regarded as one of the primary founders of American literature

and can be credited with inspiring many prolific writers,

writing styles, cultural perspectives, and philosophical

movements. Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston Massachusetts

to Ruth Haskins and William Emerson, his father being

a Christian minister descending from a lineage of previous

ministers. During his adolescence, Emerson studied at Harvard

University, and following graduation, he would go on to teach

at his brother's school for young women. After several years

of teaching, he would then enroll into Divinity School at

Harvard to train to become a pastor. In 1829, he was ordained

into Boston's Second Church, and would spend the following 3 years

or so as a pastor. During this time, however, Emerson would find

an increasing sense of detachment and disagreement with

traditional religious practices and ways of thinking. Specifically,

he found that contemporary Christianity countered and sedated

the very essence of human spirituality that it was supposed

to inspire. Around three years after becoming a pastor, and after

about 1 year following his first wife's young death of

tuberculosis, Emerson resigned from the church. "I have sometimes

thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary

to leave the ministry.” Emerson wrote in his journal.

Following his stint as a pastor, Emerson spent the next

years writing and publishing his first major essays while

developing a career as a public lecturer. Emerson would make his

first significant mark on the public with his controversial

lectures that suggested the value of separating from commonly

withheld religious ideas and traditions, and in place, argued

for infusing new independent, forward thinking that relied on

the self for divine experience and understanding. During the following decades, Emerson continued

giving lectures and producing several major, influential works of literature. He would

soon become recognized as one of the mid- 19th century leading writers and thinkers,

inspiring individuals like Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,

and innumerable others, as well as being the key figure in helping give way to new cultural

perspectives and philosophical movements, especially the philosophy known as transcendentalism,

which Emerson is regarded as the father of. Emerson's philosophy can perhaps be best

explained in two of his most famous essays; Nature published

in 1836 and Self- Reliance published in 1841. Between these

two works, Emerson primarily discusses man and nature being a

unified, singular whole, the value of trusting one's own intuition

and sense of

reality, and the realization and forthright expressions of one's

unique greatness and truth. More specifically, Emerson posed

that all of nature is an expression and permeation of one

metaphysical essence of the universe, or god, and that we are

all both the expressions and expressors of this singular

oneness. “Nature in its ministry to man,” Emerson wrote, “is not

only the material but is also the process and the result.” In

this, there is no separation between humanity and nature, where

humanity wills itself onto nature nor nature onto humanity, but

rather, everything is essentially nature interacting with

nature. “Standing on the bare ground,” Emerson wrote, “my head

bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all

mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am

nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being

circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

For Emerson, the distinction between the trees, the bugs,

the dirt, and the stars is all but a phenomenal distinction. Not

necessarily a real one. Rather, he believed that god is one

thing found in everything and through everything. Every object,

every individual and every particle of existence in the eternal

now. As such, for Emerson, the transcendent spiritual experience

is not found in any outward, previous, or future source, but

within the individual in any given moment. Moments where one's

own mind illuminates the common features of their surroundings

with potency, beauty, and interconnectedness. Alongside this, Emerson also asserted that

nature is in a constant state of flux, and that we must live

in coordination with its process, trusting our own intuition

and flowing with the changing self. In order to do this, we

must not hold ourselves to ideas, beliefs, or traditions

of the past, including our own. Rather, Emerson suggested

that our state is subject to change, and consequently, we might

feel or think one way today and the opposing way tomorrow. Instead

of fighting this, however, Emerson argued that we must

lean into it. “No man,” he wrote, “can antedate his experience

or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,

any more than he can draw today the face of a person whom he

shall see tomorrow for the first time.” In other words, no

one can know what life might be like tomorrow, nor what such life

may cause one to think or feel. However, one must move with

it, and live according to the present now.

Out of this emerges what is perhaps Emerson's most popular

concept known as self-reliance. Emerson argued that we often neglect to ever

realize the unique perspective and greatness that comes

from our particular culmination of experiences and states. Not

because we don't have access to such greatness, but because we are

often held back and

pulled away from it by others and systems of convention. For

Emerson, great artists, thinkers, writers and so on aren't

necessarily great merely because they possess access to any

higher, exclusive source of information or being, but because

they are willing to address and express candidly what they feel

in any given moment of life, despite how it might reflect on the

standard norm. And in doing so, they reveal, not only their

unique take on the world, but also the thoughts and sensations

hidden within a great many others who feel the same. Arguably,

great artists and writers aren't popular because they say

something no one has thought of or experienced before, but

because they say something that most of us have but weren't sure

if we were right to do so. Emerson believed that for the sake of one's

work and sense of self, the individual must rely on themselves

alone and recognize that what they feel and think is

real and legitimate. In a very Cartesian idea, if we can know anything

at all it is merely that we exist. And if we can suppose

anything at all, it is merely our own experience. This does not

disparage our sympathy for others, others' ideas, nor

our connection with the natural world, but rather, it serves to prevent

the disparagement of our self amidst it all. It

serves to promote trust in our own unique interpretations and

experiences and encourages us to express their individual

merit.

In slight contrast to Emerson, it appears reasonable to

also argue that perhaps there are variations in the resources

and conditions of each individual, and thus, one's ability to

trust and/or express themselves is not always equal. If nature

and human is a unified whole carried out through a process of

self-fulfilling change, is it not also possible that one's own

ability to defend and tap into themselves is part of a natural

order and fluctuation beyond one's will? Of course, this simply

serves to beg the question that if we are all transparent

eyeballs; nothings seeing everything, how much say do we have in

how much vision we have? Perhaps Emerson's concept of self-reliance

can still exist in harmony with this question. Perhaps so

long as one authentically stands in their own position

of confusion and limitation, they have still remained in accordance

with their own relative truth and greatness, and the

notion of self- reliance holds steady.

Of course, like all philosophies and philosophers, Emerson's ideas in general aren't without

flaws or counter arguments. “But it is the fault of our rhetoric

that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to

belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.” Emerson

wrote. With this, Emerson himself suggested that he never spoke

with any objective certainty or final truth regarding what he

thought.

For this and other reasons unmentioned, self-reliance and

individuality is not easy. It does not simply come from agreeing

with poetic prose. To know and trust one's self in the face of

consistent change, confusion, and a world that works to

consolidate everyone, is perhaps one of the hardest things

anyone can do. And furthermore, not always, but certainly some

of the time, it comes with the risk of some amount of separation

from the common populous and conventional norms. However,

perhaps the question one must ask here is, if all we can know

and experience is our self, how can any life be lived fully if

one denies themselves before even trying? If we hide or hinder

ourselves out of the fear of rejection from others, are we not,

in essence, rejecting our own self first; the only person we

truly and inescapably have to live with? Emerson's work is a reinforcement and reminder

of the importance of combating this. To attempt to

live in the spirit of individuality, self-honesty, and authenticity

in each moment and each context of life. To raise the sail

of one's own ship, using the unknowable force of the wind while

steering as best we can, always moving forward, finding beauty

in the vastness that surrounds us, and creating our self anew.