This article was prepared for the 2005 ALA Convention in Boston in celebration of the publishing of The Conduct of Life volume in Harvard's series of the Collected Works.

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Escapar de Vinculos Falsos (Spanish translation)

Richard G. Geldard                                                                                  © Copyright 2005

    The Escape From False Ties
    Emerson is too often accused of being quixotic. When the late Susan Sontag was asked why early in her career she never wrote about the major American literary figures, including Emerson, she replied that she always wanted her essays to be useful. And insofar as Sontag’s judgment is correct, it is confirmed by the absence of college courses in Applied Emerson. The seer himself said it well enough in “Considerations:” “So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enters into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”  My question, despite this disclaimer, is to ask if we can say that Emerson is, at last, useful?  Can these two lines from the poetic prologue be realized:

                     The richest of all lords is Use,
                     And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.

    As Conduct of Life demonstrates, Emerson was, particularly in his later work, more teacher than philosopher and more spiritual guide than theologian. As I have argued elsewhere, his method was more applicable instigation than reflective explanation. His language shatters complacencies and  shocks us from habitual slumber. He does this through a kind of abrasive eloquence. It is what prompted Stanley Cavell to refer to Emersonian rhetoric as “the attractive and repellant way he writes.”
    Connected to that attractive repulsion in facing Emerson is our hopeless challenge to somehow pin him down. He said it himself: “ I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods,” and by “mood” he means the state of receptivity or degree of presence in the moment of hearing.  And as a lecturer he no doubt kept in mind the admonition of his adversarial friend Henry Thoreau who said, “...whatever succeeded with the audience was bad.” On the other side of that coin, however, is offered a comment by Harold Bloom, who in a seminar once observed, in an offhand way, that the remarkable thing about Emerson was that he is always right. And certainly that, finally, must be useful.
    “Considerations” was not part of the original Conduct of Life lecture series first delivered in Pittsburgh in 1851. The original five – “Success” through “Worship” – formed the content of what would eventually become  Conduct of Life in 1860. The content of “Considerations,” however, although not delivered by Emerson from the lectern in Pittsburgh, was nonetheless in his mind as context for the whole series.  We learn from Barbara Packer’s comprehensive Historical Introduction to the new Harvard  edition that “Considerations” was probably first delivered in lecture form in New Haven in 1856 and, Packer makes this useful connection:, “...it aims to trace the workings-out of the principle of compensation...”  
    Whereas “Fate” and “Illusions” both reaffirm the Idealist in Emerson, “Considerations,” like its parent essay, takes the position that although we are cabined, cribbed and confined to the profane on a daily basis, we always have the means to move to higher ground. The specific steps are outlined in the essay’s final paragraph, and we can almost see Emerson pausing to find the mot juste  to sum  the “considerations” in the previous thirty-odd pages. Here is what he settled upon:

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded, -- the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these are the essentials, -- these, and the wish to serve, -- to add somewhat to the well-being of men.

    As we know, the word “culture” for Emerson always means self-culture, which in turn means self-recovery, the”erect position,” the education of the higher self, and that the most important step in achieving this recovery is “the escape from all false ties.” Subsequent steps follow naturally from that first momentous separation from the mundane past and the habit-forming present.

    To achieve the highest aims as a lecturer Emerson had to depend on his major essays, such as “Self-Reliance” and “Compensation”  to precede him. Without these references,  the new material would likely fall from the podium on numb, if not deaf, ears. The audience had to recall that in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, and that since nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of our own minds, our business lies in achieving that integrity through escape from the fetters of false ties.

    It is telling that the first Conduct of Life series took place in Pittsburgh. As Richardson reminds us,  Pittsburgh in 1851 was a coal town, suffused throughout with slippery, deadly carbon, the sky and faces a uniform black, a phenomenon Emerson had experienced in England four years earlier. Pittsburgh was the engine of material progress, where Success, Wealth, and Economy were spawned to fuel the nation’s chaotic, can we say mindless, westward expansion. For Emerson, making the arduous journey to Pittsburgh by carriage, train and canal boat was life-saving work, not just cultural enrichment. He was dealing here with perishing souls. It was his life’s purpose.

