"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. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark."
" No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."
"We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy."
Does this violate Godel's Incompleteness Theorem?
To Emerson, unlike Whitman, Nature is not the self. The subject-object dichotomy is resolved in aesthetic perception, but only passively, by becoming a "transparent eyeball". Exactly where he draws the line of this dualism is unclear, since the eye itself is a natural object.
Like the Transhumanists, Emerson sees no dichotomy between Nature and art/ technology; human works are merely an extension of the same process which occurs in nature. Even if man, or at least his immaterial soul, is somehow not part of nature, his actions and productions are.
Art is the mixture of the human will with natural essences (just as, in classical liberal theory, property is created through the mixture of human labor with natural resources.)
"Now many are thought not only unexplained [by science] but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex."
Interestingly, this list of "inexplicable things" contains some of the major preoccupations of the Freudians and Postmodernists.
"The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title."
Here, Emerson, in effect, refutes the notion of "intellectual property'. The aesthetic object is (interactively) the creation of the perceiver. It is the eye of the beholder that places the "property" in the horizon. Note the pun on the word "property". It is the property of beauty, and also property as subjective ownership of one's personal experience -- the pattern of information constructed by the observer's eye and mind. The aesthetic observer owns the object in a way that cannot be restricted by deeds, titles, patents or copyrights, and which is also nonzero-sum: multiple perceivers can each posses the complete landscape without diminishing its value. Cf. Ayn Rand's very similar words in The Fountainhead: the person who owns a great skyscraper is the one who can see its beauty.
Chapter 2: "Commodity". The title is another pun; it means both "usefulness" and "an item of economic exchange". Note that Emerson has just refuted the notion of "intellectual property" by proclaiming that the intellectual, or aesthetic object exists in the mind of the perceiver.
Economic property is created by the mixing of land and materials with human labor; aesthetic experience through the mixing of natural forms and human perception; spiritual transcendence through the blending of self, in rapturous artistic ecstasy, with the natural environment commonly defined as "not-me". All of these various "commodities", these "exchanges of value" are created through human beings mixing their will, perception and action with the external world. One may call this an aesthetic-economics of hybridization.
We might here compare the "centaur aesthetics": man + nature, and the "cyborg aesthetics": man + machine. Both show the fusion of the human and the alien, the subject and her surroundings. Whether this is achieved through a surrender to primal urges (Whitman) or a rational will-to-create (Emerson).
