The Individual and Subjective Experience Theme Analysis

Emerson’s essay “Experience” is concerned with the individual subject—the thinking, feeling person who has experience. For experience of any kind does not exist without an individual subject to have that experience. (If there weren’t a subject, who would be doing the experiencing?) Emerson believes that, instead of experiencing reality directly, individuals experience reality as it seems to them. Therefore, experience is something that happens on the level of the individual and is not shared. However, Emerson ultimately suggests that even if humans do not share experiences themselves, they share a structure of experience—namely, one that is bound by the limitations of the human subject in space and time.

Emerson suggests that the individual is limited and unable to perceive the totality of existence. “We find ourselves,” Emerson writes, “in a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” The smallness of our actions in comparison to the apparent boundlessness of experience makes it difficult for us to “know to-day whether we are busy or idle.” It is almost impossible in daily life to understand how a person’s discrete actions, choices, and experiences sum up to a human life. The limitations of our experience become the limitations of the world. “Souls never touch their objects,” and instead of experiencing objects—things or people—one just experiences a version of them, what might be called a phenomenon that is filtered through one’s particular individual self, or, to use Emerson’s word, soul. The individual should therefore be conceived not as some stable set of characteristics but rather as a unit of stability in a flowing stream of experience. The individual experiences “a train of moods like a string of beads,” each of which is a “lens” onto reality.

Every soul, Emerson explains, has an individual “temperament” or disposition toward reality. No matter how hard one tries, this inborn attitude determines how one will behave and how one will experience life. If moods are like beads, experienced in succession, “Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” It is the perspective from which we experience reality. People perceive of themselves to be autonomous and to have experience of the world and of themselves that is more or less objective. But Emerson points out that the human temperament is “ a prison of glass which we cannot see,” which determines the overall contours of our experience and our actions. This holds true for other individuals, who seem to be in control of their lives but in reality are “creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass.” This “individual texture” cannot be corrected or changed, no matter how hard one works.

Although individuals long for static truths and experiences, and seek to describe them through art and philosophy, Emerson asserts that the only thing that remains constant is temperament. Reality, filtered through humans’ ever-changing bodies and minds, never stays constant. One basic proof for the inconstancy of human experience is the way people’s opinions change. We as humans have a “love of the real” compels us to seek out examples of permanent truths, like great works of art of literature. But then preferences change and we may suddenly prefer to read something else. Just as the human body, when healthy, is constantly changing, so is the mind. “Health of body consists in circulation,” Emerson writes, “and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associations.” Although we may have some inherent longing for the permanent, our mind needs change in order to be healthy. Therefore, we “live amid surfaces,” rather than profound truths; our “office is with moments,” rather than with eternity.

Although we try to capture something of eternity through our vain efforts to develop predictive science and our fervent religious faith (which Emerson contemptuously refers to as “our idolatries”), our experience simply doesn’t allow us to get to the heart of nature. Ultimately, since “nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates,” a human intelligence cannot perceive what is permanent and orderly about experience. It is only from the perspective of “divinity” that there is any stability in human society. When viewing human behavior from the farthest possible remove, one can see that “divinity is behind our failures and follies.” Some divine plan structures what seems to be the fickleness and unreliability of human behavior.

Experience, in Emerson’s essay, is something that happens in and for an individual subject. Because that individual subject is constantly in flux, experience is also in flux, and stable reality—in the form of religious or scientific truth, or even knowledge of other human beings—is not accessible to human beings. In order to perceive the unity in a human life, and in human society more broadly, one must consider reality from the perspective of a divinity, where all change reveals itself to be part of a broader unifying order. That unity, however, is beyond the scope of human experience.