerson (and also to Nietzsche) is one who calls for the rise of better men and women:

I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called “the mass” and “the herd.” In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being—ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.

What’s at stake if we don’t call for this heroism? So what if we remain economic creatures and consumers of entertainment? Emerson saw a great risk of creating a nation of soft, compliant people:

The spirit of the American free-man is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant.

So what can be done about this? Can an individual — a President, priest or artist — change the national character? Emerson was dubious. All we can hope is for individuals, one by one, to demand more of themselves and to stand firm:

(I)f the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience—patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world.

Instead of defining American freedom as something that entitles you to the opportunity to become rich, Americans can see their freedom as a gift of what Emerson calls “Divine Soul.” We have the opportunity to see the world in new ways and to envision a brighter future. We can’t wait for a President or a movement, we need to begin with ourselves:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

If anyone still believes that this unique national call is possible, even for one man or woman, than THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR remains relevant and full of hope.

As I wrap up Emerson’s NATURE, I’m going to take a quick detour into my favorite book of 2011, Daniel Kahneman’s THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his research in behavioral economics, writes about the two different kinds of mental systems that interplay to create thoughts and ideas. The slow thinking approach is painstaking and energy hungry — and our mind tries very hard to avoid using it as much as possible.

The quick thinking side was celebrated in Malcolm Gladwell’s BLINK. It thrives on heuristics and intuition. It seems to me that half the people who read Gladwell’s book have come away with an overly sunny view of quick thinking. Kahneman takes a sledgehammer to their misconceptions.

You have to read Kahneman’s book to fully understand the analysis, but his conclusion is basically this:

(H)ow can we evaluate the probable validity of an intuitive judgment? When do judgments reflect true expertise? When do they display an illusion of validity? The answer comes from the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill:

an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable

an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

When both these conditions are satisfied, intuitions are likely to be skilled. Chess is an extreme example of a regular environment, but bridge and poker also provide robust statistical regularities that can support skill. Physicians, nurses, athletes, and firefighters also face complex but fundamentally orderly situations. The accurate intuitions that Gary Klein has described are due to highly valid cues that the expert’s System 1 has learned to use, even if System 2 has not learned to name them. In contrast, stock pickers and political scientists who make long-term forecasts operate in a zero-validity environment.

In other words, intuition has validity — but only when coupled with intense, long-term slow-thinking study. And more, for some disciplines, this long-term work isn’t going to be enough, because the field of expertise is too dynamic. No one has seen or studied enough election results or stock trades to accurately predict what’s going to happen next.

When we left Emerson yesterday, he was discussing the importance of intuition as a tool of finding truth in science, poetry and religion. He begins his final chapter “Prospects” by continuing his attack on fact gathering:

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.

Once again, Emerson seems to be in conflict with modern science. As a professional rhetorician, I’m in the same boat, because I’m sympathetic with Emerson’s point of view. This mocking attack on Aristotelian naming and ordering appeals to me a great deal:

It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas.

Emerson is on stronger ground when he criticizes history instead of science. This passage makes an important point about the need for intuition to find original approaches and first steps towards intelligent hypotheses:

In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

What’s lacking in modern man, Emerson believes, is a poetic spirit. Because we cannot see the world like poets, our thinking has become increasingly narrow, focused on economic needs, not enlightenment:

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding, as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne.

He continues:

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.

And so, we come full circle to the beginning of NATURE and my connection to THE TREE OF LIFE. Critics of the film have complained that the film lacks a traditional story and that there are long stretches where “nothing happens.” That’s not accurate — a great deal is happening on screen. But these critics are right, there is no traditional story. Emerson, nearly 200 years ago, decried this need for “fables” to explain the world. He called for an American art form, in my opinion, very much in the spirit of Terrence Malick:

We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.

By taking this poetic view of life, we will learn to see the world with a child’s eyes and we will learn to describe it in original ways, free of cliche:

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect—What is truth? and of the affections—What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said: ‘Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you.’

Emerson doesn’t succeed in unifying all modes of thought into a cohesive theory in NATURE. His view of religion is dependent on science, which has weakened many of his conclusions over the years. His view of science places too much emphasis on intuition, which has long been a crutch for lazy thinking rather than wisdom. And his love of poetry feels, at times, a bit airy. Why is this poetry anything more than beautiful? What lasting insights does poetry leave behind?

But NATURE is an astounding work for its ambition and for the doors it opened for artists and thinkers eager to blaze new trails. That uncredited poem from the quote above continues and closes with this:

‘The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation—a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God—he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to sight.’

With only two sections in NATURE to go — and a very short one entitled “Spirit” on tap for today — it’s tempting to finish up this book now and move on to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. I’m not going to do that because Emerson’s final section, “Prospects,” rivals “Idealism” (which I covered yesterday) for complexity and density.  So instead, I’m going to take stock of NATURE up to this point and set up tomorrow’s conclusion.

