The 200th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson has arrived but there has been no let-up in the controversy surrounding one of America's most influential public intellectuals. "Where shall wisdom be found?" asks Harold Bloom in his recent book, "Genius", and he answers "in Shakespeare, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche." For Cornel West, however, Emerson was a racist, an imperialist and a "petit bourgeois libertarian with at times anarchist tendencies..."
Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a minister of the Unitarian church, the most broadminded of New England's Protestant sects. After studying at Harvard, he too became a Unitarian minister but soon gave up his pastorate under the influence of German Bible criticism. While he disengaged from the church he became a public lecturer, developing the version of German idealism that emerged in "Nature", published anonymously in 1836. He also ventured into political polemic. In 1838, he wrote to President Martin Van Buren to protest at the expulsion of the Cherokee nation from their lands and he began writing against slavery. In his writings he sought to bring to life an American literature fit for the new country. He wanted a literature based not on old Europe's established models, but on the authentic expression of the heart. His call for literary liberty, and the doctrine of the self in which it was grounded, was to exert an enormous influence on writers such as Thoreau and Whitman, whom he also helped and advised.
Can Emerson still speak to us? I think he can, because he was concerned with a question that never goes away: how shall we live? In the ancient world, Seneca helped his readers to cope with a dysfunctional empire masquerading as a republic. In the 16th century, Montaigne sought to reconcile a rigorous Catholicism with Hellenistic philosophy. Today the desire for practical wisdom continues, from Michel Foucault writing on the "care of the self" to more popular books by AC Grayling ("What is Good?") or Andr? Comte-Sponville ("A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues"). But, while Emerson's answer was fitted to his times, it still has a claim on ours.
In Emerson's first book, "Nature", he sought to have us write the book of wisdom for ourselves. One of the biggest problems of personal life, he argued, is that we shirk the discomfort and bewilderment tied to an original relationship with the world. In "Self-Reliance", one of his most influential essays, he encouraged us to seek originality: "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." Emerson was quite capable of showing appreciation for old bards and sages. But he did so because he believed books are like mirrors: they help us see ourselves. "In every work of genius we see our own neglected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Still, in his lecture "The American Scholar," he warned us to be careful. "Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst. What is the right use?... They are for nothing but to inspire."
Published in 1841, Emerson's first collection of essays combined a call for absolute originality with a doctrine of absolute impersonality, in which the soul of each one of us is essentially the same as the soul of the world or God. This line of thought emerged from Emerson's wish to prevent the death of God-an idea that appears in his 1838 "Address to the Harvard Divinity School", and which Nietzsche would probably have known. Emerson's argument in the "Address" was a farewell to any kind of Christianity. In 1839, he preached his last sermon. Emerson worked out the implications of that abandonment of Christianity in a new vocabulary. These essays, full of pithy aphorisms and psychological insights, retain the moral seriousness of Emerson's Protestant ancestry. We are to do the right thing not because that's our ticket to heaven but because "all is moral" and we would be fools to do otherwise. Emerson dramatises this earnestness by making it part of a programme of self-fashioning. It is the combination of hyper-Protestantism (you not only have a direct line to God-you are God) and the will to self-creation that give the essays their modern tone.
As he got older, Emerson's thought continued to develop but the optimistic belief in self-fashioning gradually dimmed. The mid-19th century, like today, was an era in which ideas that stressed the extent to which the human personality is determined by an unchangeable inheritance were in the ascendant. Whereas we worry about genetic determinism, Emerson struggled to defend free will from phrenologists and materialist physicians. In "Experience", his fears that we have no soul prompted thoughts of suicide, which he batted away with the hope that "into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes."
In "Representative Men", a series of seven biographical essays, Emerson gave us examples of our own powers. The 18th-century mystic Swedenborg illustrated mankind's capacity for insight and ecstasy; Napoleon, of action. But these men were there to inspire us-nothing more. "Every hero becomes a bore a last," and the same is true of Emerson. The constant calls for sincerity and authenticity also encourage us to trample on other people in our attempts to fulfil our passion for self-fashioning. The self we have remade may turn out to be a monster.
Emerson is aware of the risks but he reckons the risks on the other side are just as great: "People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." It's not by becoming narcissists that we learn from him but by becoming what he calls an "inventor." The restlessness, the creative destruction of modern America, is both reflected in and shaped by these words.
