Self-Reliance

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Self-Reliance

When I speak of alienation I am speaking about wo/man’s alienation from his or her nature. I am speaking of the fragmentation of the individual. I am speaking of the fact that part of what we are is being defiled and rejected by the manner in which we live in our society.

A general theory of alienation would be a body of knowledge about how human freedom and responsible choice is constricted. Evil is that which makes it impossible for sapiens to realizing their potential; this knowledge would be an expression of what are responsible human powers and how society limits the expression of those powers.

Emerson, considered by many as the top moralist in American history, understood these facts when he stated the important challenge to all wo/men to be self-reliance. He felt that self-reliance was the “keynote of American democracy”. Whatever should limit human self-reliance works against the nature of wo/man. The great challenge to education was to develop a comprehensive theory of the limitations of self-reliance and to teach this to all Americans.

To achieve such a goal demanded that science comprehend what all humans strive for. Emerson was convinced that sapiens strived after meaning and the creation of meaning. The crux of self-reliance then was how to advance the self-creation of human meaning.

Science informs us that greed and destructive behavior are not in our DNA but in the society we create. Evil is created by our natural propensities to use our fellow sapiens to satisfy our search for meaning. Human evil is often proportional to human weakness.

“Weakness for man means shallow and narrow meanings, and lack of critical awareness of who one is, and what he is striving for…By developing his critical reason, man can free himself from a large measure of the evil that exists in his social world…It results from the fear of free choice, from the inability to assume responsibility for unique actions and meanings. On the individual level this means that the weak man is the empty man, the manipulated one, and the manipulator of others—the masochist and the sadist. On the social level it means the frightened scapegoat, the warmonger. On both levels it means clumsy, shallow, uncritical, rigid aesthetics, destructive ways of satisfying one’s striving, ways that take a toll on one’s fellow men.”

Quotes from “Beyond Alienation” by Ernest Becker

2

Self-Reliance (1841)

I copied this short bio on Emerson from the Internet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was democracy’s poet and the central figure in the Transcendental movement that invigorated American intellectual life in the mid-nineteenth century. Transcendentalism defined “reason” as the highest human faculty, the individual’s innate capacity to grasp beauty and truth by allowing full play to the intellect and emotions. The movement emerged from a small group of intellectuals centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and Emerson proved not only its intellectual leader but its most eloquent voice as well.

Trained as a Unitarian minister, Emerson left the church in 1832 to devote himself to writing and teaching and fostering a unique American philosophy. In “The American Scholar” (1837), he called upon his countrymen to achieve an intellectual independence from Europe to complement the political independence they had already achieved. As Henry Clay had commented, “We look too much abroad. . . . Let us become real and true Americans.” In his address to Harvard, Emerson asked, “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition and a religion by revelation to us? Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” Oliver Wendell Holmes called the speech “Our intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

In his poetry and essays, Emerson celebrated the diversity and freedom he found in American life, and he demanded that his fellow citizens be worthy of their freedom by daring to be independent in their individual lives. In this, his most famous essay, he declared that “Nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” The quest for self-reliance was really a search for harmony in the universe, which could only be achieved by each person seeking his or her own unique means of self-fulfillment. Emerson scandalized proper society by his attacks on organized religion, which he believed stifled the soul; for him, the divinity of each person lay in the individuality that could be sought in a free society. Even there, he noted, the idealist could be misunderstood.

Originally Emerson eschewed the “real” world for his beloved ideas. Although he opposed slavery, he avoided for as long as possible the radical abolitionist societies calling for an end to Negro bondage. But when he believed that his hero, Daniel Webster, had betrayed public trust by supporting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Emerson attacked him publicly. In the next decade, he helped hide runaway slaves and spoke out openly for the abolitionist cause.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.–Emerson