Episode #164 ... Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance
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For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophizethis.org. For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophizethispodcast, all one word, on X at IamStevenWest. Be well, and I hope you love the show today. So something that's been hammered home on this show pretty regularly in the past, maybe a little bit too much at times.

is something that at this point seems like it's become a bit of a philosophical truism. It's the realization that you can never really know anything for certain. Now, who really cares when anybody says something like this? Like, what are they even saying? Are they certain that we can't know anything for certain?

This is a line that when it's said in polite conversation can seem to some people like this sort of dusty, old, undergraduate credo. An idea that at best is pointless because it's really not saying anything and at worst completely deletes the possibility of a discussion right at the outset. Then again, there are other people out there that would see this statement as something that is undeniably true. Something that's necessary for any level of nuanced thinking.

And that if there's a mistake being made here, the mistake lies in the person who hears that you can't know anything for certain and then decides to sit around and do nothing because, hey, you can't know anything for certain anyway. Guess I'll grab me a bag of skeptical Cheetos and just call it a life. See, there's a lot of discussion among fans of philosophy about what the value of philosophy is in today's day and age.

why is philosophy even important in modern times? And there's a lot of answers to this, but one of the ones that's the most popular is that philosophy is a bit of a baptism by fire.

Philosophy is not about slowly discovering the truth about existence by reading what wise people said 600 years ago. Philosophy is more about taking you down a peg or two, humbling you. You know, that classic philosophy meme, the never-ending cycle between you think things and then you're wrong. Then you think things again and you're wrong again.

In other words, philosophy is kind of like an intellectual boot camp, where if you can survive the discomfort of having your beliefs challenged, if you can stay open to the exercise despite knowing that there's a long road ahead of you that is not going to be that easy, if you can survive that, you can potentially come out of it the other side more developed as a person. Now one thing you'll possess if you can get through the 10 years of being wrong about everything is hopefully a healthy amount of self-doubt.

And as is the case with anything people put time into mastering this life, the Dunning-Kruger effect eventually starts to kick in. What I mean is, there comes a point where reminding everyone that you can't ever know anything for certain only starts to cannibalize our responsibility to make things better in this world.

There comes a point when philosophy is less about humility and more about inspiration. A point where you definitely know that you need to proceed with caution, but nonetheless, we still gotta proceed as people invested in the progress of teen human being on this planet.

The Creation of Meaning series can be seen as an example of finding a way past this Dunning-Kruger effect, an attempt at grounding a cautious approach forward while still always remaining open to new ideas. Well similarly, the guy we're talking about today, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he can be seen as another example of this, an attempt at finding that foundational leverage point from which we can navigate the universe with at least some conception of truth connected to our actions.

And for Ralph Waldo Emerson, that leverage point is going to be grounded in the individual. See, while other philosophers out there don't trust the individual, they try their hardest to appeal to externalities as the ultimate source of truth or meaning, Emerson's going to say that the way to gain access to the truth is actually to turn inward.

that the external things we tack on to our individual perspectives are really a source of corruption, and the deepest connection available between people and the transcendent, immaterial aspects of the universe is through the most primary thing we have access to, our own individual human experience. Now, this is going to take a couple three episodes to unpack the various points he's making there.

This first episode is going to be on what I think is the most intuitive entry point into his work, his famous essay titled Self-Reliance. But first, a little bit of historical context that's going to help us throughout the rest of the series. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a citizen of the United States.

He publishes this essay in the year 1841, which places him in between the Revolutionary War that united the country and the Civil War that divided the country. He publishes this essay 53 years after the Constitution was ratified. So what's important to understand is that he's writing this essay as a citizen of a country that really is a baby. This was a country that had a lot of problems that needed to be worked out internally.

Citizens are arguing with each other about the issues that mattered to them at the time. A couple examples here. The existence of slavery. The rights of women. The treatment of Native Americans. The treatment of industrial workers and workers' rights more generally. The treatment of immigrants that were coming into the country. In other words, nothing any of us can possibly relate to today, right?

The chief criticism at the time is that the United States was great on paper. We had all these beautiful words written on fancy parchment about what the country stands for. You know, everyone's created equal, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We got it all. But what does the country actually look like in practice? Nothing like that. Feeling at the time is, how do we fix that? Which path forward are we going to choose for this nation? Because for as much as the original settlers came to North America to escape what they saw as the bad ideas that were governing the societies of Europe...

