The Conduct of Life

These nine essays are largely based on lectures Emerson held throughout the country, including for a young, mercantile audience in the lyceums of the Midwestern boomtowns of the 1850s.

[3] Three years after publishing his English Traits, Boston's Ticknor & Fields announced on 27 December 1859, an "early appearance" of a new book by Emerson titled The Conduct of Life.

[4] Confirmed as "completed" on 10 November 1860,[5] Emerson’s seventh major work came out on 12 December of the same year—simultaneously in the US and in Great Britain (published there by Smith, Elder & Co.).

It was advertised as "matured philosophy of the transatlantic sage"[6] and sold as a collector’s item "uniform in size and style with Mr. Emerson’s previous works.

Still, the height of the book's international fame came around the turn of the 20th century, coinciding with a growing public interest in one of Emerson's most famous readers: Friedrich Nietzsche.

[14] Yale’s The New Englander while complimenting Emerson's abilities, criticized the book as depicting "a universe bereft of its God" and described its author as writing "with the air of a man who is accustomed to be looked up to with admiring and unquestioning deference.

"[15] Littell's Living Age found the book to contain the "weakest kind of commonplace elaborately thrown into unintelligible shapes" and claimed it to read in parts like an "emasculate passage of Walt Whitman.

"[21] As the dialectic approach of these essays often fails to come to tangible conclusions, critics like Ellen Vellela have described the whole book as weakly structured and repetitive.

[22] Others argue that "rather than trying to dissolve the ambiguous tension of Emerson’s texts, the different arguments should be valued as a part of a dialectic that productively captures the friction of opposing poles.

In this first essay, Emerson introduces the basic idealist principles of The Conduct of Life and seeks to reconcile the seemingly contradicting ideas of freedom and fate through a unifying Weltgeist-approach.

(23) Historical and societal events are therefore not merely an expression of individual actions and thought but result of "the will of all mind" (23) and necessitated by nature: "When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done."

While the "mind of all" might give birth to great men and leader figures, it also creates inherently inferior beings, as everyone’s individual future is "already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form."

(10) Long before Friedrich Nietzsche’s coining of a similar phrase, Emerson’s essay claims that "life is a search after power" and that "a cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works" (45).

In fact, "the instinct of the people is right" (54)—the heartland’s farmers’ natural way of living and their straight approach to concrete problems makes them apt to be rulers.

(69) This text unfolds a two-sided approach to the notion of wealth: On the one hand, the economic side of the term is discussed in what seems to be a capitalist praise of America’s free market economy: "The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.

On the other hand, a criticism of early consumer-capitalism in the cities of Emerson’s time, where "society (…) is babyish, and wealth is made a toy" (80), brings about a redefinition of the term.

Thereby, the wealthy individual is characterized as a culturally productive and well-educated member of society ("To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works and chief men of each race."

Emerson celebrates "the wonderful expressiveness of the human body" (154) while especially emphasizing the eyes—"another self" (156)—as being the most universally understood, hence highly revealing (and almost erotic), means of interpersonal exchange.

At the same time, however, the selective function of manners operating in a society that "resists and sneers at you; or quietly drops you" (162) if you do not follow its rules is addressed.

Accordingly, Emerson repeatedly emphasizes the importance of both mental and physical activity, encapsulated in his idea of "voluntary obedience" or "necessitated freedom" (209).

This essay revolves around certain recurring and intertwined aspects of Emerson’s thought—most notably, society, culture, morals, nature, the meaning of life, and friendship.

His concluding remarks resonate with many of his other writings: he demands "the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation to add something to the well-being of men."

The conclusion begs for a broader and more integrated understanding of the world: "Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs of tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect."

(269)The last passage in the essay is "the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and carly expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, —the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

In a closer examination of sensory perception, Emerson writes "Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems" (274) and "[the] senses interfere everywhere and mix their own structure with all they report of it."

THE END.In accordance with Emerson’s increasingly conservative notion of society, The Conduct of Life formulates a critique of the Brook Farm community, a utopist experiment in communal living founded by his colleague and fellow transcendentalist George Ripley in 1841.

(100) In his Essay 'Emerson' (1898), John Jay Chapman claims with regards to Emerson that "not a boy in the land welcomed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as did this shy village philosopher."

[29] Indeed, The Conduct Of Life, written during the political run-up to secession and published after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, finds Emerson embracing the idea of war as a means of national rebirth.

"Wars, fires, plagues," Emerson writes in ‘Considerations by the Way’, "break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men."

(223) In nature, Emerson argues, creation is always preceded by destruction and in the intensity of conflict and battle, humanity shines ever more brightly: "civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution, [are] more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity."