1 Introduction: form and content
Emerson is going to make the case in this essay that we ought to speak our mind, be true to ourselves. That’s about the gist of it.
I want to note however something funny about the beginning here. Read the highlighted portion on p. 175. Now, here’s a question, in case you missed it: What were the verses? Who wrote them? He doesn’t tell you.
And in a sense that is the gist of “Self-Reliance”; that it is not the content of my ‘speaking my truth’ that matters but the form. The fact alone that I “believe my own thought,” that I “speak my latent conviction,” is what Emerson is arguing for here.
To state it somewhat more strongly and plainly, Emerson is not saying that the content of my beliefs is true merely because I believe them. Rather, there is a sort of moral or ethical good served by my ‘speaking my truth’, say.
2 Form as content
I want to build out a thought that Emerson mentions very much in passing. Consider this passage at the top of p. 176. I want to suggest that these two lines are saying very different things:
- “he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his”
- “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts”
The first I think is fairly straightforward: We are wont, Emerson thinks, to treat our own thoughts as merely our own prejudices; as views that occur to us in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, or that are true just to or for us. Fine.
The second is somewhat more complex. I suggest we read it as the claim that the best ideas often strike us as ideas that existed in us latently. I mean more or less that an exceptionally incisive idea, or an exceptionally compelling work of art, often strikes us as something that brings together or makes explicit something we have felt or thought incompletely before; something we didn’t have the words to articulate.
What Emerson wants to draw our attention to is that these two facts work against us. If (the second point) “genius” is a matter of bringing to the surface what we previously thought or felt, but inarticulately, then—supposing, I guess, the works of genius are good ones, ones we should want to produce—we ought to strive to articulate these thoughts and feelings, bring them to the surface. But (now the first point) we tend to dismiss thoughts “because [they are ours]”! But we should not dismiss them, if they are the seedlings of genius. Thus the punchline:
Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. (176)
3 Self-knowledge and individualism
Emerson’s view here is that we ought to seek knowledge of ourselves; and that this knowledge can be new to us, though it is constantly revealed to us indirectly through our experience. Consider the green passage on p. 176. Note how it isn’t just experience but action that reveals who we are. But most importantly we want to note here how experience itself—how “one face, one character,” etc. “makes much impression” on us—is itself a measure of who we are.
Emerson views children as living, as it were, authentically. “Infancy conforms to nobody,” he writes; “all conform to it” (p. 177). To act as children do “is the healthy attitude of human nature” (ibid.).
Behind this is an unforgiving individualism. See p. 179.
Emerson’s individualism here is particularly extreme when confronted with the (contemporary to him) plight of slavery and the cause of abolition. Consider the green passages on p. 179. What’s Emerson saying here? I could see at least two views. One is that he doesn’t think slavery is a moral wrong, and I think that is probably not what he’s saying. Note he doesn’t speak on either side of the issue of slavery itself so much as he does on the issue of collecting donations for ending slavery. Another interpretation then would be that he thinks our moral compasses should be local and concerned with those in our more immediate vicinity.
You get something like a ‘thesis statement’ on pp. 180–181.
4 Emerson and individualism
I want to take just this short excerpt as an occasion to reflect on individualism in Emerson. Let me propose a few different ways to take it.
- A first would be a literal version. On this view, Emerson is indeed trying to sell us on the idea that we ought to be, let’s say, selfish, self-interested; immune to, uninterested in the challenges and difficulties of others.
- A second version, which is a version of the literal view, would be an indirect version. We first stipulate that what is collectively good is an expression of an individual’s good. (Every Rome has its Caesar, for example.) So my pursuit of what is individually good or what is true for me amounts, indirectly, to the pursuit of some collective good.
- A third would be a critical version. On this view, Emerson doesn’t literally endorse the strong version of individualism described here. He defends it merely as the opposite of a certain collective moral identity that he rejects. In other words, he rejects the idea that by, for example, donating to certain causes, or by being a member of a community with a certain overall moral identity, we satisfy our moral requirements, as it were.
- A fourth would be a corrective version, closely related to the preceding. On this view, Emerson is arguing at the other extreme from a certain knee-jerk communal identity and its attendant moral low bar. The corrective version of individualism would be to encourage through habit formation a more balanced attitude. (Imagine for example Emerson’s audience is full of people who think ‘Well, I give to the people who collect money for this and that cause, so I am a good person’.)
I am not entirely certain which of these views is the right read on Emerson, but it may help to have in view which of these seems most persuasive to you as a reading of “Self-Reliance” before moving on to “The American Scholar.”