Help with the Emerson reading and concepts this week.
A student wrote and asked for some help with the reading and assignments for the week. My response is below. Reading Emerson is difficult, but it's supposed to be. He wrote at the very boundary of where words work and can work. I hope the following helps with some of the concepts, so you can get a better handle on this difficult reading.
Try taking a section of the one of the essays and struggling with it. The writing can be tough. Work on it sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase.
Emerson was a Romantic, just like Thoreau and just like Poe, but Emerson sought the Romantic sublime in different ways than did Poe. Emerson was about finding your best self.
Start with the assumption, which Emerson believed to be true, that almost everything we experience in the world is an illusion. You can think here of the Christian idea that this world is less real and less important than the one for which we are preparing ourselves when we die. Both Emerson's belief that this world is mostly illusion and the Christian idea that this world is less important than the next come from the same roots, namely, the thinking of Plato and his theory of forms. That's the video you watched earlier in the week.
OK, once you accept this this world is illusion, the next logical question is how to you see through the illusion to what is real and important. Being a Romantic, Emerson thought that this came from our imaginations, intuition, and emotions--not reason, which he thought was bound up in the belief shared by most that the illusion is real. The first major step is to learn to trust your "self" and its intuitions and subtle emotional reactions to the world around you. Most of the time, Emerson isn't talking about intense emotion, as was Poe, he's talking about being so attuned to one's own self, one's own emotions, and one's own intuition that one can feel empathy with others and the "real" world around us. He saw Nature as being filled with little bit's of God, just as is every person, and he thought that if we are in tune with our selves and didn't get lost living the world everyone wanted us to live, as opposed to the life we want and need to live, we'd be able to feel a resonance with Nature and other True Selves.
His often expresses these ideas through capitals. In the essay, "The American Scholar," for instance, Emerson says talks about "man," little "m," and "Man," capital "M." "Man Thinking" as opposed to "man thinking." The capital "M," Man is the true, real Man. He thinks for his self. He isn't influenced by others, except as that this influence resonates with his True Self. He reads the past, but through the filter of this own Thinking Self, his True Self. He listens to others closely and feels for and with them, but again only as these feelings and empathy resonate with his True Self. He is at once connected to others and capable of helping them, AND he is independent or reliant only on his Self. In necessary, he can stand alone against everyone, because his sense of Truth is dependent, not on what others think of say, but on what he knows to be True through his own experience of the Real world. He is like that prisoner who escapes in the video. He knows a truth which is beyond that with the other prisoners, who remained chained, can ever know, so he refuses to be bound by the illusions of the crowd; indeed, he feels for the crowd and wants to help them to see the truth, but he also feels pity for them, because their own ignorance blinds them to the very possibility of seeing the world as it really is.
I hope this helps. It covers a lot of territory in a short amount of time, but it helps explain a particular strain of Romanticism, one which sees the Poet/Philosopher/Self as more insightful than the crowd but no different from it other than in experience. In this, the Self becomes a figure of nostalgia, genius, and insight, and a source for sublime insight.
As always, write back with questions.
Steve
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