As I Am on the Brink of Choosing How to Make a Living, My Main Struggle Has Been Deciding

Emerson and American Autonomy

Daniel McCool

March 23, 2003

American Literature I

Professor Trask

As I am on the brink of choosing how to make a living, my main struggle has been deciding whether to try to live a happy life, or to spend my days searching for truth. I contrast the two options because people who are depressed, and have a low self- esteem tend to have more realistic views of themselves (Brehm, Kassin, Fein 82). Emerson, however, suggests a compromise. He makes no distinction between happiness and truth. He proposes a fulfilling lifetime of searching for truth through introspection, education, and nature.

Furthermore, I believe that Emerson’s ideas of individualism, idealism, and non- conformity are even more important in this time of war and protest. The most widely accepted and encouraged virtue since September 11, and especially now that we are invading Iraq, has been national pride and unity. We’ve taken this too far. We’ve put up a wall separating us from the rest of the world, by dividing it into two camps, good and evil. The racism toward the French, for instance, is widely accepted on billboards for businesses and late night talk shows, and it is the same tired, old result of what happens when nationalism and jingoism blind us from rational thought. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the past. Now that the war has started (and somewhat even before it started), many people hold criticism toward any form of protest of disagreement, arguing that this is not the time to express opposition (idealism). At the same time, American flags have never been so en vogue (materialism). It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the flag is simply a materialistic representation of our idealism, and that once our freedoms of individual expression and dissent are taken away, the American flag becomes simply red, white, and blue cloth, waving pointlessly in the wind of blind conformity. In Emerson’s writing, he breaks down the walls we’ve put up with his suggestion of a Oneness in nature.

Transcendentalism was largely influenced by European Romanticism, which was a philosophical reaction to scientific rationalism from the Enlightenment period (Berkin, et al 348). The name was given by German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, as he, along with other Germans influenced many of the English writers who in turn, influenced Emerson and his fellow New England writers during a large part of the mid nineteenth century (Fuller, Kinnick 566). Emerson never agreed upon the term however, as illustrated in his lecture The Transcendentalist: “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (Emerson 81). The fact that Emerson, along with others, did not want to categorize the movement by naming it, coincides with his ideology of disdain toward the over- categorization in nature. Although Emerson is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in American history, he had no formal system of thought and never attempted to create one (Fuller, Kinnick 569). In the essay Emersonian Genius and the American Democracy, Perry Miller states that “[Emerson’s] own Journals show him as never quite so certain as he appeared from the outside, never entirely sure as to just what constituted genius or just how politically healthy it actually was” (Konvitz, Whicher 75). This was largely due to the fact that Emerson’s idea of genius was not to be handed down from one person to another. This is also evident in his style of lecture, which emphasizes the sentence over the paragraph, as he combined ideas from his journals in a somewhat disorganized fashion (Carol 125).

Between 1820 and 1860, American institutions of family and community became less relevant in the face of a booming economy, the tripling of the population, and westward expansion. Jacksonian America (under the administration of the “rugged individualist”, President Andrew Jackson) shifted the focus of society, especially in the industrial Northeast, toward autonomy (Berkin, et al 345). Emerson spoke of the virtues of autonomy at this time while condemning the imitative direction of the scholar in The American Scholar, the dullness of the Unitarian church in Divinity School Address, and non-thinking conformers in Self- Reliance (Cook V, introduction). Voter participation grew rapidly from 27% in 1824 to 58% in 1828, and 80% in 1840 (Brulatour). For this reason, it was more important than ever for the “common man” to be educated, and self- sufficient. When the people decide leadership and policy, the ability of the individual to make intelligent decisions is critical.

Emerson’s idea of the purpose and practice of education is most prevalent in his highly influential lecture The American Scholar, delivered at Harvard in 1837. The speech was labeled by Oliver Wendall Holmes as “our intellectual Declaration of Independence (Fuller, Kinnick 570). It advocated the establishment of an intellectual identity in America by breaking from traditional Rationalism while avoiding the dogmatic theology and the idea of “original sin” practiced by its Puritan ancestors (Carol 123). Emerson referred to three areas of focus for the American Scholar: Nature, Books (or History), and Action.

