Misreading Emerson No More!

I confess, I have misread Emerson.  I had assumed with others that he had articulated the ideal of individualism in such an extreme way, that it had had a profoundly negative affect on Unitarianism over the years.  We have certainly been an individualistic lot, and we have quoted Emerson to justify this indulgence in the "me" over the needs of the community.  In recent years, we have come to realize that we must cherish and build the bonds of community, and that we must develop a strong ethic of mutuality.  We are teaching the new gospel of responsible relationality, but we continue much work still needs to be done.

I can't believe that I am writing this, but I think we might be able to enlist Emerson in struggle for right relationship.  I have been re-reading Emerson, and Barry Andrews' book Emerson, A Spiritual Guide has been very helpful in the process.  I  now think that Emerson's most assertive essay on individualism can serve as a very powerful corrective to some of our more facile contemporary understandings of the subject.  Emerson wrote in his essay Self-Reliance:
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activities.  When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage of its beams.  If we ask when this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or absence is all we can affirm.  Every man (sic) discriminates against between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.  He may err in his expression of them, but he knows these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed."

Self -Reliance is a celebration of genius, according to Barry Andrews, "[b]ut the word genius meant something different for them.  For us the word connotes great intelligence or talent;  for the Transcendentalists it meant something more like a current of energy or power that can be tapped.  In their view, virtually any person could demonstrate genius if he allowed this current to flow through him in an unobstructed way."  Emerson is making a statement more profound than an affirmation of  "inherent worth and dignity of every person."  He is arguing that we all have untold potential, that every person has unrealized spiritual, creative and intellectual powers  and these powers lie dormant, and unfulfilled.

Why? Because we conform to expectations of others, and that conformity is the enemy of this inner creative power which he calls genius.  "Imitation is suicide."  It is here that Emerson is often misunderstood, for years I believed that he was advocating disregard for community,  for the sake of expressive individualism.  But now I understand that Emerson was advocating, in the discourse of his time, a relational ethic of initiative.  As Andrews explains "the self. . .is not the ego or isolated self of modern philosophy or psychology.  It is the soul, which, though incarnated in each individual, in nevertheless commonly shared by everything that exists as [an] expression [of]...oversoul."    For Emerson, non conformity was not rebellion for the sake of rebellion, or is it the posing of the self  against all others,  rather it is rejecting inauthentic ways of relating, in favor of genuine mutuality.

In our own times we have come to appreciate this insight anew, but express it different language.  We speak of the need for self differentiation, so that we might be a non anxious presence relative to familiar (or congregational) anxiety.  We speak of codependency as a dysfunctional way of relating.  Despite the misuses of the term by later day social darwinists, self reliance for Emerson, was a necessary step toward authenticity and genuine relationship.