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In these series of essays, Emerson shares his thoughts on different topics united by the ideas that wisdom and truth are for the common man, the importance of sincerity, authenticity, and trusting our own judgements over social conventions, and that all of humanity and nature have some share in the divine and God. Anyone expecting rigorous philosophical essays with well-defined terms that build upon each other with formal logic will be disappointed. Emerson’s essays often meander from one partially developed idea to the next, preferring elaborate poetic expressions and half-developed aphorisms over rigor.
In “History” Emerson argues the proper study of history is not the study of important events, governments, or great individuals from the past, but the study of ourselves. When we study the “there and then” we are really trying to understand the “here and now.” We can’t understand history correctly if we think it has nothing to do with us and our concerns today. Each historical event or famous person is something that reveals a new insight into the human experience and is a reflection of the shared ideas of the universal oversoul. The study of history should be interpreted through our individual experience because it can tell us something about who we are as individuals and as a species. As Emerson states, “There is properly no history, only biography.”
In his most famous and important essay, “Self-Reliance” Emerson advocates learning to trust our own judgements. Each person has a role to play in the world and only by embracing that role can we be our true and authentic selves and discover our own unique wisdom to improve humanity. We must decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
The majority frequently follow the ideas of other people and institutions or blindly obey authority without a second thought to the point where if a person knows what church or political party you belong to they could predict your opinions and views before you have said or written a word. The reason we often don’t trust our own judgements is because we fear public opinion and being attacked for holding a contrary view to our friends and society.
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. “
In order to be a truly free human, we must be a nonconformist and not just accept something is good because tradition, society, or custom says so, but we must explore the thing that is said to be good ourselves by investigating it and experimenting with it in our lives. Even seemingly noble causes, such as giving to charity, lose their nobility if they derive from the impulse to please others and stem from social pressure.
Another factor preventing us from trusting our judgements is the desire to be consistent with our past selves and sentiments. We don’t want to contradict ourselves, even though people change over time. What I might have thought was true or good yesterday might be different than what I think today.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 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.”
The geniuses and great men of history are men who cared not for conforming to their own age, but remained honest to their own true natures and made the ages conform to them: Christ, Plato, Caesar, etc. We need to be honest with ourselves. We shouldn’t change our views or hide our real feelings about something just to please others. We should be willing to tell our loved ones, our friends, our family, our true thoughts and feelings about things, even if it is a hard truth.
Emerson notes in “Compensation” that every good or beneficial thing also comes with a negative consequence. Our gaining of something almost always involves losing something else that could have potentially been valuable. Emerson suggests there is a universal principle at work in the universe that always leads to balance and equilibrium. Everything is interconnected. We cannot take out the good part of something without also receiving the bad. Everything you do has a price.
“Love” celebrates the emotion as one of the great experiences of life that changes us as a person and makes us better human beings. Under the initial throes of love we often become completely unconcerned with the normal matters of everyday life. Love makes us see everything in a new light and intensifies the beauty of nature, poetry, music, and everything else in the world. The experience of love is the closest thing we can experience in the world to witnessing the divine or Plato’s forms, the closest we can get to some inexplicable divine beauty beyond mere physical form. Emerson describes love like a spark that turns into a fire and spreads its flame beyond the original relationship, lighting up the whole world. Love teaches us to see the virtues of our beloved and by extension teaches us to see what is truly beautiful and truly divine in others. As we come to intimately know one human being above all others, we come to know a little bit about all human beings. For Emerson love isn’t a mere private sentiment, but a feeling that enlarges ourselves and our relation to the whole world.
“Friendship” notes that true friendship like love provides the profoundest and most satisfactory relationships in our life. It is so important and desirable that we spend our entire lives searching for new friendships and intimacy with our fellow man. Unfortunately most people spend their time forging superficial friendships based on momentary pleasures or the desire to get things from people like fancy dinners or presents, while Emerson argues we should strive for friendships of the highest kind defined by sincerity, virtue, sharing new and interesting ideas, and who are willing to put aside everyday superficial courtesies and tell us the unabashed truth when they disagree with us. We should appreciate who our friends are as people, their ideas, their deepest selves, and not the things they have and can provide us. At the same time, we should let true friendships develop naturally and not try to force them since forcing them will be counterproductive.
In “The Oversoul” Emerson shares his mystical ideas about God and religion. He defends the existence of the soul by pointing out that no amount of philosophy and human analysis ever manages to give a final account of things. We are always left with the feeling that there is something more, something incomplete. This is the presence of the soul within humanity. All individual things contain God within them and are part of a single oversoul. Although we are each individuals, everything is really part of a single whole. Everything is a reflection of God. In this way, we have some of God within us.
Emerson believes we must get rid of formal religion, official doctrines, dogma, traditions, and rhetoric about God in order to authentically connect with God. We can only approach God by sequestering ourselves away from other men’s thoughts and understandings about God.
