Ralph Waldo Emerson's Later "Self-Reliance" Far More

Ralph Waldo Emerson's later "Self-Reliance" far more likely to be appealing to American college students today than his early "American Scholar"-ship Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist philosophy shifted and changed over the course of his life.

Much as Emerson's idea that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds embraces the idea that contradiction is not something to be feared within the hearts and minds of human beings, nor that ideological consistency and doctrinal rigor is something to be aspired to, Emerson's ideas between "Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar" show profound shifts in judgment, and what a human being and a thinker should aspire to be. There were, over the course of his life, many Emersons.

However, the Emerson that is most likely to be amenable to the sensibilities of college students today is likely to be that of his later essay upon "Self-Reliance," rather than his earlier "The American Scholar," which only manifests the later essay's ideas in a half-formulated and a much more Christian-focused fashion.

Today's emphasis on postmodernism and the constant restructuring of one's identity over the course of one's educational existence makes the lack of consistency and the disdain for tradition expressed by Emerson in the earlier essay to be quite attractive to young college students. "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," writes Emerson, if we do not constantly reexamine our own opinions.

Emerson's overall philosophy, as expressed in this essay, is that rather than looking to past, European models of excellence and artistic expression, young Americans must create their own, new models that are not hemmed in by past ideals. To live is to constantly reinvent one's self and life. Today's college students are similarly faced with having to break the pre-existing molds of artistic excellence, and modalities of the ways they are told to live, and the ways their parents taught them to live.

The mere reaction to what was constructed as 'American' is no longer tenable, as it was during the generation of the 1960's. Generations of 'slackers' however, have also shown that mere aspirations to enjoyment of the moment is not necessarily sustaining. The dot.com bust has shown that economic prosperity is elusive. Now, individuals must create a new justification for life and a new way of constructing the self in an increasingly virtual world. Instead of looking to the past, a new ideal of selfhood is required.

Like Emerson, today's college students are facing an age of unsurpassed technological change -- for Emerson in the form of railroads shortening methods of communication and transport, for today's college students, transportation and communication between different cultures is created with a point and click of a modem and a mouse.

The disembodied communication of the Internet has transformed this generation's soul, making its transparent 'I' not a lone soul wandering in the woods, but a transparent eye that can assume a multiplicity of identities false and true with a simple change of screen name.

Whether this fluidity of identity construction is used for good or for ill, of course, remains to be seen, but the challenge is there and must be accepted -- who am I, when what 'I' am seems so different in the words on my computer, in my real and lived life, and in the life I lead online? In terms of multiple identities, however, the more Christian-oriented Emerson of "The American Scholar," his address to Divinity graduates, already seems out of date for our day and age.

Understanding individuals of alternative faith structures is such a key element, today, of what it means to be an American, faced with the need to reconstruct a crumbling Middle East, as Americans are fearful from attacks from Islamic nations from around the world. Emerson's proclaiming of the wisdom of Swedenborg, for example, marks him squarely as a man of the 19th century, unlike his metaphor of the transparent eyeball of Self-Reliance. Even his most poetic flights of fantasy in the essay upon.