Reclaiming Transcendentalism

The Nobility of Emerson's Individualism

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” is one of the most uncompromising, elitist, and noble essays that I have ever read. I had not read it in over a decade and found myself almost shocked by how radical it is.

But when we think of his famed movement, Transcendentalism, what I said above does not usually come to mind. The popular reception of it, in our time, is largely shaped by movies like Dead Poets Society. Here we find stiff boarding school students who are called on to rip the pages out of their poetry analysis textbooks; they are called on to step on their desks and give a big barbaric “Yop!”; they are to read poetry with girls off campus while drinking; and they are to turn against their parents’ wishes.

One of the main characters, Neil Perry, reads a famous quotation from Emerson’s student and friend, Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."

As far it goes, this is not the worst portrayal of Transcendentalism, and it points to many of its core themes: nonconformism, appreciation of nature, feeling poetry instead of dissecting it, trying to trust oneself instead of external authority, and the sense that the modern world has alienated us from our truest selves. But it does not go nearly far enough. The movie conceals how high of a bar that Emerson sets; it suggests that you have to walk under the bar when Emerson had meant for us to jump over the bar!

Emerson has been massively misunderstood. But this would not surprise him:

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.—"Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood."—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

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While Dead Poets Society has done much to shape the contemporary understanding of Transcendentalism, we can hear other echoes of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” everywhere in our culture. Let’s examine those echoes on one hand, and compare them with the context of the essay. This will demonstrate how much of a distortion the echoes are. In the end, contemporary man has heard what he wanted to hear. This procedure will help us emphatically perceive how much more profound Emerson is than the shallow Emersonian opinions we have unwittingly received. Part of what is at stake is, how noble can man be under a liberal regime? Emerson points the way.

I. Truth

We often hear the phrase “whatever floats your boat.” Which means: you have something that makes you happy and I have something that makes me happy, and we do not have to agree about that. What is in my heart does not need to be same thing that is in yours. We can agree to disagree; we can live and let live. Finally: we are all entitled to our opinions.

Emerson has a quotation near the beginning of the essay that almost sounds like what we heard above, but it provides a radical revision: “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.” In other words, my boat will float correctly because it is constructed out of the right materials. If you do not think likewise, do not expect much from your boat.

Can you imagine the confidence required to genuinely believe something like this? One hears the phrase “what is true for you” and it almost reminds one of the phrase that became so popular doing the MeToo movement: “her truth” or sharing “my truth” instead saying: I would like to disclose the truth. The MeToo vision of truth presupposes a kind irreconcilable perspectivalism and it is now centering the woman’s perspective over the man’s. Neither can see the truth, but we will trust women now instead of men. But Emerson does not go in this direction. He insists that the man who believes what is true in his heart is true for all men is a genius. There is only one truth.

This of course, does not mean that the genius is correct about everything or that his account is not in need of revision. Emerson notes that the man of self-reliance may often contradict himself as he looks into his heart and then tells others what he has seen.

II. Non-Conformism

Non-conformism or at least the attempt at non-conformism, is as American as apple pie. We see shallows visions of this all of the time. To use only one example, consider the band Sum 41’s song “Fat Lip” (Millennials will all know this song). Here are the lyrics that contain echoes of Emerson:

“…Don't tell us to behave
I'm sick of always hearing "act your age"

I don't wanna waste my time
Become another casualty of society
I'll never fall in line
Become another victim of your conformity and back down

Because you don't
Know us at all, we laugh when old people fall…”

The narrator of the song does not trust external authorities. What is expected of “his age” may be a relic of convention that sets needless restrictions on what his heart tells him to do. Why should he do what society tells him to do? He must look around and see that those who have followed the mandates of society are not happy. Why would he expect anything more? And society, in his view, is not merely limiting the happiness of its subjects it is actively harming them. To conform is to back down; to back down is to be cowardly and to fail to live well.