The oversoul inspires us and gives us insight to create great works of art and wisdom. All people can access the oversoul and for this reason no piece of wisdom really belongs to any individual person; those who say something wise, every virtuous act, involves accessing the shared wisdom of the oversoul. The wisdom of great men and religious figures such as Shakespeare or Jesus originates from the oversoul. Connecting to the oversoul allows us to see what is eternal and transcendent beyond the surface appearance of things. For this reason the teachings of Christ or other great thinkers that reflect some of the great shared wisdom of humanity that is part of the oversoul are eternal; they merely tell us the wisdom that any human could have discovered. This means that wisdom and insight and communion with God and Nature are available to each of us because we can all access this shared human wisdom and doesn’t require priests or other intermediaries.
“Circles” argues that nothing in the universe is truly fixed. Everything from nature to ideas to art are always changing. There is a constant cycle of the new replacing the old. Even in science or philosophy, no law is final. One law or discovery only leads to the next law or discovery. All descriptions of fact or wisdom are approximate and not final. There is no finality. Everything is ephemeral. The danger for humanity is we can get too comfortable with old truths and grow to fear new observations, revelations, or ideas. Emerson suggests we should be willing to experiment with different ways of living. Don’t be afraid to make changes to yourself, your ideas, and your modes of life. Everything in the universe, nature, and even our own lives are constantly changing and transitioning.
In “Art” Emerson suggests the best art is accessible to the common man, restores us to “the simplest states of mind,” and has a religious quality. Good art makes it seem like we are experiencing a deep religious truth that speaks to our deepest soul. It speaks to our universal nature. The artist finds true inspiration not from enacting formal rules, but rather expressing his own emotions and ideas about the world, and employing hard work to create an object that reflects and embodies these observations. Therefore when we view or consume art we must remember to look at its spirit, its deeper and universal sentiment, not just its formal structures. Art is not just for critics, but for the average person.
Emerson has a lot more to say about art and literature in some of his other essays. For example, in “Self-Reliance” he notes the role of fiction and philosophy to help us accept our own thoughts that we rejected due to a lack of self-trust.
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
In the work of art, we come to see our own rejected thoughts presented to us by a different person and this process allows us to accept that our rejected ideas may have had some merit.
While Emerson has this say about literature in “Circles”:
“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English, and American houses and modes of living.”
Literature gives us a way to view the state of our own life by being able to compare it to different modes of living in the past, to compare our ideas to the great ideas of the past. It takes us out of ourselves and away from our everyday life so we are able to view our lives from a distance and judge it more fairly.
As the essay “History” points out when we view ancient sculpture or read ancient literature we experience humanity distilled to its essence. We come to see ourselves and our own lives in the great works of literature.
“The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands.”
Literature teaches us what is eternal. It shows us what problems, concerns, and ideas of today were ones that writers and thinkers from all ages dealt with and what so-called problems are ephemeral and shouldn’t be part of my authentic concerns.
In “History” Emerson argues the proper study of history is not the study of important events, governments, or great individuals from the past, but the study of ourselves. When we study the “there and then” we are really trying to understand the “here and now.” We can’t understand history correctly if we think it has nothing to do with us and our concerns today. Each historical event or famous person is something that reveals a new insight into the human experience and is a reflection of the shared ideas of the universal oversoul. The study of history should be interpreted through our individual experience because it can tell us something about who we are as individuals and as a species. As Emerson states, “There is properly no history, only biography.”
In his most famous and important essay, “Self-Reliance” Emerson advocates learning to trust our own judgements. Each person has a role to play in the world and only by embracing that role can we be our true and authentic selves and discover our own unique wisdom to improve humanity. We must decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
The majority frequently follow the ideas of other people and institutions or blindly obey authority without a second thought to the point where if a person knows what church or political party you belong to they could predict your opinions and views before you have said or written a word. The reason we often don’t trust our own judgements is because we fear public opinion and being attacked for holding a contrary view to our friends and society.
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. “
In order to be a truly free human, we must be a nonconformist and not just accept something is good because tradition, society, or custom says so, but we must explore the thing that is said to be good ourselves by investigating it and experimenting with it in our lives. Even seemingly noble causes, such as giving to charity, lose their nobility if they derive from the impulse to please others and stem from social pressure.
Another factor preventing us from trusting our judgements is the desire to be consistent with our past selves and sentiments. We don’t want to contradict ourselves, even though people change over time. What I might have thought was true or good yesterday might be different than what I think today.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 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.”
The geniuses and great men of history are men who cared not for conforming to their own age, but remained honest to their own true natures and made the ages conform to them: Christ, Plato, Caesar, etc. We need to be honest with ourselves. We shouldn’t change our views or hide our real feelings about something just to please others. We should be willing to tell our loved ones, our friends, our family, our true thoughts and feelings about things, even if it is a hard truth.
Emerson notes in “Compensation” that every good or beneficial thing also comes with a negative consequence. Our gaining of something almost always involves losing something else that could have potentially been valuable. Emerson suggests there is a universal principle at work in the universe that always leads to balance and equilibrium. Everything is interconnected. We cannot take out the good part of something without also receiving the bad. Everything you do has a price.
