When the World is at Stake: Arendt on The Value of Emersonian Wisdom

08-22-2024

“Thus, we find in Emerson what former ages called wisdom, and that is something which has never existed in abundance or been in great demand. Embedded in this wisdom there are profound insights and observations which we have lost to our detriment, and which we may well be advised to unearth again now, when we are forced to rethink what the humanities are all about.”
(Hannah Arendt, Emerson‐Thoreau Medal lecture, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1969)

In 1969 – one year following the publication of Men In Dark Times and six years following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem – Hannah Arendt was awarded the prestigious Emerson Thoreau Medal. In this address, Arendt establishes her breadth of understanding and appreciation of Emerson’s work. Growing up in Germany, he is one of the few American philosophers with which she is “intimately acquainted.” Despite potential disagreements with aspects of Emerson’s philosophy, Arendt expresses a sense of kinship with the great humanist in describing his relationship to Montaigne. Upon reading the translations of his work, Emerson said: “so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience”.

What attracts me to this quote is that Arendt is expressing the value of Emersonian wisdom in the context of a world facing unprecedented meaninglessness. More specifically, this is a world where totalitarianism and the Nazi regime revealed to us that anything is possible, and our abilities to confront both understanding and independent judgment have become increasingly difficult. Further, Arendt identifies Emerson as occupying a unique space in the Western Tradition that is concerned with chiefly human matters and who embodies a kind of thinking that does not belong to the vita contempletiva – the philosopher’s way of thought that Arendt critiqued as detached from the world, experience, and the unpredictability of the realm of human affairs. Writing essays and not systems, Emerson deals out what she styles as “a life passed through the fire of thought.”

In a familiar parallel, our modern world is confronted by an ever-present growth of meaningless and loneliness, a rapid rise in discriminatory violence, and radical political polarization. On the one hand, these alienating conditions – exacerbated by the rise of AI in the form of social media algorithms, echo chambers, and filter bubbles – facilitate the lack of any considerable prompt to slow us down, think, and strive to judge events and phenomena as novel in their own right (or “without any preconceived system”). On the other hand, these circumstances may culminate in the tendency to turn us both away from the world and each other. This common but fragile world can be envisioned, Arendt says, “as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” However, today, it often feels as though the very place meant to gather us together, to exchange, test our opinions, and courageously show ‘who’ we are, sits empty – or, further, is at risk of vanishing altogether. So, what then is this Emersonian wisdom, which Arendt believed we would be well advised to unearth again? And, can this be of any insight to us now? 
 
Emerson, both a poet and philosopher, was much like Arendt in the sense that both championed the political virtuosity of independent judgment, as well as the authenticity of our actions in experience. No work of Emerson’s captures this commitment more than his discussions on the experience of self-reliance. From his perspective, self-reliance is a celebration of one’s distinct individuality. It calls for the dedication to "imaginative and intelligent independence," especially non-conformity to mass opinions. Equally important, self-reliance demands courage and integrity in self-reflective thought and the freedom to express and share one's ideas with others. Here, Emerson’s philosophical emphasis resides in the process of self-reliance rather than any preconceived end or goal.
 
Conversely, self-reliance’s chief aversion or opposing vice is conformity. Rather than tradition or society, self-reliant individuals will rely on and trust in their spontaneous intuitions, respecting the integrity of their own minds. As Emerson so famously states: “Trust thyself.” In this way, when we speak of someone as demonstrating self-reliance, what we are often intuitively motioning to is one’s ability to exercise the capacity for independent thought and judgment, demonstrating a courageous value towards authenticity in meaningful action. Hence, rather than banality, self-reliant individuals reveal their originality and unique spark to others and the world – a testimony of authentic self-expression and what Arendt might have understood as connected to ‘who’ we are rather than what we are. 
 
