Agreeing with Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've now read two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first one on Nature and the second on the American Scholar, and I find myself fully agreeing with the man. He says things that I could have said myself. His metaphysics is very much in tune with my view of things, and his love of the individual is also something I wholeheartedly agree with. He even talks of the sovereign man, something I keep mentioning myself.

He's also very frank and direct about what matters and what doesn't. He wants us to think for ourselves. It's not who we are in the established hierarchy that matters, but what we figure out on our own, either by reading or by experimenting, observing, and living. He detests people who merely parrot whatever people have said before them, and he wasn't fond of people who don't trust their instincts either. He would have been appalled by the level of self doubt and blind obedience to authority that's being hoisted onto young people these days. He would have identified it as puritanism of the worst kind.

Another interesting thing about the man is that he keeps telling us to put aside any book that bores us, and he identifies a problem with style and form that's fun to read about because he must have known that his style would become as tiresome in the future as he found older books to be tiresome himself. The solution to this problem is to rewrite everything in the style and form of the day. Not word for word, but in the context in which the ideas are still current. What's important is not the words themselves, nor the names of the authors, but the ideas.

With Emerson now coming across as strangely quaint in language and style, it's interesting to see that I've nevertheless been influenced by him precisely because people have done what he suggested. My thinking has been influenced by people who have rephrased Emerson. They have added and subtracted, and expanded, but never deviated completely from the core idea. The sovereign individual that trusts his instincts and does what he pleases is very much alive in libertarian literature today. I never read a word of Emerson until about a week ago, yet I was already influenced by him because literature is full of references to his ideas.

Emerson would have been delighted to hear this. His name now more or less forgotten except in some history books, but his ideas widely known and rephrased for a new era. That's exactly what he had in mind when he wrote his essays back in his days.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By User:Scewing derivative work: 2009 - Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_ca1857.jpg, Public Domain, Link