Emerson and Kant on Enlightenment

Ralph Waldo Emerson's cultivation of self-reliance in his essays both breaks with and continues in some important ways the Enlightenment tradition, particularly that outlined by Immanuel Kant. The breaks are not insignificant, but ultimately Emerson stands more firmly within the basic Enlightenment project than outside of it.

Perhaps the most notable discontinuity is Emerson's emphasis on the individual over the group within society. Kant argues in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that, if rulers allowed their subjects to exercise free-thinking, a stable social order would result: “Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony within the commonwealth” (Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, 45). For Kant, Enlightenment would improve society by reshaping its individual and collective contours.

However, Emerson seems to suggest that the individual pursuit of self-reliance may result in a breaking apart of time-honored and socially-valued relationships, including the most basic one of the family: “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. ... I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me” (“Self-Reliance”). Whether Emerson intended his comment to be taken to its logically destructive end is perhaps unclear. But it is clear that he did not seem to endorse the positive vision for collective social reform that Kant did.

Nevertheless, Emerson continues the Enlightenment tradition as Kant understood it in at least four important ways: (1) positing an idea of knowledge as constructed by human minds, (2) arguing for an exit from immaturity and bondage to maturity and freedom (autonomy) in the use of reason, (3) identifying a human obligation to be active and courageous agents in securing Enlightenment, and (4) distinguishing illegitimate and legitimate uses of reason.

First, Kant, in seeking to make room for faith alongside reason, posited a two-world view of knowledge as constructed by the categories our minds impose on the world. Humans attempt to understand the world as it is present to us, not reality as it is in itself. We use reason to understand the world we experience, and therefore our knowledge of the world is how our minds categorize and make sense of it. In this respect, we create our knowledge of the phenomenal world. Reason/mind does not have access to the noumenal realm of faith. We understand the world by understanding our cognitive concepts of our experience.

Emerson continues this Enlightenment epistemology of Kant’s. For Emerson, humans also exercise agency in creating knowledge of their experience of the world: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads ... We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem” (“Experience”). We see (or know) what we enliven (or organize) through the media of our moods and minds, which act on the world in an epistemologically important way. Experience is not receiving the world as it inherently is. Humans creatively engage the world, imaginatively shape their experiences, and therefore personally construct their knowledge.

Second, Kant argues that “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” By immaturity Kant means “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another” (Kant, 41). This is largely a willful inability to expend the effort required (a) not to rely on another’s authority and (b) to overcome one’s lazy fondness for rational dependence.

Emerson, too, perceives in those not self-reliant a form of self-imprisonment: “But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness” (“Self-Reliance”). Humans seem to have shackled themselves by their hackneyed thinking and lust for acceptance by others, who expect continuing conformity: “Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars ... but false in all particulars.” The result is that humans neither actually engage the world independent of social norms nor rely on their own understanding and instincts. Enlightenment for Kant and self-reliance for Emerson involve an exodus from lazy dependence on external authorities.

Third, and related, for Kant humans must be actively courageous in securing their rational maturity. Kant summarizes the motto of Enlightenment as “‘Have courage to use your own understanding’” (Kant, 41). Cowardice, in addition to laziness, is a reason “why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance, nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity.” Authority structures have made the exodus to maturity appear “very dangerous, not to mention difficult.” Exercising courage to make the exodus is required for Enlightenment.

Similarly, Emerson explicitly recognizes the fear that binds individuals from being self-reliant: “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say `I think,' `I am,' but quotes some saint or sage.” Individuals find it easier and safer to act and think derivatively than on their own. By the same token, Emerson affirms in “Self-Reliance” the courage and energy required to be great, which is to rely on oneself: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. ...It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Finally, Kant distinguishes between illegitimate and legitimate use of reasoning. Illegitimate is the sort that is exercised to impose dogmatism, which “preclude[s] forever all further enlightenment of the human race” (Kant, 43). One age cannot bind itself and posterity to the status quo. This is “unauthorized and criminal” because it is unjust control of rationality (44). However, it is legitimate, for instance, for a pastor to teach church creeds publicly while also explaining his own scruples with certain doctrines, or while insisting on his and the congregation’s freedom to question them.

Emerson continues this project of delineating legitimate uses of reason. In “Self-Reliance” he exhorts: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” and “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” He wishes for readers to conform their thinking to his, to imitate him in regarding self-reliance as paramount. This is legitimate. It is illegitimate if they blindly rely on his thinking. Instead, they must act individually as creative agents in reflecting on and articulating their experience.

Emerson does not perfectly map onto the Kantian vision for or project of Enlightenment. His affirmation of non-conformity goes radically beyond what Kant describes. Still, in at least these four important ways -- knowledge as a human construct, exodus from external authority, courageous agency, and permitted types of reasoning -- Emerson advances the Enlightenment tradition along Kantian lines. And his influence would later reach to such seminal figures as Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, who themselves extended the Enlightenment emphasis on individual thinking and feeling in their own ways.  Emerson's position within Enlightenment reveals the significance of his modifications of it.