“Love” celebrates the emotion as one of the great experiences of life that changes us as a person and makes us better human beings. Under the initial throes of love we often become completely unconcerned with the normal matters of everyday life. Love makes us see everything in a new light and intensifies the beauty of nature, poetry, music, and everything else in the world. The experience of love is the closest thing we can experience in the world to witnessing the divine or Plato’s forms, the closest we can get to some inexplicable divine beauty beyond mere physical form. Emerson describes love like a spark that turns into a fire and spreads its flame beyond the original relationship, lighting up the whole world. Love teaches us to see the virtues of our beloved and by extension teaches us to see what is truly beautiful and truly divine in others. As we come to intimately know one human being above all others, we come to know a little bit about all human beings. For Emerson love isn’t a mere private sentiment, but a feeling that enlarges ourselves and our relation to the whole world.
“Friendship” notes that true friendship like love provides the profoundest and most satisfactory relationships in our life. It is so important and desirable that we spend our entire lives searching for new friendships and intimacy with our fellow man. Unfortunately most people spend their time forging superficial friendships based on momentary pleasures or the desire to get things from people like fancy dinners or presents, while Emerson argues we should strive for friendships of the highest kind defined by sincerity, virtue, sharing new and interesting ideas, and who are willing to put aside everyday superficial courtesies and tell us the unabashed truth when they disagree with us. We should appreciate who our friends are as people, their ideas, their deepest selves, and not the things they have and can provide us. At the same time, we should let true friendships develop naturally and not try to force them since forcing them will be counterproductive.
In “The Oversoul” Emerson shares his mystical ideas about God and religion. He defends the existence of the soul by pointing out that no amount of philosophy and human analysis ever manages to give a final account of things. We are always left with the feeling that there is something more, something incomplete. This is the presence of the soul within humanity. All individual things contain God within them and are part of a single oversoul. Although we are each individuals, everything is really part of a single whole. Everything is a reflection of God. In this way, we have some of God within us.
Emerson believes we must get rid of formal religion, official doctrines, dogma, traditions, and rhetoric about God in order to authentically connect with God. We can only approach God by sequestering ourselves away from other men’s thoughts and understandings about God.
The oversoul inspires us and gives us insight to create great works of art and wisdom. All people can access the oversoul and for this reason no piece of wisdom really belongs to any individual person; those who say something wise, every virtuous act, involves accessing the shared wisdom of the oversoul. The wisdom of great men and religious figures such as Shakespeare or Jesus originates from the oversoul. Connecting to the oversoul allows us to see what is eternal and transcendent beyond the surface appearance of things. For this reason the teachings of Christ or other great thinkers that reflect some of the great shared wisdom of humanity that is part of the oversoul are eternal; they merely tell us the wisdom that any human could have discovered. This means that wisdom and insight and communion with God and Nature are available to each of us because we can all access this shared human wisdom and doesn’t require priests or other intermediaries.
“Circles” argues that nothing in the universe is truly fixed. Everything from nature to ideas to art are always changing. There is a constant cycle of the new replacing the old. Even in science or philosophy, no law is final. One law or discovery only leads to the next law or discovery. All descriptions of fact or wisdom are approximate and not final. There is no finality. Everything is ephemeral. The danger for humanity is we can get too comfortable with old truths and grow to fear new observations, revelations, or ideas. Emerson suggests we should be willing to experiment with different ways of living. Don’t be afraid to make changes to yourself, your ideas, and your modes of life. Everything in the universe, nature, and even our own lives are constantly changing and transitioning.
In “Art” Emerson suggests the best art is accessible to the common man, restores us to “the simplest states of mind,” and has a religious quality. Good art makes it seem like we are experiencing a deep religious truth that speaks to our deepest soul. It speaks to our universal nature. The artist finds true inspiration not from enacting formal rules, but rather expressing his own emotions and ideas about the world, and employing hard work to create an object that reflects and embodies these observations. Therefore when we view or consume art we must remember to look at its spirit, its deeper and universal sentiment, not just its formal structures. Art is not just for critics, but for the average person.
Emerson has a lot more to say about art and literature in some of his other essays. For example, in “Self-Reliance” he notes the role of fiction and philosophy to help us accept our own thoughts that we rejected due to a lack of self-trust.
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
In the work of art, we come to see our own rejected thoughts presented to us by a different person and this process allows us to accept that our rejected ideas may have had some merit.
While Emerson has this say about literature in “Circles”:
“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English, and American houses and modes of living.”
Literature gives us a way to view the state of our own life by being able to compare it to different modes of living in the past, to compare our ideas to the great ideas of the past. It takes us out of ourselves and away from our everyday life so we are able to view our lives from a distance and judge it more fairly.
As the essay “History” points out when we view ancient sculpture or read ancient literature we experience humanity distilled to its essence. We come to see ourselves and our own lives in the great works of literature.
“The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands.”
Literature teaches us what is eternal. It shows us what problems, concerns, and ideas of today were ones that writers and thinkers from all ages dealt with and what so-called problems are ephemeral and shouldn’t be part of my authentic concerns.
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