Passive Income Blog

This is a post I put together reviewing one of Emerson’s most talked about essays, Self-Reliance.  By gathering various online reviews and summaries, I put together an overview of his Self-Reliance essay here.  My comments are posted at the end of Part 2, enjoy!

“Self-Reliance” is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson’s repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.

Click on image to view full essay

The first hint of the philosophy that would become “Self-Reliance” was presented by Emerson as part of a sermon in September 1830 a month after his first marriage. His wife was sick with tuberculosis and, as Emerson’s biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, “Emerson’s belief in immortality had never been stronger or more desperately needed.” From 1836 into 1837, Emerson presented a series of lectures on the philosophy of history at Boston’s Masonic Temple.

These lectures were never published separately but many of his thoughts in these lectures were later used in “Self-Reliance” and several other essays. Later lectures by Emerson, especially the “Divinity School Address”, led to public censure for Emerson’s radical views; the staunch defense of individualism in “Self-Reliance” may be a reaction to that censure. “Self-Reliance” was first published in his 1841 collection, Essays: First Series.

Emerson presupposes that the mind is initially subject to an unhappy nonconformism. However, “Self-Reliance” is not anti-society or anti-community. Instead, Emerson advocates self-reliance as a starting point, not as a goal.

Emerson begins his major work on individualism by asserting the importance of thinking for oneself rather than meekly accepting other people’s ideas. As in almost all of his work, he promotes individual experience over the knowledge gained from books: “To believe that what is true in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”

The person who scorns personal intuition and, instead, chooses to rely on others’ opinions lacks the creative power necessary for robust, bold individualism. This absence of conviction results not in different ideas, as this person expects, but in the acceptance of the same ideas—now secondhand thoughts—that this person initially intuited.

Emerson conitnues and now focuses his attention on the importance of an individual’s resisting pressure to conform to external norms, including those of society, which conspires to defeat self-reliance in its members. The process of so-called “maturing” becomes a process of conforming that Emerson challenges. In the paragraph that begins with the characteristic aphorism “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist,” he asserts a radical, even extreme, position on the matter.

Responding to the objection that devotedly following one’s inner voice is wrong because the intuition may be evil, he writes, “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.” In other words, it is better to be true to an evil nature than to behave “correctly” because of society’s demands or conventions.

In a subdued, even gentle voice, Emerson states that it is better to live truly and obscurely than to have one’s goodness extolled in public. It makes no difference to him whether his actions are praised or ignored. The important thing is to act independently: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think . . . the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Society is not the measure of all things; the individual is. “A true man,” Emerson’s label for the ideal individual, “belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of all things. Where he is, there is nature.” Nature is not only those objects around us, but also our individual natures. And these individual natures allow the great thinker—the ideal individual—to battle conformity and consistency.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

**********************

Popularity: 24% [?]