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... t all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. In a similar way, Thoreau's main theme theme in his well-known essay, Resistance to Civil Government was the necessity of keeping our own ideas and conscience against the unjust authority: If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth -- certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong, which I condemn.
The factor, which led Thoreau to be in favour of non-conformity, is Emerson, of course. He considered individuality as doing whatever he wanted and ignoring what the people think, which we can find in his words: What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. He explains his words and tries to justify himself by adding that: This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. 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. According to Thoreau and Emerson, individuals are responsible for themselves and should not ask for protection from the state.
In his Self Reliance, Emerson advised men to trust themselves and accept the society of their contemporaries, the connection of events that God found for them. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. He regarded the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, as the want of self-reliance, and thought that men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. He claimed: It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.
In the same way, Thoreau expressed in his famous essay Resistance to Civil Government that when he conversed with the freest of his neighbors, he perceived that, whatever they might say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquility, the long and the short of the matter was, that they could not spare the protection of the existing government, and they dreaded the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. He said that: For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. And added that: You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs, in order to avoid of the reliance on the protection of the State, which indicates the necessity of living simply. Emerson and Thoreau defined how an individual must be, which can be summed up as trusting your own ideas, finding the truth within yourself as Emerson says: Nothing can bring you peace but yourself and not to let society suppress your individuality.
Furthermore, individuals are responsible for themselves and should not ask for protection from the state. The man of principle cannot be constrained into any wrongdoing and will not compromise his freedom and integrity. According to these American writers, the cause of peace is not for the cowardly preservation of the safety of the luxurious and the timid. Sanderson Beck states in his essay on Emerson's Transcendentalism that: Peace must be maintained by true heroes who are willing to stake their lives for their principle and who go beyond the traditional hero in that they will not threaten another man's life-"men who have, by their intellectual insight or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep. It is certain that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were quite influential in the development of the USA, taking into consideration the fact that they instilled self-confidence and freedom of thought in the minds of American people. However it is difficult to say the same thing today as the citizens of the United States are less self-reliant today than they used to be, as Bryan Caplan says in his essay Self-Reliance and Creative Destruction: Despite some impressive efforts to develop a distinctly American intellectual tradition, the cultural elite of the United States gradually accepted many of the world's complaints about Americans' "excessive individualism"; these complaints then spread throughout the broader culture.
What is especially dangerous is that the decline of individualism is self-perpetuating; diminished self-reliance makes it possible for the power of the government to expand, which teaches future generations to rely upon the protective comfort of the government rather than themselves. Consequently, Emerson and Thoreau were among the founders of transcendentalism in American literature. Both writers emphasized the importance of the soul and nature and they complemented their views and their views on individualism and self-reliance effected not only literature but also politics and society in the United States.
- Aaron, Michelle, Thoreau and Individualism web > Beck, Sanderson, Emerson's Transcendentalism web > Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Self Reliance Essays (Boston, 1841) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "The Conduct of Life" 1860, Power web emerson. htm#answer Thoreau, Henry David, Resistance to Civil Government taken from The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume I (London: Norton &Co. 1993) Transcendentalism web > Transcendentalism-The Anti-Individualist Philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau web >
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Research essay sample on Individualism In Emerson And Thoreau
