College WritingSelf, Society & Sustainability

Emerson“Self-reliance”

On Nature

Emerson and the Legacy of

Romanticism

What is understood by the term ‘Romantic sense of self’?

What was the Romantic Era?

Late 18th/ early 19th century An artistic, literary and intellectual

movement Characterized by an emphasis on

feeling, intuition, self-expression, introspection – a focus on the inspired and heroic individual, rather than the community

Emphasized the individual imagination: the original genius

A Reaction Against the Enlightenment

Enlightenment Valued order, reason,

rules, science Nature was dangerous

and had to be controlled.

Gainsborough, Landscape with a Bridge, c.1785, National Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.

Romanticism Freedom from rules and

pure reason; valued the expression of strong emotion.

Also valued untamed nature for its capacity to restore the soul.

Edward Haytley, The Brockman family at Beachborough: Temple pond with temple in the distance c.1744

The Limits of Reason: Nature and the Sublime

Man is dwarfed by Nature

Nature is sublime; how can we begin to say we understand it or can control it?

Suggestion that there are aspects to nature that are divine, beyond man’s reason.

Thomas Cole, A Wild Scene, 1831-32, Baltimore Museum of Art

Romanticism and Creativity: Literature

Where 18C poetry adhered to strict rules on form, proportion, and harmony – a classical aesthetics – the Romantics promoted a freer style, valuing intuition and sentiment.

In the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth declared that he wanted to liberate poetry from the constraints of previous eras.

He described poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’.

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Poet and essayist; a

leader of the American transcendentalist movement

Individuals are at their best when they are ‘self-reliant’

This transcendentalist philosophy was a late outgrowth of Romanticism

Emerson, “The Poet” (1844): A Romantic Vision

The Poet creates from his divine inner nature.

“For it is not metres, but metre-making argument, that makes a poem ...”

“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”

Emerson, “The Poet” (1844)

[he does not rely on logic, but on the transcendental inspirations that come to him through meditation.]

“The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him ...”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself“Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with

linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.”

‘Nature’ (1836): A Transcendentalist View

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

Society as a distraction; solitude is to be valued

Man can access the divine through nature

‘Self-Reliance’ (1841)

Individualism: a transcendentalist creed Spontaneous feeling is to prized over

reason Man should not feel pressure to

conform to the modes of the group. Man is at his best when he has the

un-self-consciouness of a child.

On morality: man can make up his own

On philanthropy: what do I owe to others?

On public opinion: what has it to do with me?

“Self-Reliance” (1841): An Individualist Creed

Man is encouraged to depend on his own resources and to determine his own form of government.

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

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he tries.”

“Self-Reliance”: Feeling and Sentiment

Romanticism celebrated “sentiment” as a rich, reserve of knowledge that was under-appreciated in the Age of Reason.

Emerson describes man as hitherto “clapped into jail by his consciousness”.

Man must learn to free himself from pure reason, which considers what other people will think of his actions or opinions.

“Self-Reliance”: Nonconformity

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“Self-Reliance”: the child as father to the man

(Man should have the un-self-consciousness of a child)

“Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it.”

Man should have the “nonchalance of boys”: “[A boy] cumbers himself never about the consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict.”

“These are the voices we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world.”

“Self-Reliance”: On Morality

Pearl, from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)

“On my saying, ‘What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?’ my friend suggested, - ‘But the impulses may be from below and 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.’

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

... the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.”

“Self-Reliance”: On Philanthropy

….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 meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the

“... [What] of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?

thousand-fold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame and sometimes and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

“Self-Reliance”: one needs fortitude to tolerate the bad

opinion of the masses“It is easy for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. ...

But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.”

Emerson in the 21st Century

What relevance do these ideas have today?

Might we describe – or dismiss - Emerson like his fellow Romantic, the poet Lord Byron, as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’?

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Steve Jobs in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. (Qtd in “With Time Running Short, Jobs Managed his farewells,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 2011.)

“Self-Reliance” : on “flip-floppers”

“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency…

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.  …  Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” 

Whitman, Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Sept. 30, 2004 (CNN):

Sen. John Kerry: “[I] actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the war in Afghanistan] before I voted against it.”

Not selfishness: “ Transcendental eyeball”

"We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

The “American Adam” was not a narcissist

from Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

The narcissist differs also, in the tenuous quality of his selfhood, from an earlier type of American individualist, the “American Adam” analyzed by R.W.B. Lewis, Quentin Anderson, Michael Rogin, and by nineteenth-century observers like Tocqueville.

Nineteenth century writers and orators restated again and again, in a great variety of forms, Jefferson’s doctrine that the earth belongs to the living. The break with Europe, the abolition of primogeniture, and the looseness of family ties gave substance to their belief (even if it was finally an illusion) that Americans, alone among the people of the world, could escape the entangling influence of the past.

They imagined, according to Tocqueville, that “their whole destiny is in their own hands.” Social conditions in the United States, Tocqueville wrote, severed the tie that formerly united one generation to another. (Lasch, 8).

Are you a ‘Romantic’?

Appreciation of the “self” as the filter of experience.

Man as lone wandererEmerson: “Now we are a mob [but] we must go alone.”

Self-directionEmerson: “Man is his own star...”

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Do you believe in following your instincts?

The cultivation of self-confidence and self-realisation:

“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”

Man must learn to trust his own intuition:

“Trust thyself” ... “Accept the place divine providence has found for you.”

Whitman: “I believe in you my soul ...”

Do you agree?

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

... the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.”

Do you believe that it is important to form your opinions for yourself, and not to follow conventional wisdom?