SUNY Brockport Ralph Waldo Emersons Philosophy and Bertrand Russells View Paper

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SUNY Brockport

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Write a 4-5 page paper, typewritten and double-spaced. The images that I will include (besides the reading) is how professor expects each part of the questions to be answered. Please answer each part of the question in the paragraphs you type. You have already read these pages but I will post them again. Please use QUOTES to support the argument for both Authors. Thank you!

Option B

1. Explain Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance, including his arguments for it.

2. Explain Bertrand Russell's view that narcissism makes us unhappy, and his own recommendation for happiness.

3. Compare and contrast Emerson and Russell. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each view? Are they compatible to some extent? Which view or combination of views do you think is better?


Pages

Bertrand Russell: Read pages 173-182

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Read pages 211-226 in The Good Life



All the pages could not fit so I will include them after you accept. Thank you!


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Reason 13 ot enjoy cause we Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness at arises d to the That is blessed- over the e mind's to check ely in the ptions in ses from The British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer, Bertrand Rus- sell (1872–1970) studied at Cambridge University and later became a lec- turer at that school. His most influential work was on the foundations of muthematics, especially the ground-breaking Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead (three volumes, 1910–1913). A pacifist and liberal about such matters as religion and sexuality, his views re quite controversial in the early part of the century. He was dismissed from Cambridge in 1916 and spent the rest of his life living on his earnings made an impact on popular culture with such books as Mysticism and Logic (1918) and Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). Russell was al- pays a zealous defender of rationality in every area of life, as is evident in his lucid and commonsensical little book, The Conquest of Happiness (1930). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950. La priter and a lecturer. He wrote on almost every area of philosophy and nonstrate rning the an is and only lust external f he were ases to be e man, in e of spirit, imself, of e spiritual What Makes People Unhappy? Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but they are not, at least in a great majority of cases. If you are unhappy yourself, you will probably be prepared to admit that you are not exceptional in this. If you are happy , ask yourself many of your friends are so. And when you have reviewed your friends, teach yourself the art of reading faces; make yourself receptive to the moods of those whom you meet in the course of an ordinary day. how y difficult und to be ed without All things to be A mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe says Blake. Though the kinds are different, you will find that unhappiness meets you everywhere. Stand in a busy street during working hours, or on ? main thoroughfare at a week-end, or at a dance of an evening; empty From The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. Copyright 1930 by Horace Liveright, Inc., renewed © 1958 by Bertrand Russell. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. The Use of Reason Bertrand Russell 174 175 say that with every year that passes I you you that I most take possession of you one after another. You will find that each of will see anxiety, excessive concentration, dyspepsia, lack of interest in these different crowds has its own trouble. In the work-hour crowd anything but the struggle, incapacity for play, unconsciousness of their fellow creatures. On a main road at the week-end, you will see men and women, all comfortably off, and some very rich, engaged in the pursuit of pleasure. This pursuit is conducted by all at a uniform pace, that of the slowest car in the procession; it is impossible to see the road for the cars, or the scenery since looking aside would cause an accident; all the of all the cars are absorbed in the desire to pass other cars, which they cannot do on account of the crowd; if their minds wander from this preoccupation, as will happen occasionally to those who are not them- selves driving, unutterable boredom seizes upon them and stamps their was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost s enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things t desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire- other—as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminish- such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or ing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself—no doubt justly—a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, occupants be features with trivial discontent. friends may These considerations lead us to the problem of the individual: what can a man or woman, here and now, in the midst of our nostalgic society, do to achieve happiness for himself or herself? In discussing this problem, I shall confine my attention to those who are not subject to any extreme cause of outward misery. I shall assume a sufficient income to secure food and shelter, sufficient health to make ordinary bodily activities possible. I shall not consider the great catastrophes, such as loss of all one's children, or public disgrace. There are things to be said about such matters, and they are important things, but they belong to a different order from the things that I wish to say. My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable. I believe this unhappiness to be very die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self. And every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui. Interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping of a diary, to getting psychoanalyzed, or perhaps to becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper, pro- vided he were compelled to remain one. External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way. Self-absorption is of various kinds. We may take the sinner, the narciss- ist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types. largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for animals , power of the possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or ultimately depends. These are matters which lie within the given average good fortune, may be achieved. When I speak of “the sinner," I do not mean the man who commits sins: the word. I mean the man who is absorbed in the consciousness of sin. sins are committed by every one or no one, according to our definition of This man is perpetually incurring his own disapproval, which, if he is himself as he thinks he ought to be, which is in continual conflict with his religious, he interprets as the disapproval of God. He has an image of knowledge of himself as he is. If, in his conscious thought, he has long sense of sin may be buried deep in his unconscious, and only emerge since discarded the maxims that he was taught at his mother's knee, his everything. At bottom he still accepts all the prohibitions he was taught in shrewdness is wicked; above all, sex is wicked. He does not, of course, drinking is wicked; ordinary business individual, and I propose to suggest the change by which his happiness, cate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As a child, Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to advo- my favorite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.” At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable. In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I when infancy. Swearing is wicked; The Use of Reason 178 Bertrand Russell 179 things are where they are The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities con- therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite nected with it. There is, however, a further development which is common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of "pleasure.” That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the megalomaniac believe very things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of people parenthood also is essential. Where these one's own herd. To some lacking, only the exceptional man can achieve happiness; but enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the ment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjust- can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, pro- vided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavor, therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centered passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such pas- sions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centered upon ourselves: there that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case, the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will delib- erately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be impor- tant. I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be happy than unhappy. Whether I can help him to realize this wish, I do not know; but at any rate the attempt can do no harm. is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them. One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so litle variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, The Happy Man as this thought by many that happiness is impossible without a creed of a morter Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far s part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very simple one. It is less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy t not believe that such things are genuine causes of either happiness or their sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain things adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are s be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encour- aged this particular kind of self-absorption. and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections interest and affection to many affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the others. To be the recipient of affection is a will The Use of Reason 176 Bertrand Russell 177 abstain from any of these pleasures, but they are all poisoned for him by the feeling that they degrade him. The one pleasure that he desires with he can remember having experienced in childhood. This pleasure being no his whole soul is that of being approvingly caressed by his mother, which longer open to him, he feels that nothing matters; since he must sin, he decides to sin deeply. When he falls in love, he looks for maternal tender- ness, but cannot accept it, because, owing to the mother-image, he feels no respect for any woman with whom he has sexual relations. Then, in his disappointment, he becomes cruel, repents of his cruelty, and starts afresh on the dreary round of imagined sin and real remorse. This is the psychol- ogy of very many apparently hard-boiled reprobates. What drives them Liberation from the tyranny of early beliefs and affections is the first step together with the inculcation, in early years, of a ridiculous ethical code. is limiting himself artificially just as truly as is the man dominated by a sense of sin. The primitive man might be proud of being a good hunter, a point, kills pleasure in every activity for its own sake, and thus leads but he also enjoyed the activity of the chase. Vanity, when it passes beyond inevitably to listlessness and boredom. Often its source is diffidence, and its cure lies in the growth of self-respect. But this is only to be gained by successful activity inspired by objective interests. The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history. Love of power, like vanity, is a strong element in normal human s such is to be accepted; it becomes deplorable only when it is excessive or associated with an insufficient sense of reality. Where this occurs, it makes a man unhappy or foolish, if not both. The lunatic who thinks he is a crowned head may be, in a sense, happy, but his happiness is not of a kind that any sane person would envy. Alexander the Great was psychologically of the same type as the lunatic, though he possessed the mother-substitute) and nature, astray is devotion to an unattainable object (mother or towards happiness for these victims of maternal “virtue.” Narcissism is , in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired. Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil. In many women, especially rich society women, the capacity for feeling love is completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all men should love them. When a woman of this kind is sure that a man loves her, she has no further use for him. The same thing occurs, though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of that remarkable novel “Liaisons Dangereuses," which describes the love affairs of French aristocrats just before the Revo- lution. When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love. Other interests fail even more disastrously. A narcissist, for example , inspired by the homage paid to great painters, may become an art student ; but, as painting is for him a mere means to an end, the technique never becomes interesting, and no subject can be seen except in relation to self. valent to achieve the lunatic's dream. He could not, however, achieve his own dream, which enlarged its scope as his achievement grew. When it became clear that he was the greatest conqueror known to fame, he decided that he was a god. Was he a happy man? His drunkenness, his furious rages, his indifference to women, and his claim to divinity, suggest that he was not. There is no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world as raw material for the magnificence of one's own ego. Usually the megalomaniac, whether insane or nominally sane, is the product of some excessive humiliation. Napoleon suffered at school from inferiority to his schoolfellows, who were rich aristocrats, while he was a penurious scholarship boy. When he allowed the return of the émigrés, he had the satisfaction of seeing his former schoolfellows bowing down before him. What bliss! Yet it led to the wish to obtain a similar satisfaction at the expense of the Czar, and this led to Saint Helena. Since no man can be omnipotent, a life dominated wholly by love of power can hardly fail, sooner or later, to meet with obstacles that cannot be overcome. The knowledge that this is so can be prevented from obtruding on conscious- ness only by some form of lunacy, though if a man is sufficiently great he the political and in the psychoanalytic sense thus go hand in hand. And wherever psychoanalytic repression in any marked form takes place, there o genuine happiness. Power kept within its greatly to happiness, but as the sole end of life it leads to disaster, inwardly can imprison The result is failure and disappointment, with ridicule instead of the expected adulation. The same thing applies to those novelists whose nov- els always have themselves idealized as heroines. All serious success in work depends upon some genuine interest in the material with which the work is concerned. The tragedy of one successful politician after another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in the community and the measures for which he stands. The man who is only interested in himself is not admirable, and is not felt to be so. Consequently the man to achieve his object. But even if he does, he will not be completely happy, whose sole concern with the world is that it shall admire him is not likely since human instinct is never completely self-centered, and the narcissist or execute those who point this out to him. Repressions in IS NO proper add bounds may if not outwardly. The Use of Reason 178 Bertrand Russell 179 things are where they are The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities con- therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite nected with it. There is, however, a further development which is common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of "pleasure.” That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the megalomaniac believe very things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of people parenthood also is essential. Where these one's own herd. To some lacking, only the exceptional man can achieve happiness; but enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the ment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but man who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjust- can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, pro- vided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavor, therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the world, to aim at avoiding self-centered passions and at acquiring those affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such pas- sions some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self-admiration. In all these our desires are centered upon ourselves: there that happiness is possible, though they may adopt mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case, the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will delib- erately choose unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be impor- tant. I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be happy than unhappy. Whether I can help him to realize this wish, I do not know; but at any rate the attempt can do no harm. is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them. One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so litle variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, The Happy Man as this thought by many that happiness is impossible without a creed of a morter Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far s part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very simple one. It is less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy t not believe that such things are genuine causes of either happiness or their sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain things adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are s be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encour- aged this particular kind of self-absorption. and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections interest and affection to many affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the others. To be the recipient of affection is a will The Use of Reason 180 Bertrand Russell 181 interest, for a have put calculation, in the way in which one might lend money at man quence man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, speak- ing broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless to attempt to give it as a calculated affection is not genuine and is not felt to be so by the recipient. What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self continues to be self-centered and therefore does not get outside the So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness, he vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine. Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble. If, for example, his trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful, and then proceed, by the kind of technique that we have considered in earlier chapters, to plant this rational convic- Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in conse- it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial. I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt, though this is not, of course, universally true, to stress the act rather than the state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent will be widely different, according to his state of mind at the moment. If you see a child drowning and save it as the to morally. If, on the other hand, you say to yourself, “It is the part of virtue tion in his unconscious mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously. If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinarily unfortunate in his circumstances. If fear is his trouble, let him practice exercises designed to give courage. Courage in war has been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearless- ness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout's daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and in intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit facts secult of a direct impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse to succor the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must save this child,” you will be an even worse man afterwards than you were before . What applies in this extreme case, applies in many other instances that are less obvious. There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the atti- tude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is recom- mended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for exam- say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be ple, will without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear you when you over a very large field. What the objective interests are to be that will arise in have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the spor doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alterna- tive to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball, which can have no Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness disintegration within the self through lack of coordination between the s upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is the self and society, where the two are not knit together by the force of but you taneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do not say to yourself in advance, “I should be happy if I could become absorbed in well happen that you will fail altogether to find stamp-collecting interest- stamp-collecting,” and thereupon set to work to collect stamps, for it may pretty sure that genuine objective interests will grow up as soon as The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. ing. Only what genuinely interests you can be of any use to you, may be you have learnt not to be immersed in self.
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Running head: RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND BERTRAND RUSSELL'S VIEW

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Philosophy and Bertrand Russell's View
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

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RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND BERTRAND RUSSELL'S VIEW

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Ralph Waldo Emerson's Philosophy and Bertrand Russell's View
Ralph Waldo Emerson- Self-Reliance
Emerson emphasized the importance of trusting one's own conscience in his essay on
self-reliance. Through this, he believes that the approach is the only way one can maintain
personal integrity. This approach's main reason is the social pressure that constantly faces people
and requires them to conform to them and follow a path established by other people. Emerson
notes that following other people’s approach or path rarely yields good results. The essay also
introduces the concept of genius, which he states that being a genius is not a rare quality that is
exclusive to a few since it is within the grasp of everyone. "Whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of
goodness but must explore if it is goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your
own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an
answer which when quite young, I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to
importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church." (Emerson, 214). However, to achieve
this, one must live an authentic life. In self-reliance, he notes that the only rare thing is the
integrity of your own mind. Moral suicide occurs when we conform to society's beliefs and
accept being swayed by others' op...


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