THIS EXPLANATION by Russell Kirk of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s former influence on American intellectual life is so funny and true that when I first read it I burst out laughing (in a very restrained and housewifely way). I have always found reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to be like riding a roller coaster. When the trip is over, you are exactly where you began except your hair is messed up. Here is Kirk:

When, as in some of the Transcendentalists and their Unitarian progenitors, the transplanted Germanic idealism which inspired their system seemed to sustain a kind of conservatism, this was by accident, not from the logic of things. Hegel himself was a conservative only from chance and expediency. The whole melioristic, individualistic tendency of their philosophy was destructive of conservative values. Reliance upon private judgment and personal emotion, contempt for prescription and the experience of the species, a social morality alternately and bewilderingly egocentric or all-embracing (the contradiction so frequently encountered in Rousseau) – these qualities of Emerson’s thought gratified a popular American craving which ever since has fed upon Emersonian “Self-Reliance” and “Experience” and “Nature” and his other individualistic manifestoes. Were it not for this affinity with the American intellectual appetite, Emerson might not be remembered, since his essays are not easy reading – piercing sentences or paragraphs sparking amid incoherence of structure, the expression of a mind as unsystematic as Carlyle’s. But Emerson’s speculations were so congenial to the American temper that their influence upon American thought has been incalculably great: one even finds passages from Emerson a favorite exercise in typewriting manuals, and Emerson has stolen into the soul of such conservatives as Irving Babbitt, sometimes exerting there a disharmonious influence.

Emerson appeals to a variety of equalitarian and innovating impulses common among Americans, all of them familiarly remarked by Tocqueville: the passion for simplicity, the dislike of hierarchy, the impatience with discipline and restriction, the fondness for summary remedies. When he reduces God to the Oversoul, appeals to individual judgment, extols growth, change and becoming, and praises freedom unfettered by compromise or parchment, then he reaches an audience vastly larger than the circle of dreamy Transcendentalists. He becomes a prophet of revolt against authority. (The Conservative Mind, p. 210)

                                                                      — Comments —

Bruce writes:

I have always found reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to be like riding a roller coaster. When the trip is over, you are exactly where you began except your hair is messed up.”

Brilliant!

I have shelves full of Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists from before I became a Christian. Some wonderful writing, especially Thoreau – but the philosophy has been deeply corrosive.

Laura writes:

Thank you. Yes, I fell in love with them once too. They are great writers and an indispensable part of our literary heritage. Have you ever read Jim Kalb’s excellent essay on Emerson?

Kalb wrote:

Emerson tells us that truth is “such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.” However things may be with truth, it is so with Emerson’s thought. What he says is often wise or inspiring, but he has no coherent theory, and his commitment to what he writes is uncertain. He tells us what currently appears true to him, in penetrating, compressed and sometimes shocking language, but his indifference to consistency makes his writings imply everything and nothing. What do we make of him, and why has he been so important to the life of the mind in America?

He believed in inspiration and followed every glimmering, accepting eternal goals in concept but never feeling bound by them in practice. He dreamed of

a great public power, on which [the intellectual man] can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. 

A prophet’s constancy was not his, however. He suspected that all is illusion, or at least that “[e]very act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it,” and that “[n]o sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie … .” In the end, he took as his authority not a “great public power” but the here-and-now self, and his efforts to connect the two failed.

The unity of Emerson’s writings came more from his setting and who he was than from doctrine or vision. He was a contemplative, a moralist, and a citizen of a busy commercial democracy, a mystic and a practically-minded Yankee. He was less a thinker than an observer of his own thoughts, whose writings make visible the difficult relation between American life and man’s need for the transcendent. The American individualism that suppressed objective spiritual order and drove him into mysticism also made him unable to surrender to anything greater than himself. The result was spiritual aspiration that led nowhere; in that he was representative of many of his countrymen.

Please follow and like us: