[Greetings, friends, from Montana! As I pack up to head back to Texas for a week or two, I can’t believe how fast the (almost) three weeks of breathing in the fresh mountain air soaked in the frontier spirit have sped by.
There is something about the scenery and energy in Montana that pairs perfectly with the works and words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (aka Waldo), the American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the Transcendentalism movement in mid-19th-century America. For his critique of societal pressures and conformity, Nietzsche called Emerson “the most gifted of the Americans.” As an inspiration to poets and thinkers like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and William James, Emerson sparked something of an “American Renaissance.”
His formative influence on the American mind and ethos is undeniable. As the author of many essays and a pioneer of the lecture circuit at a period when a young United States was finding its identity and spreading its wings, his echo is everywhere. In many ways, much of the independent and individualistic spirit of the U.S. points back at Emerson. “In all my lectures,” Emerson wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.”1
As a man who left ministry owing to disagreements on the methods and practices of the church, Emerson’s relationship with organized religion is complicated,2 and his views on self-independence were considered radical at the time, especially to the early settlers of orthodox European descent. Many critics read his essays, attended his lectures, and concluded (unfairly, in my opinion), like his aunt, that his works were a “strange medley of atheism and false independence.”
Nonetheless, Emerson’s works have endured, and the ripples of his influence are still mighty rolling waves with many miles of force left in them. In his most famous essay, Self-Reliance, Emerson brings the triumphant Self to center stage and invites us to the same place he was inviting the citizens of an upstart country: to individuality.
To that essay, the idea of self-reliance, what it means and what it doesn’t, we devote the rest of this essay.]
Emerson starts his most famous essay, Self-Reliance, with the Latin phrase ‘ne te quaesiveris extra,’ meaning “Do not seek yourself outside yourself.” These lines set the stage for the rest of Emerson’s essay, which makes the poetic case for trusting our inner voices above anything external and being ourselves in a world that wants us to blend in.
These are the 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. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”3 Just as “Moses, Plato, and Milton,” writes Emerson, “[a] man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”4
Why? Because “imitation is suicide,” and conformity kills the individual whose presence and power are unique in all of eternity. By abandoning our honest views in deference to “experts” and “great thinkers,” we abandon ourselves; by exchanging our genuine behaviors and interests for those praised by others or established in custom is to put ourselves to death. In being anything other than that which we are, we throw a bag over our heads and suffocate… we snuff out the little light that is ours and only ours in all of time.
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 has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.
For this reason, you must train yourself, Emerson argued, “[t]o believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due times becomes the outmost.”5 For Emerson, self-reliance was about making choices based on our own independent beliefs and convictions (rather than outsourcing our decisions to “experts” or the intellectual inheritances of our ancestors). It was about living a life where we trust and are true to ourselves. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”6 Aristotle called this type of self-reliance autarkeia, or “self-sufficiency,” and identified it as a necessary ingredient for eudaimonia (happiness).
In one sense, we need much of this Emersonian self-reliance today. We live in a society where mainstream and social media constantly feed us a narrative on what to support and what to hate; how to be and who to like; what to do and what to avoid. Advertisements constantly assault our awareness and smuggle thoughts on what to buy deep into our subconscious. The internet makes anyone’s opinion on anything instantly accessible. All of this nudges us to outsource our thinking and absorb beliefs that aren’t truly our own, which in turn causes us to make decisions that aren’t truly our own. If we want to live a life that is our own, we must learn to think for ourselves and be prepared to meet the world’s scorn. “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”7
But in another sense, our instincts object and wonder if we might need less self-reliance. Too much of Aleister Crowley’s “do what thou wilt” mentality has made man his own star and a “society, law, to himself,” answerable and accountable to nobody, interested in none outside himself. At first glance, Emerson appears to endorse this hedonistic and self-centered line of thinking. Self-reliance “demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself…”8
Emerson anticipated this objection to his ideas and quickly clarified that his self-reliance was not a free license to do whatever we want—the conscience we carry and law written in our hearts will object when we step out of line.
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.9
This law of consciousness abides by what the Greeks called the daimon and the Romans referred to as a genie—that seed of immense intelligence and spirit of the divine within. It is the voice Moses hears on the Mount, and the oracle Socrates centered his life around consulting. “You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign,” Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, “I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything…”10
Thus, what Emerson calls self-reliance might more appropriately be called Eternal Reliance, for in looking into oneself, one sees and consults not only the Self but everything and eternity. It is not mere flesh and bone and an empty void we find when we gaze into the abyss; it is the boundless space of infinite capacities and intelligence that meets us there. The purpose of sourcing resources and wisdom from within is, if you go far enough inward, you access the source. You get to a spot where it is not really Self at all. It is a spot where the Self has dissolved into the divine. It is like the branch looking into itself and seeing its roots.
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre; rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.11
For Emerson, the reason for being singular in interests and focus is because he thought it was the only reliable way to commune with the divine, separate and apart from the pressures of the world that worked so hard to make us in its image (rather than honor the Imago Dei given to us). “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 of its beams.”12 What we call the Self is just a station for many trains we did not start and cannot stop.
In his essay titled Over-Soul, Emerson points to this Eternal we find in the Self:
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.13
This, then, is the heart of Emerson’s self-reliance. It is not really a reliance on the Self at all; it is a reliance on something larger and higher than ourselves. It is a way of acting answerable only to the Ancient of Days… a belief that one needs nothing outside of oneself and a stance that holds nothing external in higher esteem than what is found within. It is the still small voice that says “nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder” and “virtue is enough.”
Thus, we must engrave on our hearts: “I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.”14 Because this, and only this, brings us into the Light of the Sun. This, alone, allows for the birth of the soul in us and makes us the sons of God. Only this can send us up on the wings of Eagles.
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right direction.15
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, April 7, 1840.
When asked about his religious belief, Emerson said “I am more of a Quaker than anything else. I believe in the ‘still, small voice’, and that voice is Christ within us.” In his Havard Divinity Address, Emerson critiques what he calls “Historical Christianity” for how it reacts if you suggest Christ was a friend and noble man and its assistance in painting Christ as a “demigod as the Orientals or Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo” whose portrait we must accept as drawn and interpreted by other men. Many in Emerson’s day took this as evidence he was a heretic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (“Self-Reliance”).
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Plato, Apology.
C.S. Lewis, Great Divorce.
Self-Reliance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”. Essays: First Series.
Self-Reliance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude.