Emerson (1803-1882)

FRIENDSHIP AS ELEVATING THE SOUL

Emerson (1803-1882) was an American philosopher, writer and poet, who was the leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century.

The following passage is adapted from Emerson’s essay “Friendship” (published in Essays: First Series in 1841). In this essay, Emerson presents a sublime vision of friendship – so sublime that it is almost impossible for humans to achieve it fully. True friendship is not for fun or convenience, but for spiritual inspiration. Friends are valuable not because they are somebody to chat with, but because they help elevate the soul. True friendship has little to do with practical matters and with everyday problems – it involves the higher part of ourselves. True friendship is a spiritual companionship. 

I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine – wild, delicate, expressing his virtues. When he is praised, I feel as warmly as the lover when he hears praise about his beloved girl.

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We should give dignity to each other’s daily life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. Daily life should never degenerate into something usual and established, but should be alert and inventive, and add meaning to what used to be dull work.

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Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why should you insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why should you go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why should he visit you at your house? Are these things relevant to your relations? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be a spirit to me. I want a message from him, a thought, a sincerity, a glance, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly services from cheaper companions. Shouldn’t the company of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Should I feel that our connection is profane in comparison with this cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that waving grass that divides the stream? Let us not vilify it, but raise it to that standard.

      Do not try to reduce your friend’s great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his attitude and action, but rather fortify them and enhance them... Let him always be to you a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial convenience to be soon outgrown and thrown aside.

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Let us carry that which is so great as friendship with as much grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere.

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The higher the standard we demand of friendship, the less easy it is to achieve it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends who are like those we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope always cheers the faithful heart, that elsewhere there are souls which can love us, and which we can love.

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I do with my friends as I do with my books. I leave them where I can find them, but I rarely use them… I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot lower myself to converse. In the great days, visions hover in front of me in the sky. I should then dedicate myself to them… Then, although I value my friend, I cannot afford to talk with him and study his visions, or else I would lose my own.

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The essence of friendship is entireness, a total greatness and trust. It must not suppose, or provide for weakness. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

THE OVER-SOUL

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American philosopher, poet, and inspiring speaker. He was born in Boston and went to Harvard College. In 1837 he founded, together with other American intellectuals, the “Transcendental Club,” which promoted openness to the deep, poetic aspects of reality. Throughout his life he wrote many inspiring papers and gave many moving lectures around the country, and was regarded as the leader of the transcendentalist movement (an American movement of the 19th century). He was also known for his opposition to slavery. He died at the age of 78 from pneumonia.
    
The following are selected passages from Emerson’s famous essay “The Over-Soul” (some sentences slightly simplified). For Emerson, the “over-soul” (which he sometimes calls simply “the soul”) is a higher dimension of existence which is the source of inspiration, insight, and wisdom. It is an aspect of reality which inspires us to understand more deeply, to envision sublime visions, to think and write poetically, and to open ourselves beyond our little self. The over-soul is not a separate “thing” or “entity.” It is, rather, an aspect of existence which envelop us and which can elevate us, like a hidden fountain of higher life.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being descends into us from we know not where. The most exact calculator cannot predict that something incalculable may not happen the very next moment. I am forced every moment to acknowledge a higher origin of events than the will which I call “mine.”

      As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river which, out of regions I don’t see, pours for a while its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner – not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I may desire and search and be receptive, but from some alien energy the visions come.
      The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, just as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere. It is that Unity, that Over-soul, which contains every individual’s particular being and where it is made one with all other beings; that common heart which every sincere conversation worships, to which all right action submits; that overpowering reality which invalidates our tricks and talents, and forces everyone to be what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which always tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within each person is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficient and perfect in every hour; furthermore, the act of seeing and the thing that is seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. […]

       All goes to show that the soul in a person is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs. It is not a function – like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but it uses these as hands and feet. It is not a faculty, but a light. It is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will, the background of our being in which they lie — an immensity that is not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. Man is the façade of a temple where all wisdom and all good dwell.
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We refer the announcements of the soul, the manifestations of its nature, with the term Revelation. These are always joined by the emotion of the sublime. Because this communication is an influx of the divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct experience of this central commandment agitates the person with awe and delight. A thrill passes through everyone at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications, the power to see is not separate from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment in which the individual feels himself invaded by it – is memorable.