A Very Short Introduction to Emerson for My Friend Allen Milby

Idealism is the hopeful religion; Ralph Waldo Emerson its patron saint. He was born in Boston in 1803 and came of age in early nineteenth century New England. He began to keep a journal in 1820 while a student at Harvard and continued to write throughout his life. Guided by an allegiance to develop his own convictions, Emerson dedicated his voluminous career to exploring human subjectivity through writing. Compounded by his experience as a human subject in nature, Emerson viewed the world as an idealist: “If there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature” (Transcendentalist 97). The eclipse of consciousness and spirituality Emerson found in nature flooded him with transcendent joy: “[In the woods] standing on the bare ground . . . I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God” (Nature 11). Emerson’s philosophy embraces universal consciousness; transcendental nature its fundamental root.

Many students in the twenty-first century will learn to attribute the transcendental to Emerson when they first encounter his work, but few will understand how idealism influenced his transcendental thought. Soon before the turn of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant popularized throughout Europe the notion of transcendental idealism. Emerson described this principle tenet of Kant’s philosophy as “a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these intuitions were of the mind itself” (Transcendentalist 98). While Kant’s transcendental idealism claimed the mind was radically involved in the formation of experience, Emerson sympathized with a much more ancient but no less profound view of the transcendental.

Although he began to explore the transcendental with the publication of Nature, his first book, in 1836, the framework for Emerson’s transcendental philosophy was articulated later in The Transcendentalist: “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists” (92). While the former school of thought “insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man,” Emerson proclaimed that the idealist “transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness” (93). He carefully tempers this interpretation and is quick to note that idealists “[do] not deny the sensuous fact; by no means; but he will not see that alone” (93). If nature were ideal as in the tradition of George Berkeley, then it would only exist as a product of human consciousness. In the tradition of Kant, the appearance of nature in the world is shaped by our consciousness, but we are unable to experience what nature in the ideal is like. Emerson’s idealism operates between these two registers, as he is less committed to Berkeley’s extreme solipsism and resists claiming like Kant to have innovated the idealist tradition anew.

How Emerson participates in the idealist tradition becomes clearer as he shifts focus toward the transcendental: “Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow” (98). From an idealist perspective, the perennial existence of nature is transcendental not only because it is inextricable from our experience of the world, but because nature is thoroughly part of our cosmology: “[Man’s] thought,—that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself . . . and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence” (95). To speak of a real world existing beyond our reach would be an echo of Kant, and to claim that nature depends on us for existence would deny the primacy that Emerson affirms. In this vein, Emerson followed idealism to its transcendental conclusion: “Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of your will” (95). Emerson’s transcendentalist worldview emerges out of this belief that nature is fundamental to spiritual experience, and that our experience of nature is the closest we can come to experiencing the transcendental ideal.

With a clearer idea of how he distinguished transcendentalism from the idealism of his predecessors, Emerson proclaimed self-sufficiency and independence as natural values for the transcendentalist: “From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force” (Transcendentalist 95). The ideal vision Emerson held of the transcendentalist was most vividly portrayed in Self-Reliance, published in 1841 as part of his first series of essays. Emerson inspires as much as he implores us to pursue an active life in the world: “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” (139). Within the transcendentalist framework, uniqueness is inherent to each individual, and so there is room in nature for individuals to forge their own paths. The relationship between subjectivity and self-reliance reflects the connection transcendentalists hold with the divine: “We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues . . . but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards” (139). Although Emerson denies that an individual can be representative of transcendentalism as a whole, each individual is charged with explicit instructions to “speak your latent conviction” (138) and distinguish themselves as independent and self-sufficient. The active production and ongoing cultivation of thought is the duty of the self-reliant individual.

But Emerson was not at all ignorant of the obstacles that lie in the way of the transcendentalist operating within society. Just as much as Emerson championed the individual did he disdain the motives of society and the crowd. Conformism was the greatest enemy to the transcendentalist, as Emerson so powerfully writes in Self-Reliance:

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 security of his bread to each stakeholder, 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 (141).

