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| Emerson and The Examined Life |
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For us as Americans, the examined life is more than a philosophical
notion or a tenet of the perennial philosophy. For us it represents
the two founding principles fused together into a quest for the ground
of being. That few choose to follow this path must be evident. We
have abdicated our individuality to the impulses of mass marketing and
the other seductions of the popular culture, and we have sacrificed our
freedom of worship either to unthinking fundamentalisms or, the
reverse, an insensible agnosticism. Emerson devoted his life to freeing us from these prisons of our own making He said, “I have my own spirits in prison, spirits in deeper prisons whom no man visits if I do not.†If this seems like hyperbole, just look around with something less than a jaundiced eye. So what is to be done, you might ask. What about this examined life? Is it worth having? If you heard Emerson this evening you would have to say, at least, it is something to consider, to reflect upon seriously. Emerson begins “Spiritual Laws†with this sentence. “When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our lives are embosomed in beauty.†On the surface of it, the sentence introduces a passage about memory and our tendency to transform the tragic into the sublime over time. But the grammar of it is doing something very interesting. That opening clause, for instance..†Not “When we sit down to reflect on the past, but rather, “When the act of reflection takes place in the mind.†There’s no agent there, no entity, ego or otherwise, doing the reflecting. The act of reflection at some point happens; it just takes place. That bubbling up from some hidden source within us is what we have to learn how to trust. Then the next clause: “when we look at ourselves in the light of thought.†Not, for instance, when I think about my life. Again, there is this â€light of thought†that arises independently and gives us the means to look at ourselves consciously. But an agent, a seer, appears here. The light of thought dawns and we are permitted then to observe. The action of looking at ourselves in the light of thought, following the act of reflection which takes place in the mind, is the examined life of our subject here this evening. What we may see in this reflected light are the faculties of the mind: instinct, intuition, memory, analysis, and imagination. If we are attentive, we may also observe the fragmented operation of the ordinary mind as it rides along with us all day. As strange as it may seem, most of what takes place in the mind all day is really none of our business,. It’s just stuff going on, rambling tape loops of commentary, what some have called roof-brain chatter. We entertain these thoughts, even though they are so many uninvited guests in our most private spaces. Emerson knew it well when he said that who we are is what we think about all day. To bring some order, the examined life, as mapped by Emersonian texts, guides us on the way. We learn to listen seriously to ourselves in the light of thought. We learn to give our attention to the act of reflection as it arises in mind, and we even learn to throw out those uninvited guests who blunder into our precious solitude. As readers of Emerson, then, we come upon these powerful provocations of his, these shocks to our intellectual and emotional systems, and if they resonate with us, we can allow ourselves to examine consciously the reflections which bubble up from the well-springs of our experience, from that source of mind that without reflection would otherwise remain hidden from us. I said earlier that the two principles of individualism and freedom of worship fuse in our national psyche. For Emerson and for us, a crucial question then, naturally arises: what is the source of these reflections that arise mysteriously in mind? Brain chemistry, the materialists say. God, the mystics say. The collective unconscious, the Jungians say. Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth would say. “A presence which is not to be put by,†he called it. Inspired in part by Wordsworth, Emerson devoted himself to the quest for the source of revelation. If indeed we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, how are we to recognize its intimations? Emerson’s glib reply to the question of sources, that if he was the devil’s child, then so be it, will not suffice. The answer has to do with the character of the infusion. Emerson perceived symmetry and harmony in his inspirations. He observed his ego diminished to a genuine humility in the face of these involuntary perceptions. So when good is near us, when we have life in ourselves, we shall not hear any name, not even our own. These revelations from the source of our life are impersonal, and when putative leaders step forward to claim that God has spoken to them and given them a task to perform, we need to reject the claim. Emerson said about such a man in Spiritual Laws: “ The pretense 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.†We have in America a history of rogue messiahs to bear out the importance of Emerson’s warning against this arrogance. The examined life entails a humbling awareness that we are in the presence of certain universal laws, laws which are reflected in the way in which our minds are structured. Consider the famous aphorism from Self-Reliance, “Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.†Religious fundamentalism would assert that nothing is sacred but the revealed word of God in authorized texts and that our minds are by no means a reliable source, being full of sinful thoughts and attendant guilt, and that the only way to reach salvation is to live by the revealed word while praying for forgiveness. Many people are content to trust in this protective world of sacred text, fearing the extremes of messianic exaltation. This position asserts that God speaks directly to us for a particular role or actions to be taken as God’s will for us. Such extremism leads to magnified egotism, seen in those individuals who are convinced that God has singled them out as unique and, most dangerously, given them power to control the lives of others. The dangers of this exalted egotism are obvious, as seen from the jungles of Guyana to Waco, Texas, to the streets of the Middle East today. Emerson’s position, of course, is directly contrary to either of those extremes. What does Emerson mean when he speaks of the integrity of our minds? Integrity means not only honesty in the sense of being honest with ourselves in the light of thought, of having the courage to be fully what we are, but also integrity in its sense as the state of being complete, undivided and unimpaired. Integrity suggests the unifying of the various faculties of mind into a healthy, receptive whole. In recent weeks a powerful example of the examined life appeared in papers around the world. In Castro’s Cuba, a new crackdown on free expression has put hundreds of writers and journalists in prison for offending or challenging the regime. One journalist, Raul Rivero, writing from prison, where he is serving a twenty-year sentence, has articulated a moving affirmation of the examined life, writing about his personal struggle in the light of thought. Here is some of what he said: The path I set out on a few years ago, after a total rupture with the government's press and cultural media, has transformed me into a different human being, someone who has liberated himself on his own, someone who in threatened and hostile circumstances could begin the journey toward individual freedom. Fear, prison and harassment have served only to give more value to these discoveries. They have contributed to the fact that my devotion to the sovereignty of the individual is now much more than an idea or a necessity; it is an untamable instinct. Rivero has perceived that under oppressive duress the sovereignty of the individual is, at its core, an untamable instinct. The forces arrayed to tame or suppress that instinct are many, even here in this cradle of freedom. Emerson’s great contribution to this spiritual crisis has been to awaken us to the life of the mind and invite that untamable instinct to take its central role in the integrity of our own minds, to allow us to recover what he called “the erect position.†As you well know, it was Socrates who first articulated the values of the Examined Life. In his time there were three persons most admired and treasured in Athens: the spoudios, a truly mature man, a sophos, a sage, and, most important, an aristos phylax, the best guardian of the values of the community. Emerson is all three and we can best treasure him by keeping his work alive among us.
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