NATURE has surprised me. I didn’t expect the piece to be so difficult — and I didn’t expect some of my essays to turn into exegesis. Yesterday’s essay, in particular, had to go deep because it took multiple readings for me to gain a grasp of the material.  I knew when I started with Emerson that I’d find shadows of Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare and Kant in his work and knew how much he inspired Whitman, Nietzsche and Thoreau, but I wasn’t prepared for how much Emerson anticipated 20th Century philosophy, including Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

A little reading yesterday brought to my attention voluminous writing from Stanley Cavell on these connections. That interested me, because Cavell was a mentor to director Terrence Malick, whose film THE TREE OF LIFE was the subject of my first Emerson essay. That seems like validation to me and I was tempted to dig a little deeper, but then I remembered Emerson’s opening call. To seek out second-hand interpretations is the most un-Emerson path a reader can take.

Similarly, I advise anyone reading my essays to understand what they are and what they are not. I am not attempting to uncover Emerson for anyone but myself. If what I write piques your interest, the logical next step is for you to read Emerson and make your own discoveries.

These essays — and those in the Montaigne Project — aren’t literary criticism. I can’t quite explain what I’m attempting to do in these posts, but I think Nietzsche comes close to capturing it in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

I make no claim to be producing great philosophy on these pages (anyone with analytic philosophical training no doubt dismisses these essays as not-philosophy, although Nietzsche would scold me for these statement — he loathed modesty.) But I do believe that I’m creating something of a memoir in these projects. These essays are the best reflection I can capture of my day to day thoughts. These are the issues that haunt me, these are the other works that seem related to the subject and, from time to time, I drop in experience from my life to illuminate my statements. I don’t write about my life much because I simply don’t think about it very often.

Which brings me to “Spirit” and the greatest difficulty that I’m having with NATURE — I’m not a man of faith. I find Emerson’s take on religion fascinating and in some ways appealing, but at times it all appears like a massive rationalization for avoiding atheism. If we define God down to the point where the Divine is a process and a mood, haven’t we actually killed Him? If we make God contingent on the natural laws of science, don’t we make his existence contingent on future scientific discovery?

By contrast, I find Kierkegaard’s view of religion much more logical — you cannot make a rational claim for God, you simply have to take the leap of faith. There are limits to our understanding of the universe, there are mysteries not only before our eyes, but in the quantum mechanics of life and in the dark matter of space. And the more we know about the world, the less rational claims for God become. At this time, a scientifically plausible definition of God would be a Creator who set off the evolutionary and entropic processes of our universe (and perhaps others), then walked away and let them grow at will. That universe as petri dish approach would suggest that we’re mere microbes in the eyes of God. Which only raises more questions — like why a Deity capable of creating life would bother experimenting with it, unless there are multiple bored Deities competing to see who can grow the most disgusting mold in their celestial dorm room.

This view, of course, falls right into the anthropomorphic trap, defining God with human motives. We can’t escape an understanding of God that excludes us as creations in his image. Any God that doesn’t create us in his image becomes unknowable and irrelevant to our lives … and any “plan” of this God would no more include us than we would include the well being of dust mites in our day-to-day thinking.

Emerson is on to this, even if he cannot let go of his convoluted faith. He writes:

We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

But just when I’m about to become discouraged in Emerson’s thinking, he throws out this glorious twisted metaphor of God:

Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being and the evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry.

The most memorable line is the one about the divine dream, but I didn’t want to isolate the sentence because everything around it is important. The part about idealism is what Emerson covered in the last section, but it’s condensed and clarified beautifully here. Matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.  Everything in the universe is in a state of flux, decay and transformation. Heraclitus has been translated many ways, but I prefer this one because it sounds most like The Dude in BIG LEBOWSKI:

Everything flows and nothing abides.

 

Or, you can’t step into the same river twice. There is still water and silt in the stream, but not the same water and silt. The mind is part of the nature of things, so it too is subject to error and entropy … but also to radical discovery and transformation. You can’t really know anyone, yourself included. As Nietzsche and Freud will tell us later, you can’t really know why you took any action in life, you can only guess and rationalize, fitting the past into an accepted narrative definition.

Then we get the amazing “divine dream” metaphor. We are accustomed to waking from various human dreams, finding enlightenment, ovecoming misconceptions. But here Emerson completely turns the metaphor on its head.  It’s in our day-to-day understanding of the world, our relation to Dasein to use the language of Heidegger, that we exist in God’s grace, the Holy conception of the world. If it had ended there, the line would be profound.  But it keeps finding greater depth, because we have the ability to awaken from this graceful dream and discover reality, the glories and certainties of the day.

