Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our age is retrospective," Ralph Waldo Emerson began his first book, in 1836. "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" That question is the whole of Emerson, and it is more radical than its serene phrasing lets on. He was asking why we live on second-hand truth, why we take our God from the church, our wisdom from old books, our opinions from the people around us, and never go to the source ourselves. The great revelations, he pointed out, were once somebody's first-hand experience, a living insight in a living soul; by the time they reach us they have hardened into dead doctrine, repeated by rote, believed only because everyone believes it. Emerson wanted to break that spell. Every person, he insisted, has the same direct access to truth that the prophets and sages had; the divine is not locked away in the past or in some institution but available now, in your own soul, if you have the courage to trust it. Go to the source. Have your own original relation to the universe. It was the founding cry of American philosophy, and it remains one of the most bracing summons in all of literature: stop borrowing, and see for yourself.

Man thinking. Emerson made his most public version of this demand in 1837, in a lecture to the scholars of Harvard that Oliver Wendell Holmes would later call America's "intellectual declaration of independence." A young nation, Emerson told them, had been living too long on the borrowed thought of the Old World. "We have listened too long," he said, "to the courtly muses of Europe." It was time for Americans to think for themselves. But the deeper target of the address was not Europe; it was bookishness itself, the scholar who has become a mere parrot of other men's ideas, who reveres the great libraries and forgets that every book in them was once a fresh thought in a living mind. Books are good, Emerson allowed, but they turn dangerous the moment they become idols; the right use of a book is to provoke your own thinking, not to replace it, and the scholar who only transmits the past has betrayed his calling. The true scholar, he said, is "Man Thinking," not a mind shrunk to a bookworm but a whole human being drawing truth from three sources at once: nature, the great books, and above all his own action and experience in the world. The point, again, is the primacy of the first-hand. A library full of the recorded insights of the dead is no substitute for one living insight of your own.

Trust thyself. The most famous, and most misunderstood, of Emerson's commands is "Trust thyself." People hear it as a slogan for ego or rugged self-interest, and miss the spiritual nerve of it. What Emerson means is something harder and braver: that the truth which rises up in your own mind, the conviction you genuinely feel, is worth more than all the borrowed opinions of the world, and that to betray it for the sake of fitting in is the deepest cowardice. "Whoso would be a man," he wrote, "must be a nonconformist." Society, he saw, is in a "conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," forever pressuring you to think what everyone thinks, to want what everyone wants, to shrink yourself to the common size. The self-reliant person resists this; they have the nerve to speak the thought that is true for them even when the whole room disagrees, to follow their own road even when it is unfashionable or lonely. And Emerson knew the standard objection, that you might be inconsistent, that what you think today may contradict what you said yesterday, and he flattened it with one of the great sentences in American letters: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Do not be enslaved even by your own past self; speak what you think now, and tomorrow speak what you think tomorrow. The integrity of your own living mind, he says, is the only thing finally sacred.

The god within. But why should you trust yourself? What makes the private individual's intuition worth more than the accumulated wisdom of the ages? Emerson's answer is the daring idea beneath all his practical exhortation, and it is where his philosophy turns mystical. The self you are told to trust, he explains, is not your small, anxious, everyday ego; it is something infinitely larger that lives through you. Beneath all the separate human minds, Emerson held, flows one universal soul, the Over-Soul, a single divine spirit in which every individual participates and from which every genuine insight comes. "Within man is the soul of the whole," he wrote, "the eternal ONE." When you go deep enough into your own mind, past the chatter of opinion and self-interest, you reach not just your private quirks but the universal spirit itself, the same divine ground that speaks in every awakened soul. This is why first-hand truth is possible, and why no priest or institution can stand between you and God: the divine is already within you, nearer than your own breath, waiting only to be heard. It is an idea with deep roots, in Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, in the Hindu scriptures Emerson devoured, in the long mystical tradition of the One. But Emerson made it American and democratic: not a secret reserved for monks and adepts, but the birthright of every person willing to grow still and listen.

The transparent eyeball. Where do you go to have this original relation? For Emerson, often, into nature. His first book bore that title, and in it he wrote the strangest and most famous sentence he ever composed, describing a moment of communion in the open air: "Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." It is easy to smile at the image, and his contemporaries did, drawing cartoons of a giant eyeball on two legs. But the experience behind it is real and serious. In the presence of nature, Emerson found, the petty, calculating self can drop away entirely, and one becomes a pure, clear opening through which the whole of being pours, no longer a separate ego looking at the world but a transparent point where the universe beholds itself. Nature, for Emerson, is not dead matter but the visible garment of spirit, a vast symbol-language in which the divine is everywhere speaking, and to walk into it with open senses is to read God's own handwriting. This was the first-hand relation made concrete: not a doctrine about God recited from a book, but a living encounter with the spirit out under the sky, available to anyone who steps outside and truly looks.

Build your own world. The room holds Emerson's essays in his own crackling English, cited by title and section; read him in the essays above all, "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," "Nature," "The American Scholar," where the thought arrives in sentences built to be carved over doorways, each one a small detonation. He came to all of it the hard way, a young minister who walked away from his pulpit because he could not in honesty serve a sacrament he no longer believed at second hand, and who rebuilt his faith from the ground up on direct experience alone. From his house in Concord he became the center of a remarkable circle: Thoreau, who took self-reliance to Walden Pond and to jail rather than pay a tax he judged unjust, was his neighbor and disciple, and the influence radiated outward for generations. Whitman built Leaves of Grass on an Emersonian charter; William James carried the first-hand temper into pragmatism; and across the ocean Nietzsche read Emerson obsessively, filled the margins of his books with excited notes, and drew from this gentle American sage some of the fire of his own ideal of the self-overcoming individual. The greeting-card Emerson, all uplift and reassurance, is a domestication of a genuinely dangerous thinker, one who told every reader to stop obeying, stop borrowing, stop conforming, and to trust the infinite spirit speaking in their own solitary mind. "Build therefore your own world," he wrote. It is an invitation, and a dare, that has never stopped finding takers.