Social Life and Individualism Theme Analysis

According to Emerson, all individuals are isolated from reality and from each other, unable to plumb the depths of nature or ever fully to grasp the “temperament” that rules the life of other individuals. Emerson therefore advocates a kind of individualism, since according to his theory of experience, every person is essentially alone in his or her own mind. True social interaction is barely possible, and when it does occur, it is unsustainable. When people form communities governed by norms of action, they generally do not treat the other members as they treat themselves. Emerson suggests that this is at least partially because, while one is able to experience the complex motivations, both rational and emotional, that underlie one’s own behavior, it is difficult to extend this sensitivity to others.

Just as the individual subject is fundamentally separate from nature, and only experiences the “surfaces” of things, so is he or she fundamentally separate from other individuals. We experience other people as an “optical illusion”: they seem to be autonomous but are in fact “creatures of a given temperament,” whose behavior is governed by laws that are not possible for anyone besides God to understand. Humans, therefore, are fundamentally unpredictable. From Emerson’s perspective, those who claim that they can predict human behavior, such as phrenologists (who claim to be able to judge a person based on the shape of their skull), are guilty of the worst kind of conceit. The inability to really know others has implications beyond our day to day social life. It affects our politics and even our religion. People forget that “it is the eye which makes the horizon,” Emerson writes, “and the round mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type of representative humanity with the name of a hero or a saint.” Judgments about the virtues of others are fundamentally subjective.

True human connection is therefore extremely difficult, and most of the time impossible. It’s not just that any human relationship must rely on presuppositions about the other. It is also that both parties of any relationship are constantly in flux. “The great and crescive self,” manifesting (albeit not autonomously) the creative power of nature, “supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love.” People cannot entirely control the way they interact with others. Emerson even questions the possibility of spiritual marriage, a radical assertion in the largely Christian society of 19th-century America. Echoing Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Emerson claims that spiritual marriage is impossible because of the “inequality between every subject and every object”: no individual is ever really able to perceive another person as a proper subject. The other is always an object. There will always be a divide between the first and the second person, “the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture.” At best, two human beings can connect at a single point, like the tangent point of two circles. While they connect along this single point, the other parts of the individuals are “inert” and, in a slightly confusing image, storing up “appetency” for their own connections. Every union, then, produces as much discord as it produces connection.

Emerson goes so far as to claim that life does not permit any “co-life”: that there is only really one soul. This, at least, is the fiction each self operates under, for “we believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.” This is why people treat themselves so differently than they treat others. One judges another much more severely than oneself. Every act looks different to the individual when he or she is the person committing it. It is finally impossible to imagine one’s way into another person’s mind. Crime (or sin) is a category that exists outside subjective experience. It is a label attached by the intellect. It has an “objective existence, but not subjective.” In the end, then, people have a “constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors.” It is impossible to escape the individual subject and see people or things they way they really are. Productive co-existence, however, is not totally impossible. In order to do so, one must first have a firm grasp of the dynamics of one’s own self. The philosopher should seek to attain “self-trust”: the ability to understand what wisdom (religious, philosophical, etc.) actually applies to one’s own condition, and how it does so. Only once a philosopher has achieved this “self-trust” can he or she help others to do the same.

In “Experience,” Emerson argues that individuals are essentially separate from one another, and that subjects experience the world by themselves. This is a philosophy of individualism that, although less upbeat than the one Emerson famously articulates in “Self-Reliance,” is no less radical and far-reaching. In addition, because of their fleeting nature, humans can never achieve firm and lasting relationships, which makes social life difficult. But with the kind of philosophical introspection Emerson practices in his essays, productive co-existence is possible.