Going back to my MATRIX analogy, what Emerson is saying here is that the MATRIX is God’s grace. It’s God’s dream that we live in and we have been given the gift of walking around in it.  But, at the same time, we have the freedom to step out of this dream and if we choose to do so, we can discover the beauty of reality. This is a highly Gnostic way of thinking. We can become enlightened higher versions of humans who can see the world as it is.  Like the Gnostics and later Kierkegaard, Emerson believes that this enlightenment can come from flashes of faith, but he also believes that it can come from a deep understanding of science or a poetic view of life.

The quote closes with a line that proposes idealism as an alternate theory to “carpentry and chemistry.” Maybe I’m way off base here, but I read that to mean that Emerson is pre-dating Darwin with an alternative theory of Creation. He doesn’t explicitly state the alternative, but he shows remarkable insight in sensing that a scientific theory is out there, waiting to be discovered.

Again, this is just my reading of Emerson, dependent on my personal thoughts and biases. As this chapter unfolds, it’s clear that Emerson never intends to walk away from God. To me, though, this God that he describes can be substituted with the phrase natural universe and would lose nothing in translation. Take this quote for example:

The Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power.

Going back to my earlier thought about the anthropomorphic trap, Emerson understands this as well, which is why he wants us to find an original view of God, not dependent on history:

We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine.

How do we escape this trap? Through science and poetry, we find a way to clear the earth of human buzzing and see the world as it really exists:

You cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men.

All of this sets up the final section tomorrow, where Emerson attempts to obliterate Aristotle with originality and intuition.

If Morpheus meets Emerson, tells him about the Matrix and asks whether he wants to take the blue pill or the red pill, here’s how he would respond:

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space—or whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me.

This isn’t an “ignorance is bliss” response to the challenge.  Emerson comes down firmly on the side of sensations. This is the world I know and exist in, these are the sensations I feel in it, so what difference does it make whether this sensual world is in fact “real”?

Of course I’m not really being fair to Emerson because the question wasn’t posed to him the same way it was to Neo. He’s responding directly to Plato, Descartes, Kant and all philosophers through the ages who’ve argued that we exist in a shadow world of appearances. But in philosophical terms, the question is the same.

Emerson takes the Descartes response, that God would never jest with us by creating a false world. Maybe not, but reality show TV producers certainly do so every day. The creation of one-off worlds is a major industry in the contemporary world. (I just felt a bit of fleeting deja vu typing this paragraph, as if I’ve already dreamed this essay or composed it in a previous email to a friend.) Emerson further defends his faith in the phenomenal world by writing:

Any distrust of the permanence of laws would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect.

Speaking of the faculties of man, I read a piece in Scientific American this morning by Antonio Damasio, who wrote about how specific brain damage can hinder the ability to comprehend time. A 46 year old patient who suffered hippocampus and temporal lobe damage could not form new factual memories nor recall old ones.  He inhabited a permanent present. Time had no meaning to this person.

Thinking again of our postmodern condition, our new understanding of the physical world compared to the physical world Emerson could comprehend might lead to just such a paralysis or disorientation.  We can’t make the kinds of declarative statements about what the world is and how it behaves that Emerson could. Physics can’t really account for the existence of time, for example, and maybe these patients who lose all sense of past and future have a stronger grip on reality.

I think that Emerson senses this when he writes:

The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit.

It sounds like he’s defending this permanence.  But next he writes:

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

Next comes this very beautiful passage:

The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

This “reverential withdrawing of nature before its God” is a strange phrase that almost sounds like Heidegger.  We can’t ignore it because Emerson has called these the best moments of life.  This is something important.  But what is Emerson saying?

He tries first to describe a similar sensation. He talks about the joy of passing a familiar place on horseback, but we actually have better examples today.  Think of when you’re on an airplane and look out the window trying to find your house or other familiar buildings. Better yet, think of using Google Earth and zooming from a space view of planet Earth all the way down to your house. My four-year old son Finn could spend all day doing this on the iPad. Seeing this vast expanse of natural space shrink to something specific and familiar is thrilling. It gives you a sense of being alive in something bigger and more important, but it also lends context to your life. You live in a far bigger, more fascinating world than the tiny place you walk around in, almost in a daydream at times, day by day.

Here’s how Emerson describes the sensation:

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt, from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

And now Emerson makes one of his most surprising and insightful turns.  That sensation of seeing the world out of context is precisely the work of a poet:

By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.

Emerson believes that philosophers find this truth about the world as well, but by different means:

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

The scientist too learns to distrust personal sensation and observation. This ability to step outside of yourself and observe the natural world without being influenced by sensation is critical for gaining a genuine understanding of the world. It is by escaping our day to day phenomenal experience that we find bliss:

We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity.

Of course Emerson has a religious goal in mind with this theory — he wants to take a stand for a type of faith that doesn’t need history or popular rituals:

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul.

