Ralph Waldo Emerson vs Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Authenticity

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both have a great deal to say about authenticity — 15 passages and 6 respectively in thinkr's library — and they do not say the same thing. Setting them side by side is more useful than reading either alone, because the disagreement shows you what each position is actually giving up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on authenticity

American essayist and central voice of Transcendentalism. His essays — Self-Reliance, Nature — call the individual back to direct experience and inner authority.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”

“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

“No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”

“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.”

“The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.”

“You can take better care of your secret than another can.”

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on authenticity

Genevan philosopher of feeling and the general will. His Social Contract and Emile reshaped politics and education in the Enlightenment.

“Let's go dance under the elms: / Step lively, young lassies. / Let's go dance under the elms: / Gallants, take up your pipes.”

“As a general rule—never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.”

“I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.”

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

“I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: Well, let them eat cake.”

“He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.”

Where they part

USA, 1803–1882 and Switzerland/France, 1712–1778 are not the same world, and the difference is not only historical. Ralph Waldo Emerson treats authenticity as something to be to be yourself in a world… — a matter of practice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau approaches it from another side entirely. Neither is refuting the other; they are answering slightly different questions, and noticing which question you are actually asking is most of the work.