The Conduct of Life
The Conduct of Life is a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson published in 1860 and revised in 1876. In this volume, Emerson sets out to answer "the question of the times:" "How shall I live?" It is composed of nine essays, each preceded by a poem. These nine essays are largely based on lectures Emerson held throughout the country, including for a young, mercantile audience in the lyceums of the Midwestern boomtowns of the 1850s.
The Conduct of Life has been named as both one of Emerson's best works and one of his worst. It was one of Emerson's most successful publications and has been identified as a source of influence for a number of writers, including Friedrich Nietzsche.Publication
Three years after publishing his English Traits, Boston's Ticknor & Fields announced on 27 December 1859, an "early appearance" of a new book by Emerson titled The Conduct of Life. Confirmed as "completed" on 10 November 1860, Emerson’s seventh major work came out on 12 December of the same year—simultaneously in the US and in Great Britain. It was advertised as "matured philosophy of the transatlantic sage" and sold as a collector’s item "uniform in size and style with Mr. Emerson’s previous works." Quickly running through several editions in the U.S. it was soon picked up by a third publisher. In Great Britain, it was reported as "selling rapidly." Subsequently, several passages from the book appeared in popular U.S. newspapers, most of them quoting either from 'Wealth' or 'Behavior'.
First translations of the book appeared during Emerson's lifetime in France and in Russia. Still, the height of the book's international fame came around the turn of the 20th century, coinciding with a growing public interest in one of Emerson's most famous readers: Friedrich Nietzsche. Eventually, The Conduct of Life was translated into at least 13 different languages, including Serbian, Dutch and Chinese.Reception
Though hailed by Thomas Carlyle as "the writer's best book" and despite its commercial success, initial critical reactions to The Conduct Of Life were mixed at best. The Knickerbocker praised it for its "healthy tone" and called it "the most practical of Mr. Emerson's works," while The Atlantic Monthly attested that "literary ease and flexibility do not always advance with an author’s years" and thought the essays inferior to Emerson's earlier work. Yale’s The New Englander while complimenting Emerson's abilities, criticized the book as depicting "a universe bereft of its God" and described its author as writing "with the air of a man who is accustomed to be looked up to with admiring and unquestioning deference." Littell's Living Age found the book to contain the "weakest kind of commonplace elaborately thrown into unintelligible shapes" and claimed it to read in parts like an "emasculate passage of Walt Whitman." Others were no less critical, proclaiming that Emerson "has come to the end of what he had to say, and is repeating himself" or even calling him a "phrasemonger" and "second-hand writer".Significance
While some critics like Harold Bloom place The Conduct of Life among Emerson's best work—Bloom calls it "a crucial last work for Americans"—it has only been paid little critical attention.
As The Conduct of Life is, in parts, thematically grouped around practical life issues, it has been discussed as participating "in the aspirations of the contemporary conduct-of-life literature" while opening up possibilities of gender fluidity. Also, despite the stronger reconciliation between self and society compared to Emerson’s previous, more individualistic works, The Conduct of Life is in no way a one-sided affirmation of American society, especially 19th century capitalism. Rather, it can be seen as a holistic attempt to develop "principles for a good, natural, adequate conduct of life." As the dialectic approach of these essays often fails to come to tangible conclusions, critics like Ellen Vellela have described the whole book as weakly structured and repetitive. Others argue that "rather than trying to dissolve the ambiguous tension of Emerson’s texts, the different arguments should be valued as a part of a dialectic that productively captures the friction of opposing poles." In this way, "the workings of Emerson, as well as his aphoristic, succinct expressiveness could be characterized as Emersonian inceptions: getting us to start thinking, planting thoughts." Still others found an overarching unity of design to transcend the fragmentation of Emerson’s individual essays within the volume as a whole. More recent readings see Emerson as constructing an "ebb and flow within The Conduct of Life" that hints at transitionality as the "final reality of appearances."Essays
The following summaries/analyses are attempts to capture the essence of the essays from The Conduct of Life. The page numbers in brackets link to an online copy of the 1860 edition of the book on archive.org.Fate
In this first essay, Emerson introduces the basic idealist principles of The Conduct of Life and seeks to reconcile the seemingly contradicting ideas of freedom and fate through a unifying Weltgeist-approach. He claims that even though the "bulk of mankind believe in two gods" —namely free will and Providence—these concepts are really "under one dominion" and expressions of the same beneficial force. "A breath of will blows eternally," he writes "through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary." Historical and societal events are therefore not merely an expression of individual actions and thought but result of "the will of all mind" and necessitated by nature: "When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done." Still, these cosmic processes do not disenfranchise the individual, but are based on an individual desire to actualize one’s true will—a will that makes individual freedom essential: "Liberty of the will is the end and aim of this world." Individual will and purpose, though, have very strict, biological limitations. While the "mind of all" might give birth to great men and leader figures, it also creates inherently inferior beings, as everyone’s individual future is "already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form." Here, race and genetics play a crucial role in Emerson’s line of argumentation, when, by quoting the racist writings of Robert Knox and referring to phrenology and physiognomics, Emerson claims that the "strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, the healthiest and strongest."Power
Long before Friedrich Nietzsche’s coining of a similar phrase, Emerson’s essay claims that "life is a search after power" and that "a cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works". In this framework, power is not only a desirable end, but also a natural attribute of powerful people. Such people stand out in every circle of society. The reasons for their power are their "causationism", self-reliance, and health. Power is thus not necessarily with the refined elite. In fact, "the instinct of the people is right" —the heartland’s farmers’ natural way of living and their straight approach to concrete problems makes them apt to be rulers. This is a major concession of a New England intellectual to Jacksonian Democracy and a "popular government". However, it comes along with the optimist prospect that after all, "power educates the potentate". In large parts, the text conceptualizes power as an attribute of a few special people. However, there is also a more pragmatic side to the text, which claims that concentration, use, and routine can also help to develop a powerful personality: "Practice is nine tenth". In the end, the text reconciles this practical tendency with the intellectual approach to life: "We can easily overpraise the vulgar hero."Wealth
This text unfolds a two-sided approach to the notion of wealth: On the one hand, the economic side of the term is discussed in what seems to be a capitalist praise of America’s free market economy: "The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and preserving". On the other hand, a criticism of early consumer-capitalism in the cities of Emerson’s time, where "society is babyish, and wealth is made a toy", brings about a redefinition of the term. Thereby, the wealthy individual is characterized as a culturally productive and well-educated member of society, whilst the wealth of a society as a whole can be measured by the degree of participation it offers its citizens the public should. Thus, the term wealth is not reduced to being rich in pecuniary terms, but widened to cultural, moral and psychological aspects. In Emerson’s terms: "Wealth is mental; wealth is moral."Culture
By exploring the multitude of different facets of "culture", Emerson points out its complexity. For him, culture should not only be understood in the context of social community, but also on the level of the individual: in fact, individuality is thought of as the basis of culture. More specifically, culture is conceptualized as self-cultivation in an educational sense – a life-long process which "cannot begin too early". In a world that is driven by "the pursuit of power and of wealth as a means of power", culture is a corrective force: it "corrects the theory of success". It has a balancing effect, since it "modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in scale" and thereby "redresses his balance". As the physical sphere of this educational process Emerson praises the urban—the cities that "give us collision" —as a place of intellectual stimulation just as he praises solitude, "to genius the stern friend", which can be found in nature. Emerson breaks with the myth of culture being thought of as "high" culture: for him cultural competence is not only the acquisition of knowledge through literature, but more importantly an experiential process through the active involvement with and in nature: "Archery, cricket, gun and fishing rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers."