Heroism by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay Example

The heroes of the modern world are normally the first who arrive at the scene of an emergency. One marvels as how they put themselves in peril to save the helpless. The Emerson’s hero is a completely different thing – generous, but not selflessly so. He is the challenger of an evil, which few identify besides him and so acts without seconds or aids. Because Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of people, the hero, as Emerson defines him, is more appropriate to be blamed and scorned than much admired. The hero’s defiant acts are thus ultimate test of self-reliance and its highest use.

The courageous thing can only be appreciated from inside the courageous perspective. This is what Emerson meant by self-trust, for there is no way to ‘cash out’ the right way as ‘reason directs’ other than by consulting the courageous person. It is for that very reason intensely existential. No matter what circumstances the courageous man may face (even those for which he has not been trained to respond) the courageous man will be sensitive to what in those circumstances is the courageous thing to do.

Emerson called self-trust the “state of the soul at war”. Self-trust, he added, is generous; it is scornful of petty calculations. This passage aggravates a thrilling horror of self-recognition. Self-trust was needed and put to the experiment in every aspect of routine life. Emerson gives models of the complexities of human life, from illness and ethics to the problems of domestic life, all of which need a certain level of of valor to face down. For if there is a distinctive ideal of modern heroism its metaphysics are Emerson’s, which is why reading him make one questions what make sociologists call ‘structural fitness’ of war. In an overwhelming concern for ‘health and wealth’, in preoccupation for conserving life and extending it, human beings have lost their taste for heroism. Instead, they have objectified the uncertainties of life and recast them in the amplified form of risk beyond anyone’s control.

Emerson follows prudence as curative antitype, and as prudence is resolvable into care and heed, so heroism, by way of contrast, takes on the aspect of carelessness or indifference. Emerson discourses sensibly on Prudence, a virtue which he does not claim for himself, and graciously on Heroism, which was a great part of his own moral and intellectual being. The essay is discursive and strolling, and its topics have a casual or extraneous quality life the petty notes exchanged by assembling armies between bugle-calls.

Emerson is always trying to free himself and his readers from the cost of his own writing. His description of the activity of the soul asks to be read as an allegory, in which the movements of the soul in its circles represent the movements of creative energy in his sentences and paragraphs. How is one to cope with this situation without collpasing into silence? The answer lies in the phrase “the soul becomes”. Note that ‘the soul’ is first named as if, with its definite article, it were an entity; note, too, that its realization as an entity is immediately and forever delayed its presence transferred to an ever elusive future, by the word ‘becomes’. The sould never ‘becomes’ a thing or a text; it exists in the action of becoming.