    Emerson begins “Considerations” by reminding his readers that we cannot, should not, depend upon the designated gods of society for salvation.  He trots out the most respected professionals society offers: the priest, the physician, the lawyer and the judge and shows them all exercising their craft as accidental hit and miss experimenters. The priest has no idea if his words will inspire; the physician guesses at his cures; the lawyer is surprised if he wins his case; and the judge has no idea if justice is served.

    Teachers should recognize this well enough. Are any of those upturned faces and rabid note-takers influenced for the good by anything we say? We have no idea.  I have always wondered, for example, how professors can truly teach “Self-Reliance” and take it seriously. Whenever I read this passage to students, I was surprised that a few didn’t just get up and leave:

 There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried . 

    But of course they don’t get up and leave because tuition has more traction than intuition, or it doesn’t occur to them to believe it, or they think the passage is really about farming. The truth is we would all be out of work if students actually heard Emerson and took him seriously.

    After dismissing the futilities of the professionals, Emerson calls upon inspiring examples of genius, referencing those rare souls who have achieved immortality through thought and who show us the way through their works. Genius is full of the life force, and life, as Porphyry tells us, is what holds matter together. But genius is rare, not close enough. Nature makes one Emerson for every fifty of us who teach him, or as Emerson puts it, one good melon for every fifty with a mushy core. No, only self-reliance and severing of false ties will lead us onto the royal road.

    The question lingers, however, how do we proceed? What practical steps can we take in self-recovery? His recommendations first draw us away from false values,  from the profanity of the streets and the stuffy air of drawing rooms, but what then? Clearly, good company is key, but the power of the mob is strong and seductive, but unripe, ill-formed and chaotic. And it will not serve to leap from the streets to the refinements of the drawing room. High society shows itself equally shallow, offering no real nourishment for the spirit.
    Where then do we turn? What is not shallow is the true nature and substance of things, but we have to see those things with an eye that actually makes contact with the laws of their nature. Rather than the polarities of chaos and stultifying order, we have to see how these seeming opposites arise from one source.  It is in the interaction and fusion of chaos and form that the raw materials of self-recovery arise. Coal may be primitive stuff but it runs the world and without it we remain unmade. Emerson warmed his study with these solid lumps of decay and transformed their heat-making power into consciousness.  The secret of culture is the transformation of raw power into sacred flame. But the two are bound together and arise from the same element. It was this aspect of Emersonian thought that attracted Nietzsche, particularly in “The Birth of Tragedy,” which articulates the Apollonian and Dionysian fusion.

    The second practical step is physical and mental well-being. Get health, Emerson says.. Illness steals our character and ruins our promise. Drop the cant; stop the whining and treat illness sanely, certainly a directive which Sontag would have applauded.  No barrier to self-recovery was more prominent for Emerson than  debilitating illness. He knew it intimately, heard the whimpering within his own walls, and saw the effects of it on character. Eliminating all cant from the circumstances of illness is a transformation of illness into culture-enhancing creativity through genius and character.

    The upward spiraling implications of health are many. At the center is identification with the body. Emerson referred to his own body as the office where he worked. This detachment is fundamental to his idealism. The philosophical differences between the material proposition  “I am this body” vs the Transcendental “This body is an instrument for my use,” is definitive. The latter represents a philosophical and spiritual detachment from matter, making the fixation to materialism the primary false tie in Emerson’s catalog.

    The next false ties are connected to our habitual passions. All we ask, Emerson says, when we so possessed, is that we develop the capacity to meliorate, to sublimate passions into virtue. Give me the bad boy, the schoolmaster said, that I can make something of that life-giving energy. We are falsely tied to our desires as limitations, wishing for things to be otherwise, rather than seeing in our condition the ingredients to propel us forward across the barriers and thresholds of life. Such insight is, Emerson says, “the power of accommodation to any circumstance.”

    Debilitating discontent arising from circumstances is severed through the higher power of purpose in life, keeping focus on our self-chosen calling. Nothing but this higher sense of purpose provides the proper mirror held up to nature and circumstance that yields the gifts of authentic satisfaction, what Emerson called the triumph of principle. We wander unfocused though life until purpose gives us the corrective lens to finally see clearly. False ties are the notions of purpose provided by others: parents, elders and teachers who see us apparently wandering aimlessly and impetuously intercede to help. But as Emerson says, it is only when we draw upon our most private wisdom that any good can come.

    Other false ties are more prosaic. Sever yourself from virulent, aggressive fools, leave sour company, abandon debilitating work if you can’t transform it, resist nonsense and finally, “experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct for self-defense, namely not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with [unfit companions], but let their madness spend itself unopposed.”

    This last admonition may be the hardest to apply. We are social creatures and we love our company, self-reliant isolation notwithstanding. Emerson spends a good deal of this essay reflecting on all the effects, both positive and negative, of companionship. The false tie in empty companionship is the habitual addiction to surfaces. It is when Emerson confronts the essentials that his language takes flight and leaves us with genuine nourishment. Here is the ideal, what he himself would be to us:

Now, if one comes who can illuminate this dark house with thoughts, show them their native riches, what gifts they have, how indispensable each is, what magical powers over nature and men; what access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute character; he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences, -- then we come out of our egg-shell existence into the great dome, and see the zenith over and the nadir under us.

    As always, Emerson’s purpose, what gave him the power to transform the ordinary, was the instinct he possessed to shatter reductive perceptions. Ordinary experience inevitably becomes reductive. Our vision shrinks through habit. Our world is reduced to the walls of the house and finally to the one room. The window looks out on the same tree, the same dull neighbor. Days begin to look the same. Seasons repeat and the wonder of spring is lost. This false tie to numbing habit is the last, the hardest to sever. Emerson’s plea to crack the existential egg and break out into the great dome of life is as difficult for us as it is for the baby chick, and is just as fatal if not accomplished.

    Reading this essay, I am amazed again that Emerson has a reputation for gauzy thinking. As Richardson reminds us, even seemingly airy epigrams, like the man of wisdom who hitches his wagon to a star, have their grounding in fact – in that case a reference the tide-driven millstones along the New England coast.  No, false ties are not dreamy illusions and fanciful imaginings, but are their opposite: fixed narrow doubts, character-shrinking guilt, empty blame, needless fear and unreasoned dissatisfactions. These are the real killers. So when Emerson asks his audience at the end, “will you stick?” he is asking if we are capable of breaking free, but then finding a place to stand. “The hero,” he reminds us, “is he who is immovably centered.”

    That question takes us back to the young twenty-year old who began the twelfth number of his journal, Wide World XII, with the Greek phrase from Archimedes, Dos Pou Stoi, “A Place to Stand,” as in “Give me a place to stand on and I will move the Earth.” Emerson’s sticking point was his Transcendental vision, a plot of ground he first began to tend in that journal. Perhaps you know the revelatory passage.  It contains a litany of metaphysical false ties from which he intended to break free.

December 21, 1823
Who is he that shall controul me? Why may not I act & speak & write & think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the Universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of Wrong & Right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them? Is Society my anointed King? Or is there any mightier community or any man or more than man, whose slave I am?   I am solitary in the vast society of beings; I consort with no species; I indulge no sympathies. I see the world, human, brute & inanimate nature; I am in the midst of them, but not of them;....I say to the Universe, Mighty one! Thou art not my mother; Return to chaos if thou wilt, I shall still exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a destiny greater than thine. Star by Star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed, — But I shall live.

           This, of course, is not language for the lectern. It is too interior. What Emerson prepared for readers and listeners was meant for awakening the sleeping mind with rhetorical shocks to the system, not personal confession. When Emerson in 1851 said, “I have my own spirits in prison, spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not,”  he articulated the core of his unique task in the world, and these considerations by the way are the tidings he carries to those in prison, offering escape from false ties and the opportunity to add somewhat to the well-being of others.