His most striking example of how Nature relates to the human mind is the quote “The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion” (Emerson 45). This is similar to Plato’s notion that man can find truth through mathematics, or “pure logic.” The two ideas differ, however, in that Emerson advocated the importance of emotion, something that Plato held to be evil. Emerson, it seems, wanted the American Scholar to be an artist, or poet, thus: “poetry will revive and lead in a new age….” (Emerson 43). His epistemological view was that intrinsic expression, perhaps unexplainable to others, was the only way to achieve truth. As I mentioned earlier, his idea of truth coincides with goodness, as stated in his Divinity School Address delivered at Harvard in 1838: “Good is positive. Evil is merely privitive, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat” (Emerson, 65). The section on Nature in The American Scholar can be seen as a condensed version of his essay Nature.

His view of epistemology, however, is not to say that he did not believe in learning from others or from the past, only to be critical of information and to avoid becoming an imitative, non- thinking “bookworm” (Emerson 47). In his section on the influence of books, he warns against focusing too much on the writer of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, which can lead to acceptance of anything that particular writer says in the future: “love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue” (Emerson 46). The lessons we are to derive from history, says Emerson, are to be used for progress, and this is where the state of education was failing: “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius…. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates” (Emerson 47).

Perhaps the most important aspect attributed to the ideal American scholar was that of Action. He complained about the general inaction of the scholar by saying “The so- called ‘practical men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see they could do nothing… Without [action] thought can never ripen into truth” (Emerson 49). He adds “The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power” (Emerson 50). This differs from the idea of a cooperative commonwealth in which different parts of society do a job, or play a role. Emerson suggests that it is not enough simply to come up with ideas and instruct the “doers” of society to carry them out, but one must complete the circle of progress by acting on ideas.

So how did we lose this sense of Nature? Emerson’s Zen- like explanation suggests that we have become prisoners of our own metaphors. In the section Language, from the essay Nature, he states “Words are signs of natural facts” (Emerson 13). Quite easily, we forget that words are things that we have created, and that they are, like the flag, merely representations of ideas. In order to reacquaint ourselves with nature, we must be able to remember the way in which we describe the world (in words) is man- made. Thus “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry” (Emerson 15).

By the time Emerson began lecturing about autonomy, it was inevitable that the United States would become an individualistic nation. There were, of course, many drawbacks to the prospect of autonomy. America had already been notoriously dubbed as the “land of the Almighty Dollar” where the sole purpose of life was to “get rich quick” (Carol 121). By the end of the nineteenth century, just decades after Emerson’s suggestions, it seemed as though the positive aspects of autonomy had been forgotten. Worker exploitation was virtually inescapable, and indeed, the prospect of individual wealth often outweighed the virtues of moral responsibility. In other words, the ends justified the means. In other ways, however, Emerson’s influence proved to be highly effective. For example, without Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience, which was strongly influenced by the writing of Emerson, many of the tactics and ideas of Martin Luther King and Gandhi never would have come to surface (Gentry).

At this point in American history, I fear that America has been frightened into trust, coaxed into conformity, and destined to betray the virtues of autonomy that took thousands of years, and dozens of experiments for human civilization to realize. Emerson’s idea of education aligns with the literal translation of the word “educere” which means “to lead out of.” This Platonic view of epistemology is focused on the intrinsic (myself), not the extrinsic (popular opinion). In a time when America is losing its grip on its identity, Emerson’s lessons of self- reliance, beauty, progressivism, simplicity, and promise have never been so important.

Works Cited

Berkin, Carol, et al. Making America: A History Of the United States; Second Addition, Volume 1: to 1877. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

Brehm, Sharon, S., Saul M. Kassin, Steven Fein. Social Psychology: 5th Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

Brulatour, Meg. Social and Political Changes in the Time of Emerson and Thoreau: The Nineteenth Century at a Glance. American Transcendentalism Web. 22 March, 2003. <

Carol, Ann O.P. The Beginnings of American Literature. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965.

Casado da Rocha, Antonio. Images for Reform: “Means and Ends, Seed and Fruit” and “Civil Disobedience.” American Transcendentalism Web. 22 March, 2003.

< imagesforreform.html>.

Cook, Reginald L. Introduction. By Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Prose and Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: Random House Inc., 2000.

Fuller, Edmund, B. Jo Kinnick. Adventures in American Literature: Laureate Edition. Ed. Mary Rives Bowman. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1963.

Konvitz, Milton, Steven Whicher, eds. Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall Inc., 1962.