We sure do talk a lot about creating a brave new world, but in practice we just seem to be importing all the bad ideas into our new neighborhood. Further criticism at the time: can somebody even really call the United States a country with its own culture at that point? Or is it just a patchwork of a bunch of European ideas dressed up in an Uncle Sam costume? Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that we needed to solve these big problems that face the country, and part of doing so was going to involve creating a distinct culture unique to the United States.

And the only way you're going to do that, he thought, is if the citizens of the United States started thinking for themselves, creating the solutions to the problems, instead of sitting around passively waiting on some external body or idea to solve all the problems for them. Self-reliance was an essay that, among other things, at its core, was a call to action to American citizens. And it's with this in mind that he begins the essay by asking an important question of his fellow citizens who might be reading.

It's a question that's now become famous in transcendentalist literature. He asks, how often do people sit around thinking about some issue that faces their country or their community, come up with what seems like a really good idea, seems like it's making a great point about whatever the prevailing discussion is on the matter, and then after they arrive at this good idea, they throw the idea away, don't ever talk about it. People ask them about social issues and they never even bring it up, if for no other reason than because they themselves were the ones that came up with it.

The thinking being that, hey, I came up with this idea, so this is probably just a stupid point. I mean, who am I to come up with any sort of interesting counterpoint to the discussion of my age? I'm just an ordinary person. I'm not some genius. I'm not a thought leader of some sort. Yeah, sure, this idea is truly how I feel about the situation. But if I say this thing in public, I'm probably just going to embarrass myself. I must be missing something incredibly obvious here that all the smart people already know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks this is an absolutely toxic way of thinking about yourself. And he says so often what naturally goes along with this type of attitude is the further assumption that if you're a thinking person and you want to know more about the world around you, that the path to becoming a really smart person with well-thought-out beliefs comes from reading a bunch of other really smart people that are quote-unquote experts in whatever area you want to educate yourself about.

In other words, to get smarter, all you gotta do is turn to a philosopher, a religion, artists, thought leaders, external sources of truth. You read these really smart people and essentially just say whatever they said. Somebody asks you what you think about something, you just recite the pre-approved smart person answer that you memorized last week. That's basically what becoming a smart person even is. Where else would you learn how to think intelligently other than by listening to smart people?

Well, Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks this is exactly where people go wrong when trying to learn to think intelligently.

See, if Emerson was anything, he was an enemy of dogma of all varieties. He didn't think that you should just imitate someone else's opinions if you wanted to be a smarter person. As he says, "Imitation is suicide." And what he meant by that is that when you trade your own unique personal development for a ready-made dogma spoon-fed to you by a third party, you are effectively sacrificing your life. You are sacrificing your own unique contribution that you and only you can offer to society.

Early in the essay, Emerson makes it clear that one of the most important realizations that any human being can ever arrive at in this life is to trust thyself. This is going to be a theme throughout the rest of the essay, hence the title, Self-Reliance. Now, don't get him wrong here. He is not saying don't educate yourself. By all means, listen all you want to as many sources as you can and get as much information as is available to you.

But he would say the second the source changes from telling you the facts of the matter to telling you how you should be feeling about those facts, that's the second it turns from education to indoctrination. He says it's pretty alarming when you consider how uncommon it is for someone to trust themselves and their own ability to formulate an opinion about anything. He asks, "Why is this such a rare quality for people to have?" Quick pause here in the essay because I think it's important to illustrate what Emerson's trying to do in a philosophical context.

He's calling into question the most common, traditional ways that people have viewed morality. See, instead of deifying cultural figures and saying that people should look to them to figure out how to navigate every second of their life, Ralph Waldo Emerson's offering up an alternative morality, one more centered around the perspective of the thinking individual person.

So to further illustrate this point in the essay, the next move for Emerson is naturally going to be to explain why these external sources of wisdom, the religions, the political leaders, all aspects of society, he needs to explain why these are not in fact forms of enlightenment as many people see them, but more accurately are dogmas that corrupt the more natural individual intuition and conscience that we're all born with.

Because that's the big question here for Ralph Waldo Emerson. We all start off as individuals. You can see examples of self-reliance all around you in nature. Look at certain animals. Look at plants. Look at children of our own species. A child is naturally a non-conformist to anything their parents or society tells them is the right way to be feeling.

When a five-year-old kid walks into a room of adults, she's not worried about her reputation. She's not worried about losing her job. She's not worried about offending the delicate sensibilities of the group or whatever narrative of the world makes them feel the most comfortable. My daughter the other day straight up told somebody that llamas are not real. Like she looked them in the eye and said, llamas are not real. She ain't buying it. I felt bad. I pulled her aside. I showed her pictures of llamas. I took her to see a llama in person. She's like, nah, daddy, that's a sheep.

And you know what? I was proud of her in that moment. She doesn't care if she's reciting the socially agreed upon norm. Right or wrong, she is marching to the beat of her own drum there.

And look, it's not like Emerson's defending people independently making unfounded claims. He's defending the spirit in play there, the spirit of self-reliance. He's trying to point out that there's a distinct difference between children, whose opinions about a situation are not bought or finessed in any way, and what he calls the "cautious adult," people who are so scared about their reputation, their group identity, not offending anybody too much, that they can never actually fully be themselves.

When you are a cautious adult, you care far more about saying something polite than what is right. So when do people turn into these cautious adults? That's the question here. When do the children of our species get beaten to submission by society at all levels?

Well, if you want to solve a problem, probably pretty useful to figure out how it happened in the first place so you don't run into the problem again. And this is exactly what Emerson spends the majority of the essay doing. There are three major traps that people fall into that cause them to lose this initial ability to be self-reliant. And the first one we're going to talk about today is called conformity.

Now, this is far from a mysterious philosophical term. Simply put, fact is to Emerson, most people conform to the demands of their society. We go out into the world, we become adults, and society puts pressure on us to be a virtuous person. And what is being a virtuous person? Conforming to the normalized ways of thinking approved by society. In fact, to Emerson, one of the primary goals of society is to get you to stop thinking for yourself.

So much so, he says, that when you fall in line and play the game demanded of you by society, shockingly, this is when people will often start referring to you as a mature person. Oh, you've really matured in the last couple years. You're doing great. Really living your best life out there, huh? Some people may call that the process of maturing, but to Emerson, in reality, it's much more of a systematic anesthesia. Some people may call it becoming a more moral person. Others might call it blindly conforming to what some external source told you to do.

But the question remains for Emerson: why not listen to what you want to do instead? Why always yield to some external source? Now someone could respond to this and say, "Hold on a second, Emerson. Is this really such a bad thing that's going on?" Because don't we want society to be a governing influence on some people's behavior? And for the record, everything's included in there when he says the word "society" conforming to a religion, conforming to a philosophy, conforming to a political ideology. Don't we want these things to help direct the thinking of some people?

I mean for one, valid question. Does every person on this planet have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to their moral approach towards life? Could we say that society provides a necessary service to people in that way? But more than just alleviating confusion though, doesn't society allow us to avoid a certain level of disaster that's gonna come if we base our morality on the intuitions of the individual? Like if you don't follow some sort of external moral code,

What if I'm sitting at the dinner table and someone takes the last piece of chicken, and my moral intuition in that moment is to stab them in the head with a fork? Is my individual moral approach better than following some collective moral approach dictated by society? Well, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as it turns out, is not an advocate of stabbing people in the head with a fork. But he would say that if that is really your moral intuition...

Better to act honestly and have a chance to learn from your mistakes, recalibrate, and grow, than to lie, fall in line with what everyone else tells you as a proper response, just so you can get everyone's approval. You can't morally grow if you're not being morally honest. Now, the stabbing in the head is obviously an extreme example here, but you can imagine the same line of thought applying to less extreme examples. Say, standing up for what you believe is right when your opinion might not be the most popular with the mob mentalities of the world.

The bigger point here for Emerson is that if you're an advocate for conformity in any capacity, then you have to also be able to answer the question, how much conformity is too much conformity? Because maybe some things are easy to agree on, right? Maybe we can all agree that we shouldn't be able to murder each other, things like that. But how about conformity when it comes to which political viewpoints people should be able to hold? Should society govern that? How about which job society thinks you'd be the best at? Should you conform to that? How about who society thinks your spouse should be?

At a certain point, blindly following society, not thinking for yourself, and instead just conforming to somebody else's opinions, at a certain point that becomes an act of cowardice to Emerson. But again, hold on there, Ralph. Another objection. What, am I supposed to never agree with anything anyone says about the world? What if I'm listening to someone talk about the way the world is, and it just genuinely resonates with me? My individual personality agrees with their individual personality. Is that so hard to imagine?

I think Emerson would say it's not hard to imagine. The point here is to remain true to yourself. To not need society or other people to tell you how you should be feeling. And only you can know if that's what's going on in your head in each particular instance there. But just consider this: If you're somebody that falls strongly into one particular social camp or another, I think he'd just say, "Beware of the convenience of staying in that position." You know, how convenient that all your moral intuitions correspond with Christianity if you're a Christian.

How convenient that your politics matches up perfectly with a certain group of people that have a certain letter next to their name. How convenient that every time you listen to a certain show, you find yourself agreeing with everything the host is saying. I think he'd say, "Don't underestimate people's willingness to conform to the ideas of others just so that they don't have to live in the often difficult place of true nonconformity." The feel of Emerson's writing during this section of the essay, it's like he thinks it's a tragedy when people conform to outside opinions.

And he says it's a tragedy for two reasons. The first reason is that when you conform to any way of thinking, your friends, your family, and everybody that you care about never actually get to witness who you truly are. He says this person who doesn't think for themselves is so terrified of thinking the wrong thing, embarrassing themselves, upsetting the people around them, that the only person their friends and family ever get to know is just some collection of pre-approved talking points.

Think of the cost a person has to pay simply for the privilege of feeling accepted by the mob. The second reason it's a tragedy to conform to society is because, as he says, just think of all the wasted time there. For every second you spend proselytizing a religion, a philosophy, a political ideology,

For every second you volunteer to be an unpaid mercenary on behalf of someone else, that is a second wasted towards the cause of actually creating something valuable with your time here, where you can truly make a contribution to society with your own unique skill set, experience, and expertise.

This is one of the mistakes of the American citizens during the time of Emerson. Most of them are sitting around, really angry about the issues that bothered them, all the social injustice, wanting things to change, but just sitting around waiting for some external force or dogma to come along to solve all the problems for them. But Emerson would ask, how many of those people were being individuals, using their unique talents to create something that actually tries to move things in the right direction? There's a lesson here that Emerson can offer to people living in modern times.

You know, there's a lot of people out there who consider themselves to be nonconformists because they strongly oppose some way that things are structured within society.

But what is the difference between true nonconformity and the type of nonconformity that just looks good on social media? Lot of people superimposing flags on their profile pictures as a symbol of their solidarity. Lot of people screaming into the yawning abyss of Twitter to people that more or less already agree with each other. Or any example of activism where you have zero skin in the game and nothing to lose. Regardless of the good intent behind it, it's interesting to ask.

can merely symbolic support of a cause be a convenient disguise for that cowardice that Emerson was talking about before? Because if you're not actually changing hearts and minds or contributing to progress, and to Emerson's point, if you're just appealing to some third party that gave you all the talking points you're screaming at people, what are you at that point?

Well, certainly not a self-reliant individual that's interested in creating something that may serve others. In many ways, you are just as complicit as somebody that's doing nothing at all. Is this just a covert, modern, digital version of conforming to the way that things are, content with nothing changing?

Fact is, society needs a lot of people dedicated to the cause of the status quo. And to Emerson, the needs of society and the needs of the individual don't always necessarily align. And this is one of the real dangers of conformity to him. It causes otherwise super passionate people to waste so much time that they could otherwise spend offering their own unique talents towards arriving at a solution.

It's in this spirit that Emerson thinks that the solution to conformity is obvious: it's nonconformity. And if conformity comes about by looking outside of ourselves for how we should be feeling about the world, then true nonconformity is only going to come from a turn inward. That said, even if you realize this, even if you can avoid falling into the trap of all these different types of external dogmas, you're still not out of the woods yet.

The second major trap that people fall into that sabotages their ability to be a self-reliant person can be thought of as a sort of internal dogma, what Emerson calls the trap of consistency. See, because so far all this talk by Emerson of staying true to yourself and relying on your individual perspective, that all may sound good in theory.

But it definitely has its fair share of critics. One of the most common rebuttals to what we've been talking about so far has to be that we cannot rely on individual perspectives to be a reliable source of legitimacy because individuals themselves are not reliable. People change all the time. People think one thing one day and completely change their mind the next.

There are many examples of this, but one of the most obvious ones to start with are the positions people hold that are running for political office. Try running for public office in the United States and changing your mind about anything regarding the issues.

You will instantly be labeled a flip-flopper, unprincipled, inconsistent. How can I even know who I'm voting for if you're changing your mind about things? I don't even know who I'm looking at right now. There's this idea that if you're gonna run for political office here, you should have been five years old, slid down the slide and had some sort of epiphany moment like, "Hmm, Keynesian economics. I like it." And then never changed your mind again about anything. You know, heaven forbid you grow and change as an individual over the years, develop yourself as a person.

There's this idea that you should feel ashamed if you don't know exactly where you stand on something. That if you're publicly wrong about something, that you should carry around a scarlet letter with you forever. Or that throughout the process of educating yourself, if you feel one way, and then you hear something that changes your mind the next day, and then something else that changes you the day after that, there's this idea that that makes you an intellectually weak person. Maybe you're just dumb. Maybe you just agree with whoever's arguing the point in front of you, and your brain is actually incapable of differentiating between good or bad points.

Or maybe this fetish we have about the consistency of our beliefs has absolutely nothing to do with being a well-thought-out person. Another bit of philosophical context about what Emerson's up to during this particular portion of the essay.

There's this long-standing Enlightenment-era confidence in reason, order, and consistency. That the legitimacy of an idea is directly connected to how consistent that idea is. You can understand why. The thinking is that if something is true, it's going to be just as true tomorrow as it is true today. That if an idea is proven to be false at some point, then we had been formerly living in error as a society.

Now, this is certainly a noble cause, right? And you can see how it directly connects to this lack of confidence in the whims of the individual as a marker of legitimacy. You can see why people might try to make someone feel dumb who changes their mind or contradicts themselves from one week to the next. But Ralph Waldo Emerson, making the case for the individual, is going to call all of this into question. In reality, as he says, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. One of his most famous quotes. Now, why would he say something like that?

See, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the truth of the universe is not something that you grasp one day and then spend the rest of your life defending. The fact that you believe the exact same stuff you did 20 years ago has nothing to do with the legitimacy of what you're believing. When a person seems inconsistent or contradictory, a cautious adult that spends their days embroiled in society repeating what other people told them to say, they might see that person as stupid or confused.

But inconsistency and contradicting yourself is not the mark of a stupid or confused person. To Emerson, it is often the mark of someone committed to truly thinking for themselves, someone truly in touch with how disordered, unreasonable, and inconsistent the truth of things often is. The cautious adult, from their perspective, is utterly incapable of seeing that this person may actually be more connected to the truth than they are.

He compares this whole process to sailing a ship into a headwind. How do you get to a particular destination on a sailboat if the wind is blowing in the opposite direction that you want to go? Well, not in a rigid, absolute, consistent straight line. If you tried to go in a straight line, you'd just stand still or go backwards. No, you have to go from side to side, zigging and zagging, using the winds to move towards the general direction that you wanted to end up in.

And it should be said, people sitting on the beach watching you from the sidelines, they're gonna be like, "Dang, that person's all over the place. Like, seems like they had one too many iced teas on that boat." Call the police. Call the Vatican. Call a philosopher. Call someone to fix them, because this person must be crazy or stupid if they're sailing in this way. But for all that movement back and forth, the person sailing on the boat was all the while, slowly but surely, moving closer to their destination.

He would ask this person that's standing on the beach, the cautious adult looking at the person changing their minds all the time, quote, Why drag around the corpse of your memory? End quote. What he means by this is why continue to hold on to ideas that are being challenged simply because you happen to have believed them in the past?

Why not live in the present? Why spend your life always poised, waiting to defend what you already believe? Why be so defensive? The burden and the futility of that is really like dragging around a corpse with you everywhere that you go in life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson asked the people living during his time in America to dare to be inconsistent. Consider the fact, he says, that no great thinker who has ever lived has ever been considered a great thinker because they consistently adhered to the status quo. You know, when it comes to never changing your mind about anything and believing what everyone else believes, they were the greatest of all time. Write their name down in the history books. No, that's never what happened. The greatest thinkers of all time seemed totally contradictory, inconsistent, and misunderstood.

He says, quote, End quote.

You know, one thing he never promises in Self Reliance is that it's gonna be an easy life. He says, "Easy to be a nonconformist while sitting in your basement never talking to anyone, but try doing it in public where you're being attacked by a mob of conformists screaming somebody else's ideas at you. Much more difficult."

But, he says, true change, the kind of change Americans needed during his time that would bring about the abolition of slavery, women's rights, the rights of workers, and all the other issues that mattered to them, true change was only going to come about from actual individuals stepping up and daring to exist outside of that mob. And again, it is a disgusting idea to Emerson to think that you are somehow not capable of being that individual.

Just think of that whole idea for a second. That it takes a great person to think of an idea that can change the world for the better. Emerson would want to ask, what really is the difference between the so-called great person and the so-called ordinary person? Because here's what really happens. Most people think about the world and have their own intelligent feelings about things. Most people, through the humility of social conditioning, don't dare to speak up about their ideas for fear of looking stupid or the social backlash of it all.

Then one day, somebody with something, with enough childhood trauma to believe that they actually have something important to say, that person steps up, has the courage to voice their opinion, and then magically, they start to gain supporters and followers. And why? Because they're voicing something that resonates with people. In other words, they're voicing something that a lot of other people were already thinking anyway. So where does this magic start to kick in? When does this person become somebody who's anointed by God to feed us wisdom?

In reality, Emerson would ask: And it's at this point in the essay that Emerson stops talking about how we shouldn't be thinking and starts shaping a plan for how we should be thinking.

"If you want to access the truth of the universe," Emerson says, "one good place to start is not going to be outside of you, but on the contrary, the most inward, local, primary access point that we have available to us, and that is our own individual intuition." See, if society can be thought of as an abstract collection of what he calls "tuitive knowledge," then what we can gain by accessing the universe through our individual perspective is what he calls "intuitive knowledge," and he places the latter on a much different level than the former.

But it's worth asking, where is all this coming from? Like, why does the individual specifically get such a privileged spot in Emerson's worldview? Well, in some of the transcendentalist lore that's out there, there is this concept of the oversoul, sometimes directly interchanged with the word "God." But understand that Emerson's far from some Bible-thumping guy trying to save you from the devil here.

Once again, he's a staunch opponent of any sort of dogma, religious or otherwise. It's kind of one of the main points of his work. No, no, our buddy Ralph, he'd be considered much more of a deist. You know, he's the type of person that believes in a god, believes in a creator and some sort of guaranteed unifying order to the universe.

but doesn't believe that that god involves itself in human affairs whatsoever. The strength of this is that a belief in this type of god frees him from the chains of religious fundamentalism, but it also doesn't relegate him to a hardline, purely materialistic view of the universe that might limit someone who's just trying to explain things through science. To Emerson, there are immaterial, transcendent aspects of reality. They just manifest themselves to us sometimes through the material world.

More on this next episode, but the important part here now is to understand this oversoul in his work and how it in part represents a connection that the individual has to the universe in its totality. The idea in Transcendentalism is that every part of the universe is connected to every other part of the universe, including us as self-reliant individuals, uncorrupted by society.

He says, quote, "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity." End quote. That immense intelligence that he's talking about is the oversoul. And as self-reliant individuals, we can become receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. In other words, people that are willing to pay attention and watch the universe at work will gain access to the truth.

People unwilling to do the work, who take the uninspired path of regurgitating talking points, will never gain access to the truth. Wisdom gained from intuition, which he sometimes called spontaneity, he sometimes calls it instinct, wisdom gained from here has a profound added benefit to Emerson. Because not only can this sort of wisdom inform our everyday decisions,

But then through the practice of getting better at connecting with this oversoul, with the universe, we also inexorably feel more connected with the universe and our relationship to it. So being a truly self-reliant individual removes the need for some third-party text or group to make you actually feel connected to something.

Ralph Waldo Emerson closes out the essay talking about ways we can apply self-reliance to specific areas of society. For example, religion asks us to conform. Self-reliance could improve upon that. The arts ask us to just imitate the artists that came before us. We could use some more self-reliant artists. It's an interesting close-out to the essay, and it's going to be relevant to next episode when we talk about his essay on nature and how we can rethink the historical concept of nature, what that means through this transcendentalist lens.

But if I know my listeners, then I know there's quite a bit of you out there all wondering the exact same thing right about now. Wait, so Emerson's saying that I shouldn't follow society as a guide to tell me how I should be living, philosophers included, but he just spent the entire essay telling me how I should be living. Wouldn't you say that's a bit inconsistent and not in a good way?

But I think he'd say that he's being obviously misunderstood there. I think he'd want to clarify, heading into next episode, that he didn't claim to be or want to be thought of as a philosopher in the first place. He thought of himself, it seems, as much more of a poet than a philosopher. He thought philosophers had been missing the mark for a really long time.

And to help frame all the ideas presented in this episode today, I'll leave you with his words from another section of his writing, where he reimagines the entire way that philosophy might be done in the future. He writes, quote,

End quote.

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.