Emerson ends his essay “Self-reliance” with the following: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of your own principles.” Following this, some years later, Thoreau writes “Civil Disobedience” after he is imprisoned for adhering to his own moral compass, which is at odds with the state laws. Thoreau argues that us, individuals should live by our own principles rather than adhering to unjust laws and a government we do not agree with.
According to him, the Government is best which governs the least, and exists because people have to choose it to execute their will. However, it is susceptible to corruption, and often ends up pursuing its own self-interest (like in issues of slavery and the Mexican war) though those conflict with the higher divine law which governs the Universe. Majority rule is based on physical strength, not on what is always right or just.
Moral Diversion
“There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to war, and yet in effect do nothing to put an end to it.” – (Thoreau CD) Thoreau acknowledges that his opinion differs from others, and he is well aware of the implications of this. “I know most men think differently from myself…”
Thoreau is against the slavery and the Mexican war, more specifically against supporting the state that is itself supporting these immoral acts. To show his opposition, Thoreau refuses to pay his taxes – the money hence collected is used by the state to fund these immoral acts – and a result, he ends up in jail. Following his release, he writes CD as means to argue for the collective of men to not blindly follow the state bit instead to do what’s right for us all.
And that in essence would mean the “true place for a just man is prison.” Thoreau didn’t advocate the non-payment of taxes as a rule, and in fact, a well-meaning aunt soon paid his bill. The non-payment was just one example of the many non-violent ways that a democratically elected government could and must be resisted when its actions veer into aggression and unreason. An election settles who the president might be, it doesn’t determine that everything that president does is right or that one should simply do nothing until the next election. “There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.”
For Emerson, the individual comes first and this is at the core of his whole philosophy. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so… And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny…”
For Emerson, the individual comes first because he has divine intuition. “The magnetism which all original action is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust… We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition.” Emerson advocates his readers to avoid blindly following the paths of others and instead to trust and follow their own instincts and blaze their own path. Conformity, according to Emerson, is death to an individual. Emerson strongly believes that “imitation is suicide.” To Emerson, if a person possesses an opinion, the person should voice that opinion immediately without doubt.
When Thoreau uses the term consciousness, it is in one way the intuition Emerson refers to. In that it’s proper to the self. Thoreau suggested that true patriots were not those who blindly followed their administration. They were those who followed their own consciences and in particular, the principles of reason.
Thoreau wished to redistribute prestige away from blinkered obedience towards independent thought. What marked out a noble citizen of the republic, a real American, was not – in Thoreau’s view – that they respectfully shut up, but that they thought for themselves every day of an administration’s life.
Since self-reliance is an appeal to the individual to obey his instincts and to challenge tradition and conventional wisdom, its connection becomes apparent in that Thoreau hangs on to his conscience even when it means that he has to go to jail for upholding the higher principles guided by this higher law from which conscience stems from. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau stated that government should be expedient and conscientious.
He started off his essay with his motto, “That government is best which governs least” and “That government is best which governs not at all.” He meant that we did not need a government that made rules and that the government should let the people do whatever they wanted to do. He believed that government should be expedient, not inexpedient. “Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.” He used a lot of examples to justify the inexpedient government. One of them was the Mexican-American war.
“Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure…” It was inexpedient because war was just a tool for a few powerful individuals and did not have consent of the multitude. He discusses obedience to principle, independence from the government, and intolerance of injustice, which are all just kinds of self-reliance. Self-Reliance produces good citizenship. Obedience to principle produces good citizenship.
Throughout Civil Disobedience, this idea is a recurring theme and one of the first that Thoreau addresses. When discussing the idea of surrendering the conscience to the legislature he says, “Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward” (Thoreau 387). He makes the distinction between subjects, those who surrender their consciences, and men, who heed their consciences and judge for themselves.
Essentially, he states that our consciences are what define our manhood and that the individual must take it into their own hands instead of leaving it to an unjust government. He reinforces this point by likening those who submit without regard for their own consciences to “movable forts or magazines”. He further elaborates by saying, “The only obligation, which I have the right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right” (Thoreau 387).
However, consciousness differs from intuition in that it is divine. Divine consciousness is shared by everyone according to Thoreau but for Emerson, Intuition is proper to the self. It can be inferred from “To speak of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and it is.” (Emerson) that Intuition is stems from within ourselves- our souls – while consciousness being divine is like an ever-pervading wave in the universe which we can all access, if we were to want to do that.
Additionally, it can be inferred that Thoreau and Emerson mean very different things when it comes to actually acting on their consciousness/intuition. For Thoreau, in almost all accounts of civil disobedience, points to the seriousness, sincerity and moral conviction with which civil disobedient breach the law. For many disobedient, their breach of law is demanded of them not only by self-respect and moral consistency but also by their perception of the interests of their society.
Through their disobedience, they draw attention to laws or policies that they believe require reassessment or rejection. While for Emerson, following one’s intuition does not extend to the realms of state laws like Thoreau, but instead concerns himself with minute things, proper to the self, of the order of the individual instead a regional, or national order in terms of magnitude.
