Individualism & Society
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Self-Reliance”
I try hard to live by this philosophy. Not because I wish to be great, but because I hope to understand myself better – even if this means that I will often be misunderstood.
Individualism is hard. Humanity pines for conformity, for consistency, for little boxes to check people off with and put one another into. Little cages.
But individualism is also what has pulled us up from the mud, from the chains of class and sexism and institutional barriers to prosperity and culture. In all our weirdness, we are all still equals – or at least we strive to be.
Despite our individualism we are all still connected, but now in more meaningful and profound and important ways than before. Because we choose to be, because we come at it from a position of strength. This doesn’t make living in society any easier, but who said that easy was ever the point?
I don’t believe in denial of the self. I think we should learn to understand our selves in order to forget, like lines in a play or tying knots.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” — Tyler Durden
OK, it was really Walt Whitman.Report
Tyler Durden, Walt Whitman – what’s the difference?Report
“The first rule of poetry is you don’t talk about poetry.”
You know, that’s not bad.Report
Actually…no that’s pretty sage advice.Report
Also, I’ve always thought this was a copout for making an intellectual error.Report
May well be your best post I have read.Report
Well gee, now I’m blushing. Thanks though.Report
“I don’t believe in denial of the self. I think we should learn to understand our selves in order to forget, like lines in a play or tying knots.”
I’ve always understood “denial of the self” in a completely different way. You seem to use it like “deny self-knowledge, or exploration of the different parts of the self”. The only way I’ve seen the “denial of the self” thing advocated is in denying the concept of a “self”, or of a distinct individual entity that incorporates a person’s being/character/individuality. This is perfectly commensurate with exploring different aspects of that being/character; it just denies the concept of a single I which is running the show.
What kinds of “denial of self” statements are you trying to deny? It’s always interesting to hear “self”-understanding.Report
Well I realize that everyone has their own opinion of how this works/what this means. I see denial of self as incorporation into a more important ‘oneness’ or universalism. I think we can have some sort of ‘oneness’ or widespread empathy, but in order to do that we need to come from a position of individualism and strength-in-self.Report
Gotchya.
This is getting far afield from your post, but denial of the concept of a “self” is usually said to help both goals – both a strength-in-self and “oneness”/widespread empathy. Psychologists have been finding evidence against a “self” for a long time (the idea goes back to Nietzsche), and one of the things that’s been empirically verified is that people with a greater acknowledgement of a lack of “self” usually are both more aware of their own characteristics and have a greater sense of general empathy. A lot of Eastern religions / cultural practices, too, take place at the intersection of denial of the self, “oneness”, and individualism.Report
If I understand what you’re saying, it’s that learning who you are is like learning who someone else is: it requires observation. Introspection isn’t likely to be accurate.
That makes a lot of sense.Report
“[I]t requires observation.”
Probably, yuhp.
“Introspection isn’t likely to be accurate.”
It all depends on what you mean by “introspection”. “Generating a rationalization for behavior”, probably not. “Observation of mental processes”, probably so. That’s one of the ways the Dalai Lama characterizes meditation, as extended personal observation.Report
I’m trying to distinguish between “I observe myself behaving in this fashion” and “I think of myself as this sort of person.”Report
It’s hard to do the first.
It’s easy to do the second. Even when it means that you have to ignore observations about yourself.Report
To be great is to be misunderstood. But it doesn’t follow that to be misunderstood is to be great.
Come to think of it, I’m not even too sure of that first proposition.Report
Yes, I agree with a psychiatrist who once told me that the greatest teachers were the ones who can explain complex ideas with simplicity and clarity with consistent logic. Obscurantist posturing is often mistaken for greatness.
Someone could also say a garbled inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statists and moderate pundits and faux-elites. With inconsistency a potentially great soul has too much to do which signifies nothing.
I mean, someone could say that. It really depends on how you justify either approach. I’m not being punchy, I’m just saying…Report
@Jason – I’m not sure. I think it depends on how you read the Emerson quotation. I think you can read it a number of ways. I don’t see Emerson as explicitly saying that the only way to be great is to be misunderstood, or that the opposite is true.
@ Mike – I’m really bored with the drive by personal attacks. Cut it out or make yourself scarce. I don’t mind engaging your arguments. I mind the bullshit attitude which has no place at The League. I won’t ban you, but I won’t engage with you either unless you cut it out.Report
Good lord, a personal attack? Excuse me? You really have something against me, don’t you? I wasn’t even thinking about you personally — I’ve always had problems with that quote, you are just a little self-centered and pettily defensive here, sport. I will save you the trouble of banning me. I hope you treat others better.Report
Oh spare me Mike. At least own your contempt. Identifying your disdain is not self-centered. I’d you’re off in a huff again that’s done by me. You can dish it plenty but you can’t take it for shit.Report
My phone is lame and auto corrected much of that last comment. It can also bugger off.Report
I still don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t a personal attack. I was turning the quote around — statesman to statist (there are no statemen) — philosopher to moderate pundit (because they are often inconsistent) and divines to faux-elite who pass for divines and have no consistent set of idea, only what will maintain power.