For Arendt, the only actions that create possibilities for genuine and meaningful political change (such as towards oppressive structures and systems) are those that transcend mere instrumental activity of the agent's own spontaneous initiative. This transformative and unpredictable potential relates to the fact that in acting and speaking, we reveal ‘who’ we are – our unique and distinct identity. In other words, through authentic political action, with and among others, we demonstrate our freedom and distinguish ourselves as somebody rather than nobody. The sheer meaning of one’s actions, then, rests in the agent’s spontaneous initiative and authentic disclosure rather than any achievement that will follow. In doing so, Arendt believed that we demonstrate a sort of care for the world and the freedom of those in it.  
 
This care, Arendt would say, involves the recognition of the world’s fragility – that what we do and how we act can, in fact, change the world. But this recognition demands of us a process of overcoming the coercive expectations and lure of ideological consistency and conformity that we find in the modern problems of mass thinking and mass society. As feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye elucidates, expectations can be quite powerful because: “How one sees another, and one expects the other to behave are in tight interdependence, and how one expects another to behave is a large factor in determining how the other does behave.” Arendt signals this very problem, I believe, when quoting Emerson’s non-conformist serenity, “I like the sayers of No better than the sayers of Yes” – gesturing us towards the insight that to guard even the possibility of a common world, there will be times when we must lay everything on the table. In daring to think and judge independently, we must be courageous enough to risk this disclosure and mediate opposition. This is because in politics it is not merely one’s individual life per se that is at stake, more specifically, it is the world.
 
By contrast, actions lacking this dynamic character of meaning can be found in the use of means of violence towards individuals and groups or even “dazzling speakers of propaganda.” Given their instrumental character, words here reveal nothing of the agent in terms of their human dignity or irreplaceability and action in these cases is nothing really but an achievement among others. Here, aversions of self-reliance are taking center stage, and there is perhaps no greater example embodied than in the case of Adolph Eichmann. For instance, if self-reliance demands originality and spontaneity, Eichmann demonstrates its complete lack in banality. If self-reliance demands integrity in self-reflective thought, this two-in-one dialogue with oneself and the courage to dare to think and judge independently without the prior yardsticks of tradition or society, Eichmann lacks these abilities altogether. His actions disclose nothing about ‘who’ he is; instead, they merely maintain what he is in their other-conforming instrumentality. No meaning can be ascribed to such actions, and politically transformative and spontaneous initiative is simply not possible.
 
In Emersonian terms, the general potential of this aversion would be to become “mere mouthpieces to the party; take away the party, and they shrivel and vanish,” while for Arendt, we might say it is to keep the scales weighted towards disaster rather than in the opposite direction. This profound wisdom, then, might just simply be, that “[t]hose who are reliable in such circumstances are not those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards. Much more reliable will be the doubters and sceptics’ – not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because these individuals are used to examining things for themselves thoroughly and making up their own minds.”

References:
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
———. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.  
———. “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture.” Chicago Review 14, no. 1 (1960): 28–46.
———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
———. Men in Dark Times. San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
———. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1st ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.
———. “Understanding and Politics.” Partisan Review, vol. 20, no. 4 (July–August 1953): 377–92. Reprinted in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954.
Arendt, Hannah. Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2018.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Difficulties of Understanding.” Journal of Continental Philosophy 1, no. 1 (2020): 37–62. https://doi.org/10.5840/jcp202018.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays. Boston: James Munroe. 1841.
Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, N.Y: Crossing Press, 1983.
Hermsen, Joke J., and Dana Villa, eds. The Judge and the Spectator: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1999.
Kateb, George. Emerson and Self-Reliance. Thousand Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage, 1995.
O’Dwyer, Kathleen. “Emerson's Argument for Self-reliance as a Significant Factor in a Flourishing Life.” Journal of Philosophy of Life vol. 2, no. 1 (2012): 102-110.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt, for Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

About the Author:
Sasha Simon is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario (Canada). Under the supervision of Profs. Carolyn McLeod and Helen Fielding, her doctoral project focuses on developing a feminist account of self-reliance as a tool for resisting the coercive expectations that underpin oppressive double binds. Her research interests are at the intersection of Feminist Philosophy, Political Phenomenology, and AI Ethics, with a particular emphasis on Hannah Arendt.