We are Reconciled: Intuitive Individualism in Emerson’s Writing

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s career was characterized both by reformation and reconciliation.  It is easy to read too much into the often fiery rhetoric of Emerson’s speeches and come to see him primarily as an iconoclast, but this would be a great oversight.  Emerson was, however, a very progressive thinker and he seemed to have a constitutional affinity for a sort of skeptical optimism.  Never content to merely accept traditions at face value, Emerson knew at an early age that he had a higher calling: “I burn after the ‘aliquid immensum infinitumque’ [”Something great and immeasurable”] which Cicero desired” (Jan-Feb 1827 journal entry at age 23)(Emerson  2001, 487). At the same time, however, he was filled with doubt: “a score of words & deeds issue from me daily, of which I am not the master.  They are begotten of weakness & born of shame” (ibid).     Yet, in time Emerson would prove that these struggles with doubt (as well as serious illness) were a period of latency, that would yield a great harvest in time. That harvest would be his conception of the divinity of self-reliance, and hence, self-trust, which would give him a new confidence in his intuitions.  Emerson’s call to the American Scholar differed more in form and style than in principle from the Divinity School Address.  Both were a call for the “reform of Reformation” and an adaption to an age of individualism.  In the manner of many Protestant ministers before him, Emerson sought to make religion accessible to a new generation, despite the head winds of “Copernican nihilism”.  Within this context, Self-Reliance emerged as a sympathetic union of Understanding (science/reason) and Reason (divine and instinctual intuition), with Reason being primary. Thus, Emerson sought to reconcile science and religion, rushing from Unitarianism to Transcendentalism.

Emerson’s struggles with self-doubt made him particularly sensitive to the “peculiarities of the present age” (Emerson 2001, 487). In this regard, he noted that his was “the age of the first person singular” and it was characterized by a “reform of the Reformation” (Emerson 2001, 487-8). The foundation of his faith would be self-trust, moral intuition, and self-reliance (the search for truth in communion with one’s soul).  According to Robert Milder (Emerson and the Fortunes of Godless Religion),

Reconciling the laws of nature and the laws of morality in a postanthropomorphic universe would be a priority throughout Emerson's career. "Calvinism rushes to be Unitarianism as Unitarianism rushes to be Naturalism," he would remark years later about the slippery slope from doubts of revelation and the paternity of God to doubts of religion itself (JMN, 15:228). Could one hold fast to a religion of immanent moral law without the stay of a divine Father, or would "Ptolemaic Copernicanism" prove an oxymoron in fact as it was in name? Through the early to mid 1830s, Emerson would immerse himself in the leading sciences of his day - astronomy, chemistry, geology, botany - hoping to "humanize" them by demonstrating that the laws of nature were indeed ethical in character and manifestations of an anthropocentric design if not of the old anthropomorphic Designer.” (Milder 2014, 578-9). 

Emerson was not alone in feeling that these philosophies presented a dire threat to the spiritual sanctity man and, ultimately, the tenability of the moral order which ungirded civilization itself.  This view seemed to be in the New England air and the refutation of this philosophy became the chief motivation in the early days of Emerson’s thoughts (Keane 54). Emerson and others sought to counter what Patrick Keane designated as “Hume’s potentially nihilistic challenge” (Keane 54).  These ideological debates were intricately tied to the ongoing attempts of American intellectuals to formulate and embody a distinct American culture that would include “the  creation of a new literature, the literature, in a word, of democracy… Democracy had already taken shape in America, and the democratic ideals of equality and liberty were already deeply implanted in the American spirit, but the inmost meaning of democracy-its new conception of the nature of man, his place in the world, and his relation to the divine-had hardly been thought about as yet and never adequately expressed” (Hochfield xi).  

This can be seen in his 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School, in which he argued that “Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual.  It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.” (Emerson 2001, 73).  Emerson’s chief complaint was that “the soul is not preached” (Emerson 2001, 75).  As a result, he admonished, “the Church seems to totter to its fall, almost, all life extinct” for “whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate” (Emerson 2001, 75-6). Emerson concluded that would-be ministers must “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul”  (Emerson 2001, 80).   The soul had to be freed from the burden of “Historical Christianity” and given new meaning within the context of American democracy.  His audience was in possession of a “whole popedom of forms” which “one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify” (Emerson 2001, 80).

Emerson sought to rally  Harvard’s graduating class to this higher calling, stating that “I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy” (Emerson 2001, 81). In no uncertain terms, Emerson makes clear that his concern is for the soul.  For some, however, this criticism struck too close to home and Emerson’s Divinity School address seems to have been his most controversial work (Hochfield xix).  Nevertheless, throughout his life, Emerson seemed to have been instinctively inclined towards theoretical and theological experimentation, although this experimentation was generally ringed in by his conservative moral character.  In Self-Reliance, Emerson continues his search for a more democratic religion that transcended institutions, rank, and position and placed man in a direct relationship with God and at the spiritual center of a moral and rational, anthropocentric universal order (Woelfel 130).   

Two years after the Divinity School Address, Emerson published his first collection of essays.  In Self-Reliance, Emerson returns to the theme of the soul and its authentic and enlightening influence upon the mind of the individual.  Once again, Emerson held the truth of the soul to be self-evident and derived from a primary relation to truth, albeit mediated through the individual and his circumstances (Smith 206). In Self-Reliance, Emerson elevated the wisdom of youth as a means of illustrating the self-evident nature of morality, while conjoining it was the democratic principles of freedom, equality, and self-reliance, elevating the insouciance of youth which refused to be tamed.  Emerson wrote that:

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.

For Emerson, the concept of “self-reliance” was spiritual; it connoted authentic, independent thought illuminated by the light of an individual’s soul and filtered through their unique character and temperament.  Thus, Emerson conceived of his writing as a constitutive act and a form of experimentation directed towards this end and consciously avoided the tendency of many philosophers to construct absolutist systemizations.  Emerson himself was a perpetual renaissance.  In his essay, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy: And Character and Opinion in the United States, George Santayana wrote that:

Emerson was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or to notice…He had no system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous, was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones that they were myths…Had he made a system out of his notion of compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems. But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and hints toward fresh transcendental musings (Santayana 10).

Accordingly, his method of writing often explores polar opposites and then inverts them.

Emerson was heavily influenced by Stoic philosophy, in which virtue becomes a matter of pursuing that which is sympathetic to our nature and thereby elevating ourselves. Our reason, when properly utilized, represents the only realizable freedom available to man: that of obeying his will, uttering his heartfelt Yes or No, and planting himself in his self-trust (Woelfel 131).  Stoics argued that others can direct nearly unbearable disincentives at the autonomous but only the individual can submit and ignore his higher will (the law of his ‘universal being’); failure to do so would then be a result of a weakness to his ‘private law’ (Woelfel 130).  According to James Woelfel, author of ‘The Beautiful Necessity’: Emerson and the Stoic Tradition, Emerson maintained a “Platonic-Stoic conviction, expressed in the opening sentence of "History," that "there is one mind common to all individual men"…Emerson referred to this as the "radical identity" of all human beings. At the same time, in the Emersonian "dialectic" the universal identity of human beings manifests itself only in concrete individual persons, and this is the basis of Emerson's often-misunderstood individualism and also the ground of his affirmation of equality and democracy. This individualism is precisely the opposite of-indeed an attack on and rejection of-individualism as usually understood: as an atomistic autonomy in which each person stands essentially alone, self-sufficient, and separate from others” (Woelfel 130). Similarly, in Self-Reliance, Emerson wrote:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark (Emerson 2001, 121).

Emerson’s Reason is “the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life”; its source is “Spontaneity or Instinct”, but namely, “Intuition” (Emerson 2001, 127). 

In the manner of the Stoics, Emerson states that “we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.” (Emerson 2001, 128). Emerson thereby affirms nature, and offers a self-evident rejection of the nihilistic tendencies of Copernican empiricism, affirming the priority of the spiritual over the material, while reconciling religion with science. Emerson’s embrace of nature extends to his writing, which seems to conform to it, embracing a style that is organic, contradictory at face value, and ultimately, irreducible; “a science baffling star, without parallax” (Emerson 2001, 126).  Emerson’s concept of self-reliance was, in the end, more reconciliatory than revolutionary.  Importantly, however, it preserved the concept of the soul, man’s direct relationship to the Divine, and served as the foundation for a moral order that survived the challenges of “materialists”.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, et al. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. 1st ed, W.W. Norton, 2001.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Joel Porte. Essays & Lectures. Literary Classics of the U.S. : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press, 1983.

Hochfield, George. Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists. University of Illinois Pr., 2009.

Keane, Patrick J. Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of All Our Day.” University of Missouri Press, 2005.

Milder, Robert. “Emerson and the Fortunes of Godless Religion.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 4, Dec. 2014, pp. 573–624

Santayana, George, et al. The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy: And Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press, 2009.

Smith, David L. “‘Who Shall Define to Me an Individual?’ Emerson on Self, World, and God.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, vol. 30, no. 2, 2009, pp. 191–211.

Woelfel, James. “‘The Beautiful Necessity’: Emerson and the Stoic Tradition.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, pp. 122–38.