Chapter Three

1. Chapter Three • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 -1883) • Born in Boston to a clerical tradition. • Leader of the transcendentalist movement in America. • Journals and speeches were the forms of communication most natural to him.

2. Literary term • Transcendentalism: • It refers to a kind of attitude that believes in the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. In another word, transcendentalists believe that man learns things not only through reasoning based on his five senses, or by his own sensual experiences, and that he also learns truth spontaneously, out of his soul or instincts .

3. Text study: Self- Reliance • Theme of Self-Reliance (1841) • This essay focuses on his discussion on the individual’s relations with his culture – culture in the broadest definition, thus exploring the implications of the fierce individualism at the heart of his Transcendental faith: the dignity, the ultimate sanctity of each human being.

4. Quotations for further appreciation • I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. • 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.

5. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. • To be great is to be misunderstood.

6. Quotations for further appreciation • Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. • Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more.

7. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; - and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

8. Special features • Mode of perception A. Self-reliance Emerson’s real task as a writer is to demonstrate a way of seeing in which the individual eye, free of constraints of history or culture, achieves ultimate meaning through its own perception of the sensible data of the world. Ultimate meaning for him is latent in the act of perception, in the link which perception realizes between the self and objects, not in the systemization of abstract ideas derived from the analysis of perception.

9. Hence, when Emerson calls for self-reliance, he means primarily the inward activity, that is, the soul engaged in seeing, which is not so much a moral injunction as the beginning of vision.

10. B. Symbolic vision For Emerson, the external world, that is, nature and the whole universe, is the embodiment of the internal or the spiritual world. In symbolic perception the irreconcilable elements of the 18th century philosophy, such as mind and matter, the inner world of value and the outer world of fact, have no separate existences but are ways of talking about a single, unitary act.

11. The distinction between subject and object vanishes, and in its place is an immediate grasp, through the symbols of nature, of the organic relation between human consciousness and what is outside of it, or of the organic unity of all parts of Being. Nature, to a great extent, illustrates the centrality of the symbolic method to his thought.

12. Poetic language 1. He skillfully uses some figures of speech, such as metaphors and similes, to drive home the comparison he wants to make. 2. Symbols, images, are widely used to make clear and vivid his metaphysical discussion of the over-soul, the Spirit, nature, and the individual man.

13. Questions to ponder • In what way do you see Transcendentalism in the parts we have studied? • Do you agree with Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance? • What does his self-reliance mean?