The Romance of Democracy:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nothing can bring you peace but
yourself.”
(Political Science 565)
Romance
• Romance of the individual vs. Romance of the
Nation
• Humans essentially good vs. Humans
essentially bad
• Light Romanticism vs. Dark Romanticism
2
The Nation as Crusade
• “We are the nation of human progress, and
who will, what can, set limits to our onward
march? Providence is with us, and no earthly
power can. We point to the everlasting truth
on the first page of our national declaration,
and we proclaim to the millions of other
lands, that ‘the gates of hell—the powers of
aristocracy and monarchy—’ shall not prevail
against it.”
3
The Nation as Crusade
• America’s purpose, its telos is to spread
democracy throughout the world
– Telos: A purpose that is part of a things nature,
forming what it is
• America is providentially destined to succeed
in this mission. Failure is impossible.
• Voluntary principle = democracy = United
States = “the cause of all mankind” = The
will of God
4
The Nation as Crusade
• The enemies of the United States and democracy
are enemies not only of all mankind, but of God
– They are intrinsically evil, satanic
• “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it”
– Matthew 16:18
– Refers to the Christian church
– America, embodying the will of God, is the new
church
– By definition, the United States is a force of pure good
and its enemies agents of pure moral and religious evil
5
The Nation as Crusade
• Because the American interest is identical with
the universal human interest and the will of
God, everything done in the name of the
American interest is by definition good, acting
to promote freedom and democracy
• By the same token, every opponent of the
American interest is by definition an enemy of
God and all mankind
6
The Nation as Crusade
• “no lust for territory has stained our annals.
No nation has been despoiled by us, no
country laid desolate, no people overrun.”
– The indigenous would probably disagree.
– But, they cannot for O’Sullivan be free, and thus
are removed from consideration. Where they
were, democracy will be.
7
The Nation as Crusade
• New York Morning News, Dec. 27, 1845:
• “To state the truth at once in its neglected simplicity,
we are free to say that were the respective arguments
and cases of the two parties, as to all these points of
history and law, reversed—had England all ours, and
we nothing but hers—our claim to Oregon would still
be best and strongest. And that claim is by the right of
our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the
whole of the continent which Providence has given us
for the development of the great experiment of liberty
and federated self-government entrusted to us.”
8
The Nation as Crusade
• Manifest Destiny: manifest here means “made
apparent, revealed, obvious”. Fated by
Providence (the will of God) to spread across
continent
• America’s moral & religious right and mission
are prior to any existing legal claim.
9
The Nation as Crusade
• “All this will be our future history, to establish on earth
the moral dignity and salvation of man—the
immutable truth and beneficence of God.
• For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which
are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America
been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death
the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the
glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now
endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of
beasts of the field.
• Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to
be the great nation of futurity?” (Great Nation of
Futurity)
10
The Nation as Crusade
• The US is chosen by God for “blessed mission
to spread the life-giving light of truth
(democracy) to the world
– America does not have a mission, it IS a mission. It
must redeem the world.
• Messianic Nation: Redeeming people of other
nations, raising them to dignity of humans
from bestial condition
11
Spot Resolutions
• Offered by Lincoln in the House December 1847, questioning the
truth of Pres. Polk’s legitimation for war with Mexico, which was
that Mexican soldiers had invaded America & killed civilians
– Considered unpatriotic, damaged political career
• Exactly where was the blood shed?
• Was it on Mexican or American soil?
• Was that spot long inhabited by Mexicans, until they fled at the
approach of American soldiers?
• Did the people at that spot ever consent to be governed by Texas or
the US?
• Were the Americans injured and killed soldiers or civilians?
• Why was there an American military presence there, after President
Taylor said none was necessary to defend Texas?
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 1803-1882
• Unitarian minister
– Resigned when he felt he could
not in good conscience
administer Communion or
participate in public prayer
• As writer & philosopher,
lynchpin of Transcendentalist
movement in eastern US
– Influential on Friedrich
Nietzsche, William James, Walt
Whitman, Henry David Thoreau
• Abolitionist & moral reformer
13
Divinity School Address
• “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath
of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with
fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet
with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.
Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade.
Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost
spiritual rays.
– Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The
cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again
for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed
more happily.”
– “But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the
universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world
at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and
What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never
to be quenched.” (130)
14
Nature
• “A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty
appears to man when his heart and mind open to
the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in
what is above him.
– He learns that his being is without bound; that, to the
good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in
evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his
own, though he has not realized it yet. He ought. He
knows the sense of that grand word, though his
analysis fails entirely to render account of it.” (131)
15
Moral Sentiment
• “The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light,
motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human
life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact.
These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude
our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each
other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.
– The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and
thought, — in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest
by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this
sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to
the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of
some of those classes of facts in which this element is
conspicuous.” (131)
16
Moral Sentiment
• “The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of
the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws
execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space,
and not subject to circumstance.
– Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose
retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good
deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is
by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity,
thereby puts on purity.
• If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the
safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of
God do enter into that man with justice.” (131)
17
Moral Sentiment
• “Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not
absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of
heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity.
Benevolence is absolute and real. So much
benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.
– For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is
differently named love, justice, temperance, in its
different applications, just as the ocean receives
different names on the several shores which it
washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and
all things conspire with it.” (132)
18
Religion & the Moral Sentiment
• “The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which
makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to
charm and to command. It is a mountain air.”
– Moral sentiment universally shared
• “This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and
successively creates all forms of worship. The principle of
veneration never dies out.
– Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite
without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all
the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in
proportion to their purity. The expressions of this sentiment
affect us more than all other compositions.” (133)
19
Intuition
• “This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It
corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be
great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from
another, — by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and
that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of
Reason.”
– “It is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly
speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from
another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly
reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can
accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is
the presence of degradation. As is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith
depart, and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become
false and hurtful.” (133)
20
Divinity of Man
• “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in
it, and had his being there.
– Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.
One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that
God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth
anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this
jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God
acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or,
see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’”
21
Divinity of Man
• “But what a distortion did his doctrine and
memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the
following ages!”
– “Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that
corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it
appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not
the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the
personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it
dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of
Jesus.” (134-35)
22
Divinity of Man
• “That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is
excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which
shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me,
makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason
for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep
over me, and I shall decease forever.
– The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect of my
strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across my
mind, are not mine, but God's; that they had the like, and were not
disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations
go out from them, inviting me to resist evil; to subdue the world; and
to Be. And thus by his holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only.”
(136)
• A combination of the transformation of faith into mythus (doctrine, ritual, and
formalism) and uninspired preaching has led to a belief that God spoke only in
the past
• Death of God
23
Divinity of Man
• “And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can
be done by us?
– The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church.
We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the
redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The
old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things
transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious.
• Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and
curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the
assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the
fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man;
indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.
– It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He
speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity, — a faith like Christ's in the
infinitude of man, — is lost.” (141-42)
24
New Divinity
• “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind
you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with
Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom,
authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, — are
not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but
live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.”
– Refuse all role models
– Seek solitude
– Disdain the cheap praise of society
• “You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but
you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts
merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest
applause.” (142-44)
25
New Divinity
• “I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow
so far those shining laws, that he shall see
them come full circle; shall see their rounding
complete grace; shall see the world to be the
mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the
law of gravitation with purity of heart; and
shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one
thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”
(145)
26
Self-Reliance
• Ne te quaesiveris extra.
• “Do not seek outside yourself.”
– “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in
your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.”
• “Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we
ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books
and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.
– A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which
flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his.
• In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works
of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.” (210)
27
Noncomformity
• “Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed,
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be
formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs,
which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would
sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
– These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow
faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one
of its members.”
• “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
customs.” (212-213)
28
Noncomformity
• “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who
would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the
name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of
the world.”
– “Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that
or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only
wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the
presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he.
• I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges
and names, to large societies and dead institutions.” (213)
29
The Self
• “I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at
last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I
exclude company.
– Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day,
of my obligation to put all poor men in good
situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the
cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to
whom I do not belong.” (213)
30
The Self
• “There is a class of persons to whom by all
spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I
will go to prison, if need be;
– but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand;
alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;
• — though I confess with shame I sometimes
succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar
which by and by I shall have the manhood to
withhold.” (213)
31
Noncomformity
• “Most men have bound their eyes with one or
another handkerchief, and attached themselves
to some one of these communities of opinion.
– This conformity makes them not false in a few
particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all
particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their
two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so
that every word they say chagrins us, and we know
not where to begin to set them right.” (215)
32
Humiliation in Conformity
• “Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prisonuniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to
wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
– There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does
not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean
"the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put
on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to
conversation which does not interest us.
• The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by
a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline
of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.”
(215)
33
Who would be understood?
• “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He
may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
– “If you would be a man, speak what you think today in words as
hard as cannonballs, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you
said to-day.”
• But won’t you be misunderstood?
– “Misunderstood! It is a right fools's word. Is it so bad, then, to
be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and
Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo,
and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
To be great is to be misunderstood.” (216)
34
The Higher Self
• “The man in the street, finding no worth in himself
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on
these.
– To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien
and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to
say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?'
• Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to
his faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.”
(218)
– Lacking awareness of who and what you are
35
The Higher Self
• “See what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he
speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or
Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a
few lives.
– We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames
and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and
character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words
they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which
those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are
willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as
good when occasion comes.
• If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to
be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish.” (221)
36
Isolation & Freedom
• “We must go alone. Isolation must precede true society.
– “Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I
have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I
am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey
no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support
my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these
relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal
from your customs.
• I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
or you.
– If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you
cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.” (223)
37
Self-Willed Ethics
• “The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold
sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But
the law of consciousness abides.”
– If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction
society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of
man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding
whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death,
and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons.”
• “Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our
marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen
for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate,
where strength is born.” (224)
38
Authenticity
• “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own
gift you can present every moment with the
cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another, you have
only an extemporaneous, half possession.
That which each can do best, none but his
Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what
it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.
Where is the master who could have taught
Shakespeare?”
39
Authenticity
• “The reliance on Property, including the
reliance on governments which protect it, is
the want of self-reliance.
– Men have looked away from themselves and at
things so long, that they have come to esteem the
religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards
of property, and they deprecate assaults on these,
because they feel them to be assaults on property.
They measure their esteem of each other by what
each has, and not by what each is.” (230)
40
Authenticity
• “But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his
property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, —
came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he
feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him,
has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no
revolution or no robber takes it away.
– But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire,
and what the man acquires is living property, which does
not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire,
or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself
wherever the man breathes.” (230)
41
• “So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble
with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls.
But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal
with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God.
– In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the
wheel of Chance, and shalt always drag her after thee. A
political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or
the return of your absent friend, or some other quite
external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days
are preparing for you.
• Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring
you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace
but the triumph of principles.” (231)
42