What Emerson Means by Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a nineteenth-century American essayist, lecturer and poet. Born in Boston in 1803, he was fourteen when he entered Harvard.

Emerson became a central figure in American transcendentalism. The movement was never a single set of rules, but several of its emphases helped me find my way into his essays.

• A person’s judgment can be dulled by the institutions around them.
• Experience and intuition have something to teach beyond what can be deduced.
• A person can have a spiritual life beyond the forms of organized religion.
• The natural world deserves attention in its own right.

I had found two Korean collections that take their names from Self-Reliance. One used a title that could be rendered Stand Alone at the Center of the World. The other used the shorter Confidence.

One essay and two ways of naming it

Self-Reliance was first published in Emerson’s Essays in 1841. The essay has the force of a voice addressing a room. I can see why readers remember it in phrases and return to find the paragraphs around them.

The title in English can point to independence and to trusting your own judgment. Each of the Korean titles brings one part of that meaning into view.

What I wanted to know was what that trust asked of a person who had been in the habit of looking outside themselves for permission to act.

What stayed with me in the collection

There are several essays in the Korean volume. I found them most persuasive when Emerson asks what we have gained by repeating something other people already approve of, and what we might notice if we stopped.

What progress can cost

Emerson offers a provocative way to talk about progress. He thinks a society may gain a power at one point and give up another elsewhere. The beginning of the passage has the force of a deliberate overstatement.

• “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.”
• His comparison is to people walking on a treadmill, moving continuously without making the kind of advance they imagine.

With a watch, for instance, a person can tell the time without looking at the sun. The watch is useful. Emerson wants the reader to notice the skill that could go unused once it becomes easy to reach for one.

How much should we leave to fortune?

I read the essay during a period when it was easy to doubt my own decisions. The image I remembered was the wheel of fortune, which Emerson asks the reader to stop treating as the source of every result.

• Are you still willing to leave your life in Fortune’s hands?
• Are you prepared to gain or lose everything on the turn of her wheel?
• Emerson asks the reader to give up that kind of bargain.
• He puts cause and effect in its place.
• Work on something you have a reason to do. Then a turn of the wheel has less power over how you see the result.
• …
• “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
• “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

Book details

Stand Alone at the Center of the World (a Korean collection titled for Self-Reliance)

Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Korean edition published

April 28, 2016

ISBN-13

9788992969499

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