So let’s return then to Morpheus’s question: does Emerson really want the blue pill? Emerson is in search of truth and beauty.  Through science, poetry, philosophy and eternal wonder about the universe, Emerson believes bliss can be attained. That is not blue pill resignation. It’s not about the joys of eating a virtual steak.

By the end of this chapter, I think Emerson talked himself into taking the red pill.

The world is naturally messy. Things fall apart, but not only that, dust settles, grass grows, garbage containers fill and dishes must be washed. Civilization isn’t simple and the larger and more complex societies become, the more expensive they are to maintain.

So the size of government must grow to meet those needs. If a city is going to remain open for business after a snowstorm, the city government will need a fleet of snow plows and mountains of salt. That salt corrodes the pavement, which then must be patched and re-plowed.  Cities are dynamic entities — neighborhoods rise and fall constantly, which means that city services must be adjusted constantly.

And this is just the local level. Move up to the federal level, and government has to inspect food, test pharmaceutical drugs for safety and efficacy, make sure drinking water is clean and inspect cargo containers entering the country. None of this is efficient, but that’s the way of the world — maintaining a modern global democracy takes effort.

If something we call progress exists, we can thank entropy for it. Because of entropy, the world becomes disorganized and things decay. This maintenance requires work, which demands wages, and those wages lead to spending and investing that grows the economy. It’s not all about government either. Your computer or car breaks down and eventually it looks cheaper to buy a new one than to keep fixing the old.

In short, entropy isn’t something to be feared, it should be revered. We should be grateful that nature demands our constant attention. We should be cheerful about our daily opportunity to build the world anew, even if it breaks down again by the days’ end.

Emerson says that this daily interaction with the world is what teaches us how to understand it and how to gain what we call common sense:

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

While it’s true that we have lost some connection with the physical world, our daily interactions with the virtual world provide similar opportunities for understanding. We don’t have to buy into the magical illusions. We can marvel at the electrical power that our cellphone caries around in its tiny battery instead of becoming infuriated when it starts to run dry. When we’re talking and the call drops, we can remember what a telephone call meant in our childhood compared to what it is now and recognize that we’re talking on a subway moving under the city. It’s only because systems tend to break down over time — in this case the Bell System — that innovation becomes possible and necessary. It’s only the deficiencies in our current system that creates space for better products and services later.

The combination of human will and curiosity has led to astounding discoveries. We keep finding ways to manipulate and shape nature to our needs. Emerson is sanguine about this progress and sees it almost as a birthright:

Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes at last only a realized will—the double of the man.

That’s one way to put it.  Another is that nature is out to kill us and succeeds one at a time. Our drive to keep nature’s dark victory at bay compels us to conquer the natural world. Sometimes it leads us to do foolish things, such as building expensive houses on hillsides that will inevitably we washed away in mudslides. Or it tempts us into an addiction to fossil fuel energy that upsets the planet’s ecosystem. But every new challenge creates new opportunity for innovation.

Emerson sees this interplay between humans and nature as highly religious:

Therefore is Nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted.

I don’t question Emerson for drawing these conclusions. First, he does so based on the science of his age.  Second, he fitting the world into a narrative pattern that other humans have chosen for centuries. People yearn for stories to explain the complexity around them. But Emerson takes a very interesting turn next, back to where his essay began:

In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end is essential to any being.

Instead of matching up nature with the historical religions of our past, Emerson suggests a completely new version of God. Emerson’s God is an instrumental God — a God that not only exists in the details, but also in the raw materials of life. To Emerson, God isn’t just in the tree that becomes timber that builds the house for a family, God is also in the data that is minded to suggest a pattern that leads to a new financial instrument that creates higher returns for a pension fund, so a teacher can retire and afford to send her grandchildren to college. God doesn’t stand beside human creativity and help spark it, God is the creativity and the material that suggests it.

But this God works in mysterious ways — so much so that Emerson is the kind of believer atheists tend to appreciate. Emerson’s God isn’t necessarily all knowing and all loving. He can be a God of tedium and annoyances:

What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest—and all to form the Hand of the mind—to instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!” The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate—debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

Reading this passage, I’m not surprised that Nietzsche loved Emerson so much. Emerson was a Theist of eternal return. He maintained a cheerful disposition even when pondering the most soul crushing are aspects of the human experience. Yes, debt and credit are potentially spirit crushing devices, but even they are the stuff of God. Be grateful for what we can accomplish with these tools.

Emerson’s God inspires human greatness. He doesn’t crush us under the weight of moral laws, he starts a process that demands constant human attention and innovation and then gives us the sparks to keep moving, to stay busy and to lack satisfaction with our successes.

Harold Bloom considers Emerson’s Transcendentalism to be the true American religion. As a skeptic, I have no problem with that. Open up a church of Emerson in my community and I’ll cheerfully take my family every Sunday.