Emerson on the Purpose of Life

Among Ralph Waldo Emerson’s primary perceptions about living were these:

• There’s no other world; this one is it.

• All important truths must finally be self-evident.

• The purpose of life is individual development, self-expression and fulfillment.

• Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm, and your work should be in praise of what you love.

• The days are gods.

“On a day no different than the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet,” explained Emerson’s biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr. “Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he can discern. By the same token, each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken.”

“There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise.”

Emerson's Kenshō

Ralph Waldo Emerson highly valued a type of experience which is ineffable in English, but which the Japanese Buddhists have termed kenshō.

Late one January afternoon, Emerson wrote: “The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors … The leafless trees became spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost contribute something to the mute music.”

Biographer Robert D. Richardson Jr.  observed, “(T)he experience Emerson most valued is the exhilaration that can arise sometimes from our presence in nature, though we cannot say quite why.”

“If this is mysticism, it is mysticism of a commonly occurring and easily accepted sort. The aim of the mystic is to attain a feeling of oneness with the divine. Experiences of the kind Emerson here describes have happened to nearly everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world with a momentary sense of peace and a feeling, however transient, of being at one with it.”

Learn

When you have learned something, my dear, it often feels at first as if you had lost something.

— George Bernard Shaw

The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

— Will Rogers