Life & Background
Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister who died when he was eight, leaving the family poor. He went to Harvard, taught, and was ordained a Unitarian minister, but resigned his pulpit in 1832 after the death of his young first wife and a crisis of conscience over administering communion. A year in Europe brought him into contact with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, whose German-inflected idealism he brought home. Settling in Concord, Massachusetts on inherited money, he became the centre of a circle that included Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, and made his living as a lecturer on the lyceum circuit, delivering thousands of lectures across the country. He came late but firmly to abolitionism. He died in Concord in 1882.
Self-Reliance
The essay argues that the individual must trust their own instinct above inherited opinion. It opens with the claim that to believe your own thought, and to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all people, is genius. Emerson attacks conformity and consistency in turn: society is a joint-stock company conspiring against the manhood of each of its members; whoever would be a man must be a nonconformist; and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. He argues that imitation is suicide, that envy is ignorance, that travel is a fool's paradise for those seeking abroad what they lack within, and that institutions are the lengthened shadow of one man.
Emerson writes in aphorism rather than argument — the essays proceed by accumulation of memorable sentences, and he defended the method by rejecting systematic philosophy outright. Behind it lies a theology: if the divine is immanent in nature and in every person, then intuition has the authority the church claimed, and this is what made his Divinity School Address so scandalous that Harvard did not invite him back for thirty years. The doctrine has an obvious political ambiguity, which criticism has pressed on since: self-reliance can be read as spiritual democracy or as a founding text of American individualism in its harsher economic form.
Why Emerson Matters
Emerson supplied American writing with its founding argument for cultural independence — The American Scholar was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes the intellectual declaration of independence — and Transcendentalism is the first native American intellectual movement. His direct influence on Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson is traceable line by line, and his ideas travelled: Nietzsche read him closely, and Gandhi and the Indian reception of Transcendentalism, which itself drew on the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, form a circuit worth knowing for comparative questions.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Nature1836
- The American Scholar1837
- Divinity School Address1838
- Essays: First Series (incl. Self-Reliance)1841
- Essays: Second Series1844
- Representative Men1850
- The Conduct of Life1860