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

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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.”

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.’”

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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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 meeting-houses 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)

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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)

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Humiliation in Conformity• “Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the

prison-uniform 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)

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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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?”

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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)

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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)

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• “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)

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