He wants to throw off the shackles of civilization, but in favor of what? The quoted lyrics give us one possibility: laughing at old people falling. The demands of courtesy call upon us not to laugh when the clumsy limbs of old people lose their bearings. The narrator thinks that this makes liars out of us. This is the closest he gets to something like philosophical honesty. But in all likelihood, he probably wants to liberate restraints on vulgar pleasure seeking. He might spend part of his days skateboarding—and that might be somewhat adventurous—but he will probably spend the rest of the time partying and trying to get laid. This might be fun for awhile; but it will eventually get boring and he’ll need drugs to make his dissipated stupor tolerable. Too bad there isn’t any soma.

How do we know that Emerson wants us to turn away from this kind of life? Or how can we ensure that non-conformism does not devolve into something much more base? Emerson anticipates this concern, saying,

“The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides…If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day.”

Most people will assume that breaks from the norm are failures to live up to moral standard, and more than that, that such failures are an attack on custom itself. We’ll discuss what he might have in mind with respect to a higher or noble natural law in the next section.

Emerson’s resistance to conformity goes much farther than the punk rocker. As he says:

“There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…the virtue most in request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”

Emerson calls us on to imagine the plans that we make while we are alone. Imagine standing up to your boss or that asshole co-worker. In private, you work out what you really want to say to them; what will sting them the most?—and what will compel them to see that you are undeserving of the way that they have treated you? But when in the world, it is very difficult to carry out the things we imagine ourselves capable of while we are alone. In this way, even if we loosened the constraints and let the youth do as they wished (as Sum 41 would have it) they still would not be entirely free from the difficulty of carrying out their plans while in view of the eyes of others.

In agreement with Sum 41, Emerson suggests that conformism makes us less manly (it makes us back down). Society wants us to depend on it; it needs us to believe that what is good for the city is always good for the individual—that there is no tension between what Leo Strauss calls the city and man.

However, if we turn away from conformity, what on earth are we supposed to turn towards?

III. The Law of Nature

To set up what Emerson sees as a guide to human life, let’s consider one last contemporary moral opinion we find all over our culture. Joni Mitchell, Faith Hill, and Mary J. Blige, among others, have songs that prominently feature the phrase “take me as I am.” Joni Mitchell’s song, “California,” is probably the most honest version of this claim. She asks to be taken as she is, while “strung out on another man.” She openly admits that she is in a position of weakness and wants to be loved in spite of this. Conversely, Faith and Blige insist in their songs that they are already strong and should just be appreciated. But at the center of all three songs is the notion that one need not improve to become worthy of love. Just search the internet for this kind of thing, and you will find lists of 10 songs to remind you of your worth—”you deserve love”—no matter how lovable you are.

In “Self-Reliance” Emerson has a similar line, “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.” This has a similar ring to our present moral opinion, but what does Emerson think that being yourself means?

Contrary to the prevailing view, Emerson says “All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.” The excellence of someone or something is what makes them distinct from everything else. All of the humans who are bad at basketball do not stand out from each other; in that sense, they lack this virtue, and so are not real basketball players. To bring it back to Emerson’s stakes, those who do not live well are like shadows of human beings. To be most fully full oneself is to become virtuous.

He then immediately compares virtue to nature:

“I see the same law working in nature conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.”

So much for the Transcendentalists being hippies!

Emerson is interested in attaining the full power or capacity of the human being that he understands to be domesticated by society and the opinions of others. He wants nothing less than the full flowering and growth of the soul; he does not want to be weak. One is struck throughout the essay by metaphors related to elevation and height.

In other words, to take Emerson as he is, is to find a man who will be difficult to be around, not because he is weak, but he is ceaselessly trying to dwell with the truth so that he can become as powerful as possible and so be properly called himself.

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The last thing to sort out would be Emerson’s understanding of God. He has probably caused a lot of our present confusion with respect to “I’m spiritual, not religious.” I think that he may have been misunderstood here as well, but I think that essays other than “Self-Reliance” are more decisive for answering this question, so I will leave that question for another time.