Man Divided Against Himself
I am reading Emerson’s address The American Scholar (1837) his most famous work. I wasn’t expecting much more than a pep talk, and was surprised by its depth, from which I have copied the following:
It is one of the fables, which out of unknown antiquity, convey unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself, just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.
The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, – present to all particular men only partially, or through one facility; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whole aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst the other performs his. The fable implies that the individual to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers.
But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut like so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his craft, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book, the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
It is hardly necessary for me to add to this eloquence (all too rare in our time).
Except to say that it has been ignored entirely.
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