The root of Emerson’s rejection of society is not misanthropic but individualistic. Other than subscribing to the ethic of transcendentalism, individuals in society ought to be under no pressure to conform to social conventions: “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it” (142). Too often has society tolerated moral infractions for the sake of being agreeable, or has allowed the perpetrators of moral crimes to be absolved by undertaking socially-acceptable actions. Emerson witnessed this in his own time, indicting masters of slaves outside the United States who were proponents of American abolition: “If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant [and] be good-natured and modest . . . this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home” (142). The ability to perceive moral wrongs as such without being blinded by the niceties of society is an imperative appeal to truth for transcendentalists: “Rough and graceless would be such a greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none” (142). In the confluence of responses to the goings-on of society, Emerson warns the transcendentalists not to be deterred from going against prevailing opinion; like the perpetual creation of the self in nature, an individual must rely on his or her own subjectivity and consciousness as the most trustworthy guide.

Yet the ulterior enemy of the individual, “the other terror that scares us from self-trust,” is consistency: “But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?” (145) Opposed to the staid accounting of facts upheld by materialists, the transcendentalist aspires too greatly to write down his next thought to concern himself with adhering to yesterday’s ideas: “Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today . . . to be great is to be misunderstood” (146). Privileging subjectivity rather than conformity and creative outpourings of speculative truths over trite consistencies, Emerson honors self-reliance as the duty of the transcendentalist individual.

With an intellectual framework clearly in place for recommending the transcendentalist’s approach to society, Emerson is able to describe in more inspirational terms how a young transcendentalist can prepare to enter the world. In his speech The American Scholar, originally presented at Harvard in 1837, Emerson calls on the student of transcendentalism to first turn to nature for his education: “To this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul” (54). Within the natural world, the student will find the corollary to every idea he finds in books or that emerges within his mind: “He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments” (54).

The second means by which the young transcendentalist may educate himself is through careful study of the past. Not to be confused with the history of institutions and traditions, Emerson instead provokes the student to study the humanists throughout history who have contributed progressively to the documentation and enumeration of their times: “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” (55). More than any other imperative, Emerson cannot emphasize strongly enough the need for the transcendentalists to wrestle with the works that preceded them and use them to facilitate the creation of their thoughts: “Books are written . . . by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views [of] Cicero, Locke, Bacon; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books” (56). By playing on the complacency that comes natural to students, Emerson urges the transcendentalist to challenge himself relentlessly, never to accept the truth as given, but to incorporate it into the mind and use it as a hurtle to overcome. This is not to dismiss reading, however, as an idle pursuit, but rather as the resource by which the student finds the best work available to stroke the fires in his mind: “The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s or Shakespeare’s” (58). Yet Emerson is also careful to plead with the student not to embrace reading—and college education more generally—without scrutiny; condemning the compulsive to pursue higher education for its own sake, Emerson writes, “Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year” (58). Emerson’s prescience is most revealing here.

Of Emerson’s most important dicta to emerge from the American Scholar is the ultimate affront to civilized society: the open embrace of poverty and solitude. An invaluable experience for the transcendentalist, Emerson argues for welcoming into his life what will ultimately be inevitable for the non-conformist: “For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed” (63). While even the strongest among young transcendentalists would be loathe to renounce their privilege, their circumstance, and their material well-being, this is nevertheless what Emerson implores us to do. Reminiscent of the virtues that first enabled transcendentalism, Emerson recognizes in students the power that is new in nature to create spontaneously from the embers of elder fires fresh and profound thoughts: “He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts” (63). Above all is the duty of those who aspire to be transcendentalists to commit themselves to writing and sharing their thoughts for generations to come, where their contributions will be recognized and contended with, and with any luck, will be surpassed by the next generation of transcendentalist writers and thinkers.

Emerson’s commitment to the principles of transcendentalism were adhered to throughout his long life. It was not until 1867, when he published the poem “Terminus,” that Emerson ever gave up his will to write creatively. This poem is an elegy to his younger, more vivacious self, who was filled with fresh thoughts but who now is viewed from the perspective of an older man, drained of his vitality: “As the bird trims her to the gale/I trim myself to the storm of time” (668). Emerson remembers the foundations of his transcendental thought fondly, most importantly the free intellectual pursuit that was inextricably linked to his philosophy: “Lowly faithful, banish fear/Right onward drive unharmed/The port, well worth the cruise, is near/And every wave is charmed” (668). As the patron saint of transcendentalism, Emerson’s writings ushered into the history of humanist thought the belief that nature could be a spiritual experience. His fundamental imperative to think and to write as non-conformists is his most lasting impression on the minds of transcendentalists past, present, and future.