English professor Ziff discusses Emerson's relevance in lecture

To commemorate Ralph Waldo Emerson's 200th birthday, Larzer Ziff, Professor Emeritus in the English Department, gave a talk on Sept. 12 entitled Emerson Now.

The focus of Ziff's talk was Emerson's applicability not just as a great writer and philosopher of his time, but of the present day as well. Emerson is the author of essays such as Nature, Self-Reliance and Representative Men; his transcendental philosophy has influenced people from Henry David Thoreau to present day business executives.

The central idea of Emerson's Self-Reliance is the law of truth to self, which places personal belief and personal good above obligations to others.

Emerson even claims that it is easier to obey one's duties than to obey one's true self. This doctrine, Ziff joked, has been used as the justification for the behavior of Enron and Tyco executives, and for the Republican tax cuts.

However, Ziff emphasized that "to view Emerson's importance through the men he influenced is to view him refracted" and to underestimate the writer's own usefulness in the 21st century.

Emerson believed that "there is one common mind to all men, therefore we can think what Plato thought, feel what a saint has felt."

Emerson wrote Representative Men to exemplify the universal mind. Though it discusses men of greatness in specific fields, for example, Plato the Philosopher and Shakespeare the Poet, the work is meant to represent the common experience and the qualities present in everyone. These men -- as examples of greatness -- represent the potential inherent to each person.

Because all men ultimately have the same experience, "the presence of the universal mind is the source of true morality," Ziff explained. This common mind also makes us understand things in terms of people, not in terms of facts, and led Emerson to write, "there is no history, only biography."

"We understand history through personages," Ziff clarified. Instead of comprehending historical events, we understand the people who shaped them. The historical record, Ziff claimed, is intended to, "Remedy the defect of the too-great nearness to ourselves."

By understanding the crucial importance of people in the past, we also understand that we are not the most important -- or the only -- people in the course of history.

However, Ziff pointed out that "the civil history of man is not his only history ... one's life is intertwined with the whole of organic and inorganic beings." Man is also an inextricable part of natural history, not just his own history.

Emerson himself drew his inspiration from nature. His writing was strongly influenced by his setting, either in New England or abroad in Europe. In Emerson's view, "expression proceeds as much from natural relationship as from thought," Ziff commented. From this natural inspiration comes Emerson's emphasis on flexibility rather than rigid form: "constantly in Emerson we see the insistence on flux rather than form," said Ziff.

The writer's affinity for natural settings led him to draw a comparison between the United States and nature. He felt that the vigorous attitude of Americans comes from being born and raised in such an untamable landscape and once wrote "in America, lies nature sleeping."

Ziff explained, however, that in contrast to the American literary character of the time,

Emerson "sought to avoid drawing a clique of followers around him." The writer actively sought to keep his readers away from him because, according to Ziff, he felt that being surrounded with so many people would interfere with his ideas.

Though Ziff holds to the age-old adage that you should never end a speech with a quotation, he allowed Emerson to have the last word in his talk. "I hate quotations," Ziff quoted. "Tell me what you know."