Emerson Thoreau and Individualism in Society

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are still considered two of the most influential writers of their time. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a lecturer, essayist, and poet, Henry David Thoreau is his student, who was also a great essayist and critics. Both men extensively studied and embraced nature, and both men encouraged and practiced individualism and nonconformity. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s book "Walden" and essay “Resistance to Civil Government (“Civil Disobedience”)", both thinkers speak about being individual and what reforms and changes need to be made in society. Thoreau stayed with Emerson for a while and was affected by his ideas, especially relating to the individual and society. Emerson’s idea that in society the heart and power of man is drawn out and ignored, which makes people afraid of expressing their own ideas as well as being afraid of truth, led Thoreau to think that:

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength . . . How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties . . . All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.(606)

Emerson and Thoreau attacked the dominant religious, political, and cultural values of American society in order to make people aware that they are more important than everything is, including government and society. According to Emerson, society is a barrier against the individuality of its members; and he continued: "Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." (539-540) The solution, for Emerson, is self-reliance, meaning that man is only responsible for his own life and he should not be too surrounded in society.

Thoreau looks at this from another angle in his book Walden: "But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."(603) He his saying it is against the very beliefs that society holds dear, to conform to society. For if, man is working to lay up treasure on earth he should not be working at all.

Another principle expressed by these writers is that of individualism. Society of the time said that the lawmakers had a sense of right and wrong and that their laws should be followed without question or thought. Emerson and Thoreau thought that people should think for them selves first. This is expressed in Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.(698)

And in “Self Reliance” by Emerson: “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.”(538) To develop into an individual is to make every choice based upon your own personal belief, no matter what society says, and to act upon your belief as a result.

Emerson thought that all great works were products of individualism and self-reliance, claiming that:

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. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. (538)

In a similar way, Thoreau’s main theme in his book "Walden" was the necessity of keeping our own ideas and conscience against the unjust authority: