Classic Philosophy for the Modern Man Read online

  266. ‘One can only truly esteem him who does not look out for himself’ – Goethe to Rath Schlosser.

  267. The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their children: ‘Siao-sin’ (‘make thy heart small’). This is the essentially fundamental tendency in latter-day civilizations. I have no doubt that an ancient Greek, also, would first of all remark the self-dwarfing in us Europeans of today – in this respect alone we should immediately be ‘distasteful’ to him.

  268. What, after all, is ignobleness? Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common. On this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there originates therefrom an entity that ‘understands itself’ – namely, a nation. In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely: about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly – the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer. The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger – that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (The fear of the ‘eternal misunderstanding’: that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them – and not some Schopenhauerian ‘genius of the species’!) Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command – these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. A man’s estimates of value betray something of the structure of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and common experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile,[7] the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious—to the ignoble!

  …

  269. Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts! Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortalisers of things which lend themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting? Alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose its odour! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated yellow sentiments! Alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand – with our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer, things only which are exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds; but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved – evil thoughts!

  * * *

  Selflessness. ↵

  Refinement. ↵

  Old Provençal: ‘gay knowledge’ or ‘gay science’, the art of composing love poetry; especially the art of the Provençal troubadours. ↵

  Difference engenders hatred. ↵

  Naturam expellas furca, tamen usquerecurret: ‘you can drive nature with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back’ - Horace, Epistles, I. x. 24. ↵

  Among equals. ↵

  Progression towards the same. ↵

  10

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws

  Introduction

  What if, despite all the cynicism and hypocrisy we see around us, there were still a reason to be confident that we can tap into a source of universal power – simply by living life as one’s own man?

  The great American transcendentalist philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, thought that there was.

  Emerson’s beliefs were always considered radical. Strongly influenced by the ancient Indian classics, the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedanta, as well as Quakerism and German philosophy, Emerson believed that all things were connected to God and, therefore, all things were divine. Life was usually experienced as a series of incomplete and partial glimpses of reality, he thought, whereas in fact each tangible being is merely one aspect of a resplendent underlying unity. The power of that underlying unity – that ‘soul of the whole’ as Emerson calls it – is accessible to all of us.

  Of course, if there really were some way of accessing the power of the universe, we would naturally want to have some guidance as to how to do that.

  Emerson’s essay, ‘Spiritual Laws’, attempts to provide that guidance. He does not himself list the laws to which he refers in the title; he wanted to inspire far more than he wanted to enumerate. That humbler task falls to us. So – what laws can be discerned?

  Emerson understands that the universe is experienced differently according to a man’s fundamental nature. Our genius or nature determines for us the character of the universe because the universe responds and becomes meaningful in answer to it. We attract experiences that are significant to us in the same way that a magnet attracts iron filings. The right thing for us is that which corresponds to our own inner constitution, rather than that which we choose, since choice is only ‘a partial act of hands, eyes, and appetites rather than the whole being’. Our character is constantly making itself known and is impossible to hide: it reveals itself in our smallest acts and dispays itself in our very demeanour.

  Emerson also understands that, as one aspect of the infinite responsiveness of the universe, it leaves every man to ‘set his own rate’ – and unfailingly accepts his own self-assessment. It is for ourselves to attribute our own value to our work and deeds. Work has meaning, and becomes vocation, insofar as it is an outlet for our character and aims. At the same time, extraordinary success comes from the self-negation which allows for creative energy to find its outlet in the world.

  Finally, Emerson understands that everything stems from the inner man. It is not in activity or making external changes that we recreate ourselves. The epochs of our lives are determined ‘in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk’. We may admire the great institutions of the world but we forget that each of them was initiated, at one point, by a single thought.

  Emerson was widely considered to have been the most influential writer of nineteenth-century America. For the modern reader, Emerson’s value lies in what he himself identified as the central doctrine of his work – ‘the infinitude of the private man’. Mass man, man as an
economic unit, man as a ‘human resource’ – these bugbears of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have been anathema to Emerson. Instead, Emerson reminds us of our dignity, our expansiveness, and our power to begin the process of regenerating the universe from within.

  * * *

  Spiritual Laws

  When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

  The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man, never darkened across any man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. ‘A few strong instincts and a few plain rules’ suffice us.

  My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

  In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’

  Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they could reflect than in another, as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.

  The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.

  The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’

  We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

  …

  I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution; and the action which I in all my years tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade? Has he not a calling in his character?

  Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival.
For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward ‘signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,’ is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.