Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self-Reliance
The year was 1832. On a warm summer day in Boston, a Christian minister stepped in front of his congregation at the Second Unitarian Church. The young, slender, sloped shouldered man looked over the crowd with his deep blue eyes. If moods had a color the atmosphere was also a deep blue, this was his final sermon. Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned after only two years of leading the church.
This was well before he became a great master of American literature. Well before he was called, America’s Plato, stirred souls with his ethical and moral ideas. Well before his essays and thoughts were taught in high schools and universities. Before all of this, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a young man fumbling his way through the world.
Yet, his decision to abandon life as a pastor in his mid-thirties transformed him. Like a snake climbing out of its old skin, he climbed out of his old self. Shedding expectations and doubt and stepping into the freedom of new self-awareness.
Just a year earlier his wife Ellen Tucker died. Tuberculosis. It left him rattled, shaken, and blanketed in sorrow. He wrestled with death and he began to question life. As it does, personal catastrophe often causes us to question our most fundamental beliefs. Was it the right choice to become a minister? What influenced his decision to attend the prestigious Harvard Divinity school? Yes, his great grandfather was Chaplain of the American Continental Army, but did he have to follow family tradition?
In the end, the answer was no. He abandoned his family’s religious heritage. Gave up his substantial $1800 (six-figure equivalent) yearly salary and started his own journey. A path of self-reliance.
Everything in Emerson’s life shaped him into one of the most recognized philosophers of the modern age. Here are 4 ideas from Ralph Waldo Emerson on self-reliance:
ON TRUSTING YOURSELF
Psychologist Carl Jung once said, “Who looks outside, dreams, Who looks inside, awakens.” When Emerson trusted himself he woke to his own truth.
When he stepped down from the pulpit in 1832 he made a choice. To emerge from the long family shadow of religious leadership and into the light of his own self-interest. This would have taken tremendous self-trust, to leave it all behind and start anew. This is exactly what he did.
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction . . Else tomorrow 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.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty... To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
ON NON-CONFORMITY
In 1836 Emerson anonymously published his very first book entitled, Nature. There were 500 copies printed. Fast-forward 6 years later, and he had just made it past 499 to sell out the last copy. Perhaps if Emerson had not challenged traditional ideas about the nature of God his edition would have sold faster.
Many questioned his unorthodox view that God lives within nature. Others mocked his idea of transcendentalism, which in its essence, says that the closer one is to nature the closer they are to God.
What an inflated ego they thought, who is he to question an accepted set of beliefs, who was he to go against tradition.
Emerson did not concede or conform to his views and wrote in direct contrast to traditional Unitarian thought: “All people contain seeds of divinity, but society, traditionalism, and lifeless religious institutions thwart the fulfillment of these potentialities.”
He asserted that God’s presence is inherent in both humanity and nature and can best be sensed through intuition rather than through concrete reasoning.
Regarded by many of the older ministers as radical, he spread his ideas through channels other than the church. Trading the sermon the public lecture he toured America while publishing his ideas in journals.
Emerson realized that no matter how hard he tried, he could not be what he was not. Against the grain, he moved forward true to his own values and integrity.
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”
ON KNOWING YOUR WORTH
Emerson’s father died when he was only eight years old. His family had no financial support. He had no fatherly love or guidance. His mother Ruth sold the family library, took in boarders, and worked to bring in minimum wages as a maid. Emerson was no stranger to missing a meal or to doing without. He and his brother Charles had only one coat between them. “Who’s turn is it to wear the grey coat today” his classmates would say.
His family misfortune made him the subject of constant ridicule. Emerson always maintained a strong sense of worth even in times of torment.
Still rich in privileged and social status, but poor in wealth he could have fallen into self-doubt and pity. Yet, he never forgot his worth as a unique human being. This served him well in his career as a lecturer and as his reputation flourished so did the demand for his speeches.
Acting as his own booking agent and speaking dozens of times each year on train tours across the country, Emerson was able to support his family, his mother, and a disabled brother.
One friend said he could have had even more influence had he been a little warmer. Emerson replied that he “never intended to be a substitute for a kitchen stove.”
“Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.
To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”
ON TAKING RISK
A publicly reserved man, Emerson was reluctant to campaign directly for radical social reform, but his involvement with the antislavery movement grew as the national crisis over slavery escalated during the late 1840s and early 1850s.
He spoke in defense of Elijah Lovejoy, lynched for his anti-slavery publications, and later defended radical abolitionist John Brown.
Delivering his first public antislavery address in 1844, he was presenting a case that was not very popular for a white male at the time. He referred to the Fugitive Slave Act as a "filthy enactment" and wrote in his journal, "I will not obey it, by God.”
In a series of powerful public addresses in the early 1850s, he used his speaking skills effectively in the antislavery cause. He also championed woman's educational and economic rights.
Given emancipation did not occur until 1863 and women did not receive the right to vote until 1920, these were unpopular opinions at the time. Without regard for who he would offend he spoke out anyway.
“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”
Self-Reliance is Emerson’s most well-known work.
The main idea is that those things with the greatest value often come from within.
Nothing outside can grant you inner peace. Life is not disconnected from life, but how we experience it is very personal. It is seen through the perspective of our own unique souls.
It isn’t a manifesto on isolation, but one on staying true to your own inner voice.