The Difficulty of Reconciling Philosophy and Life. The basic view of the relationship between God, man, and nature expressed in “Experience” is essentially that found in Emerson’s earlier idealistic expressions of Transcendental philosophy. Emerson stresses that God is the source of man’s unlimited strength and power, and that insight into the divine is the ultimate goal of living. Emphasizing the unity of the universe, he writes that “Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection; the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.”
Emerson presents the divine “First Cause” as the inspiration behind all the nobler actions of man, as opposed to material influence. He vigorously dismisses materially based interpretations of human nature (like phrenology), which view character as the fixed result of physical traits, and disregard the influence of the divine spirit. Intuition affords vision of divine unity, imparting meaningful wholeness and coherence to the many separate expressions of God in the material world and in human life. It also inspires man’s hitherto unrealized inner potential. He metaphorically alludes to the undiscovered capabilities within man as analogous to the unexplored American west: “I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.” (Thoreau, too, developed the metaphor of “the West” in his work, notably in the essay “Walking.”) Moreover, Emerson equates man’s openness to spirit not only with his personal insight into the universal but with the ultimate transformation of society itself—”the transformation of genius into practical power.”
However, as steadfastly as Emerson holds to his idealistic optimism, he recognizes in “Experience” that there is a discrepancy, a tension, between philosophical idealism and the experience of life. In the prefatory poem and throughout the essay, he acknowledges the thoughtful man’s confusion as he confronts the forces that distort perception and prevent vision beyond the material into the divine, absolute, and permanent. He openly admits that philosophy is not life, that we cannot successfully alter the world we inhabit by imposing on it our sense of what it should be. Efforts to reform society don’t achieve their desired results because, in the end, the gap between the ideal and the material cannot be so easily bridged. Grief at the loss of loved ones, one of the deepest human emotions, provides no insight into the relationship between the spiritual and the material, and leaves us empty and baffled. Even nature herself, our ally and tool for comprehending the universal, does not readily allow us to make sense of her operations in human life.
But although idealism and human experience are difficult to reconcile satisfactorily, nowhere in the essay does Emerson suggest that one must be chosen over the other. They are coexistent elements, not mutually exclusive. They merge into one another by graded steps, “life above life, in infinite degrees.” Emerson urges us to keep our sights on the ultimate purpose of our existence—to understand our place in the universe and our relationship to God and nature—but at the same time to live life as it is, not worrying too much about the discrepancy between the two. “Life is not dialectics,” he writes. It must be lived on its own terms, not confused with the higher realm that exists side by side with it and that surpasses it in significance. Our experience of daily life will eventually contribute toward a broader sense of the universal.
Emerson asserts that the specific societal forms, personal relationships, and human conditions that constitute our experience are, in the long run and from the broad view, insignificant. We may thrive as spiritual beings as well under one set of conventions and circumstances as under another. He advocates avoidance of wasting precious energy on trying to alter the externals of life. We may find meaning in even the most trivial transactions and relationships:
I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.
Moreover, he recommends embracing life, not merely grimly accepting it. He distinguishes between two points of view that we might describe today as the difference between seeing the glass half-empty and seeing it half-full:
I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my accounts in sots [drunkards] and bores also. . . . If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.
In attempting to analyze experience too closely, we fail to get from it what we can. Its lessons are learned “on the highway”—along the way, in the course of life, not through conscious intent to make sense of it. Emerson advises a tolerant, balanced approach, one that incorporates power (divinely granted and intuitively realized life force) and form (the particular external structures through which we express ourselves). We should aim toward the “middle region of our being,” the “temperate zone,” the “mid-world,” the “equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry,—a narrow belt.” There we may both live life as we must and yet remain open to higher reality.
