"Self-Reliance" by Ralph W. Emerson
Lessons of Self-Reliance
Live with integrity, do what you want to do with your life and not by what society expects or wants you to do, don’t give up on your liberty, think and speak for yourself, not for your party or “usages that are dead to you” as he writes. I have found this essay very insightful and wonderful, a true piece of art!
The importance to judge the past in order to improve our present. If we change the meaning of our past experiences by learning through those past experiences, we will be more prepared and succeed in the present and future. We related to the gratitude of the past Bert mentioned during our Thanksgiving dialogue.
The consistency of being genuine with yourself and your actions, and of not being afraid of not being consistent with your actions per se as long as they are genuine to you. Scorn the appearances! This is the most important note I wrote: “Be consistent in doing the right thing, if it’s genuine, you’ll be consistent from the distance, you’ll have honor.”
Dialogue 6 (10/12/12)
There are few things better to do at the MPC than read Emerson in the Jardín Ayau, sitting on the grass and reading it aloud. Instead of doing performing arts, we decided to keep reading Self-Relianceby Emerson. In this dialogue we discussed the things we value, the nature of observation, the scientific ethics, and materialism. The most important quotes we talked about were the followings:
“Yet they (material things) all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.”
- Things related to this quote: “value what you value”, nature of observation, Polanyi: “Science has a moral dimension.”.
“…it (the popular fable of the sot and the duke) symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”
- There are people, like Socrates, who we think of them as “gods”, but we forget they were once humans who have awaken.
“Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?”
- Here, Emerson puts in question materialism; something that we are still questioning in the 21st century.