Where in all this did I attack you?Report
Actually, if you read back over this, you will realize that it was you attacking me personally rather than the other way around. I have always disagreed with this quote, because I can’t imagine a learned man contradicting any important idea that was earned through study from one day to the next. Great men have always had ideas that they held consistently, and they changed their minds only through much evidence to disprove their orginial ideas. Their strength was consistency, not inconsistency.Report
Funny, I can think of great men who changed their minds. In fact, most of the cases I know did so. They had to, when confronted with a truly great idea. So Newton discovers gravity and the calculus, Kant reads Hume, Kierkegaard leaves Regine, etc. Once they’ve got the great idea, they tend to stick to it, but that’s because it’s really hard to let go of an idea that good, and that productive.
I believe what he’s suggesting is intellectual experimentation. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I think that’s how great ideas come about.Report
Very well said, Chris.Report
To be great is to come to the attention of many people. Most of them will misunderstand you, because that’s what people do.Report
“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
Uncle Bert said that.Report
Of course, he was as mad as a hatter.
The other thing I was thinking is that people tend to understand the stuff they spend a lot of time with much better than they stuff they come in slight contact with or hear about in passing. If you’re great, there will be a fish of a lot of people for whom you’re in category 2 or 3.Report
Jaybird — what is this in reference to?Report
The thread, dude.
(For what it’s worth, I imagine that Erik will soon get home to a real computer and be able to read all kinds of comments that got posted today and then be somewhat taken aback at the timing that resulted in you being the guy who got yelled at. With that said, I don’t think that you should be as thin skinned as you are. Life is tough and misunderstandings take place. Better to swallow pride and make clarifications and allow conversations to move forward than to get into a fight that nobody remembers a year later. If nothing else: HAVE A FIGHT THAT PEOPLE REMEMBER A YEAR LATER.)Report
(punches Jaybird through the Internet)
TAKE THAT!
(Nobody would be expecting that. It’d be memorable).Report
Wow, whichever port that was, Erik’s totally gonna have to close it.Report
Thin-skinned? I’m missing something. I’m not the one who reacted. What am I missing? I am truly flummoxed.Report
I basically think Emerson was an elitist snob who thought he was above it all, so I was asking for clarification regarding your comment. I’ll just let this all go by and chalk it up to a misunderstanding.Report
Oh I forgot to add — dude.Report
Awesome.Report
Yeah, it’s not been a good day for LoOG. Did we get some Balloon Juice links today or something?Report
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BJ typically gives us about 32 a day (950+ in the last 30), so that’s not an abnormal number of visits.Report
Was it? I was gone all day bullshitting with professors and students. This reminds me: could everyone here comment slower? I’m out a lot and there’s a lot to read at night. Thanks in advance everybody!Report
I’d appreciate if everyone would slow down enough that I can download all of the comments onto my cell phone without tapping Refresh every two minutes (if there’s more than 10 comments, I only download the last 10).Report
I don’t know if typing slower will help, but I’ll try.Report
I did not. I said “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” Actually, I think Napoleon beat me to that one, but he’s not around to take the credit, so I will.Report
He means a great intellectual. In that sense, I think history proves him right, even beyond his examples. What’s the apocryphal Schopenhauer quote? All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as being self-evident? That’s not quite true, but it’s got more than enough truth in it.Report
One more thing about this. Great ideas, which are what make great intellectuals, are bound to be misunderstood, because what makes them great is that they are radically new. For the most part, human ideas, even when they are new, stick pretty close to what we know. Creativity is, in the vast majority of cases, dependent entirely on the known. What makes an idea great is that it goes a little bit further, it strays a little bit more from the known. This makes misunderstanding inevitable, because we have only the known with which to understand them.
This is not to say that everyone will misunderstand them. There were people who got Copernicus and Kepler right away, and Darwin’s ideas were accepted by some very quickly, either through the force of his reasoning or because those who were accepting were inclined to appreciate his particular innovations. But most people misunderstood them, and in many cases, such as Copernicus or Darwin, many people feared them as a result. I don’t think Emerson means that everyone, everywhere, will misunderstand great intellectuals, but great intellectuals will be misunderstood, and widely so at first. This is the price one pays for giving the world great ideas.Report
Oh, and I wasn’t suggesting that I’d leave because I can’t take the heat, but because you brought it up and you are the owner — I don’t want to be where I’m unwelcomed.Report
Mike – my apologies if I took you the wrong way. Your comment – including the refernce to punchy, etc. – seemed directed at me, and my embrace of this quote. If you did not mean it that way I was obviously mistaken.Report
I made the “punchy” comment as a joke from the last time I disagreed with you and you thought I was picking a fight. I’m honestly not picking a fight — I just speak straightforwardly most times. I thought the “punchy” comment would send a signal of humor to lighten up the disagreement. But to futher explain, I think it’s the opposite of what Emerson said, and that inconsistency/lack of principles is why statesman have become statists, philosophers have become squishy pundits and divines, well, that was a stretch, but faux-elitists seemed to fit my theme of modern society’s fixation with the pragmatic and expedient over consistency in principles and ideas.Report
Like I said, I’m sure I just misread you. I can be touchy at times. Fuggedaboutit.Report
As a rule to go by with me, if I don’t call you a f*(&&&ing S&^%$#(, then I’m just disagreeing on the issue at hand.Report