A joyful presentness is what Emerson is preaching about in the essay experience. How can we wake up to the fact that we are actually, it is we who animate the world. We don't have to wait for something big to happen in our lives. Our everyday lives should enliven, should bring the world to life for ourselves and for those around us. He writes on page 295, let us treat men and women well, treat them as if they were real, perhaps they are. It's a kind of Emerson, typical Emerson formulation, the later philosophers would call this the Philosophy As If in the post contient stream. But for Emerson, rather than argue whether people are really real of not, going the Mr. Ramsey route remember from To The Lighthouse. He wants us to act in such a way that their reality would be disclosed to us. Their reality would be unconcealed for us because of the way we act in the world. The following phrase may help in this regard. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway, Emerson writes. In other words, don't try to analyze whether people are real, whether this experience counts. Whether I am authentic. Whether I'm honest. Take to the road, take to life. I mean, this notion that everything good is on the highway will inspire American travelers from Woody Guthrie to Jack Kerouac and many others. Who see that the best thinking is not done behind a desk or in a library, in front of a computer, everything good is on the highway. I guess we should turn off our machines and go outside and start moving around. One of the enemies of this kind of experience for Emerson is memory. And there are several sentences in the essay where he talks about how the focus on the past inhibits our ability to live fully in the present. Sentences like life has no memory. That, that we shouldn't be encumbered by our worries about yesterday. That those worries about yesterday are a debt that we can never repay and keep us from fully engaging in the present from animating the world around us. You might hear echoes from Nietzsche here. Who thought that our obsessions with history, our cultivation of memory was also a cultivation of guilt. And we can't let go of the past. You may hear echoes of Freud here to. That our inability to let go of the past cause us to suffer from reminisces, you remember that phrase from Freud. For Emerson, writing before and each [LAUGH] before Freud. For Emerson, the focus on the past, learning from the past, is a way of avoiding the present. To Emerson, one of his most famous essays is called The Self Reliance, and that was one of the options you had, for this week. In self-reliance, he makes the argument that we have been too long subservient to other people's thinking. Too long culturated into modes of being that have nothing to do with our heart, nothing to do with our energy. And we need to somehow liberate ourselves from those constraints and dependencies and stand on our own two feet. And again, I'm gonna give you just some phrases from Emerson's comment on them, a little bit, again to see how Emerson is trying to turn us away from history and argument and skepticism and toward experience. Toward animating or vivifying the world around us. So from Self-Reliance, from the very beginning, 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. To believe that what is true for you is true for all men, that is genius. That is genius comes from your ability to follow your own heart. Trust thyself, Emerson writes. Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. Emerson is preaching to you. Right? But he does not want you to follow him. He doesn't want you to rely on him. He wants to try to help liberate us to follow our own hearts. >> You use the word in answering the former question of self reliance, which obviously. >> Yeah. >> You're not using it without a reference one of your other hero's. You mentioned Ceasar. >> Well Caesar himself said you should always italicize the self, it's self reliance and it is indeed the American religion as proclaimed by Ralph Waldo. Who is still the national sage, if not quite the national prophet. He made very clear what he meant by it, which is in the end, listen to what he called the God, G-O-D, within. Only the God within. Only what he calls, also, the Diamond. And he says at one point in his wonderful notebook, the Diamond knows how it is done. Just listen to the voice of the Diamond and it will get done. He also says, but do your work and I shall know you. And I always found that really inspiring and I try to teach that to my students. >> He asked this question, a page or two into the essay, how can we leave our consciousness behind? How can we leave our filters behind, if you will. He writes in my edition on page 1-3-1, but the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. This is a great phrase. We are clapped into jail by our consciousnesses, and we seem to be imprisoned by our thinking, so we don't actually engage with the world. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person watched by sympathy or the hatred of hundreds whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this, if he could pass again into his neutrality. What is Emerson saying here? He's saying that when we act people expect us to act that way again. It's pretty simple. [LAUGH] Once we start acting in a certain way, I show up if I'm wearing a tie, if I'm wearing a jacket, the next time I come to class you might expect me to be wearing a tie and a jacket, I talk in a certain way, expect me to talk that way again. I show up with certain friends, you expect those are the kinds of friends that I'll hang out with. For Emerson, this is terrible, because we shouldn't have to stay the same. There's no Lethe for that. That's the river Lethe is the river that you drink to forget everything. Wouldn't it be great if we could show up the next time and nobody has expectations for us, and we don't have expectations for ourselves. I mean that's really important for Emerson. That somehow, we don't feel the obligation to be who we were yesterday. That's a kind of, that's reliance on ourselves rather than who we have been. Now going just a couple more pages into the essay to where he talks about independence in the crowd. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Isn't that great? The great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps the perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude. You'll be reminded, I hope, by now, of Bodleia. Right? The poet alone in the crowd. Being in the crowd, that crowd bath, Bodleia called it, but not being subsumed completely by the crowd. This phrase it's easy to live in solitude with your own opinion. That's a little dig at his friend Thoreau. Right? Thoreau who in order to get to his own thinking retreated into the woods, or moved into the woods. Let's not call it a retreat necessarily. And Emerson is here saying that the great man is he in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. How can you be with the crowd but not be completely subsumed by it? Another thing for Emerson is not to be subsumed in the past. That's what he was saying before, not show up. Not show up as you had been before, but to be free to perform to enact a new identity. Emerson here and Nietzsche had great depths to him. Emerson thought historical consciousness was vastly overrated. That in fact historical consciousness got in the way of creativity. Got in the way of experience. Which for Emerson was linked to creativity. He writes, why should you keep your head over you shoulder. Why should you keep your head? Why drag about this corpse of your memory lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that place? Suppose you contradict yourself that, what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Live ever in a new day, that's Emerson. Nietzsche's use and abuse of history follows us very closely, you should not be constrained by what you have done. You should be empowered to do anew, to make anew, to live ever in a new day. Because if you don't live that way, if you are encumbered by your memory, if you are encumbered by the crowd, what will happen is that you will over time become conformed more and more to someone else's way of life. You will conform more and more to either the status quo or the dominant majority or even a aggressive minority. But you will be conforming to someone else's mode of life. And conformity for Emerson is the great enemy. Conformity is the opposite of self-reliance. And this is probably the most famous Emersonian sentence, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. A foolish consistency, not all consistency, but a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Adored by little statesmen and philosophers, and divines. Petty people, he thinks. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. Isn't that fun. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. You make the world new every time you act in it, and you act in it when you experience in it. Your genuine action will explain itself, Emerson says, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. This is from 137 in my edition. Your conformity explains nothing. That's really crucial for Emerson. When we conform to other people's opinions, expectations in lives, we lose ourselves. And losing ourselves means we no longer have experience, we don't learn from the world and we teach no one anything at all.
