The Art of Manliness - How Emerson Can Help You Become a Stoic Nonconformist

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.260 When we think about Stoic philosophers, we typically think about the thinkers of ancient

00:00:14.960 Greece and Rome, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But my guest, Mark Matusik, says

00:00:20.480 there was an incredibly insightful Stoic philosopher who lived on the American continent

00:00:24.240 in more modern times, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Matusik is the author of Lessons from an American

00:00:29.800 Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your Life. Today on the show, he shares how Stoicism and

00:00:34.640 Transcendentalism overlap, and how you can use Emerson's Stoic philosophy to become a

00:00:38.300 non-conformist. We discuss the lessons you can learn from Emerson on developing self-reliance,

00:00:43.120 embracing the strengths of your weaknesses, trusting your own genius instead of imitating

00:00:46.900 others, gaining confidence from nature, compensating for the difficulties of relationships through the

00:00:52.060 joy of deeper connections, living with greater courage, and more. After the show's over, check

00:00:56.960 out our show notes at aum.is slash Emerson. All right, Mark Matusik, welcome to the show.

00:01:19.340 Thanks a lot. It's great to be here.

00:01:20.960 So you got a new book out called Lessons from an American Stoic, How Emerson Can Change Your

00:01:25.460 Life. And this is about the great American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm curious,

00:01:31.940 how did you discover Ralph Waldo Emerson, and how did he change your life?

00:01:37.940 I was in the first year of graduate school, and I was having a very bad time in my life. I couldn't

00:01:45.360 find my direction. I felt lost in academia. I was fairly depressed and anxious a lot of the time.

00:01:53.060 And I happened to fall into a job as a research assistant for a professor who was writing a book

00:01:58.720 about Ralph Waldo Emerson. And I barely knew his work. Just from high school, I had read a couple

00:02:03.920 of essays, but it didn't really mean anything to me. And you know how when the student is ready,

00:02:09.040 the teacher shows up. And when I started to read his work, something resonated in me that I hadn't

00:02:16.920 encountered before. He was the first transcendental writer I had ever come across. He had a vision of

00:02:23.340 human potential that was much bigger than anything I had ever encountered before. And it cut through my

00:02:31.900 depression in a way that nothing else really had. The beauty of the writing, the expansiveness of his

00:02:40.700 vision, and the sense of self-reliance, which is something that I had never understood deeply before

00:02:47.360 coming across Emerson, really shifted how I looked at myself and the world. I stopped blaming other

00:02:53.720 people for my problems. I started looking inside myself for answers. I realized that even though I

00:03:00.960 considered myself an agnostic, an atheist, that I really did have a deep sense of spirituality in me.

00:03:08.260 It wasn't an organized religious kind of spirituality, but there was definitely a sense

00:03:13.360 of something bigger than myself and being connected to something larger that I had been longing for my

00:03:20.060 whole life and didn't even realize it. So the book is called Lessons from an American Stoic. I've

00:03:25.820 never thought of Emerson as a Stoic before. You said in the book that he was called America's original

00:03:30.180 Stoic. Why is that? You know, people don't realize what a Stoic Emerson was. So much of

00:03:37.700 transcendental philosophy overlaps with Stoicism. They both share this idea that we all create our

00:03:45.120 own reality and that how we see is how we live. They all talked about, Remerson as well as the

00:03:53.400 ancient Stoics talked about the fact that nothing can really harm you except with your own permission,

00:03:59.500 you know, that how we interpret our lives has everything to do with our experience.

00:04:03.720 They both talked about obstacles being opportunities, virtue as a path of happiness.

00:04:10.380 The Stoics, as well as Emerson, shared this belief that character is destiny, that how you think,

00:04:16.220 what you believe is who you become. And that's what unfolds as your destiny in life.

00:04:21.720 Also, the Stoics believe, you know, God is in everything, like the universe. He's there

00:04:26.800 all over the place. And like transcendentalism had a similar idea.

00:04:29.760 That's exactly it. Yeah. That the God in you connects to the God in all things. That non-dual

00:04:37.280 metaphysical belief was very much present with the Stoics. And it was Emerson's whole life.

00:04:44.120 His entire life's work was about helping people recognize that they have, that we all have in

00:04:51.220 ourselves access to a bigger mind, what he called the over soul or the over mind. We all have access to

00:04:59.220 that. And the Stoics believe that as well. And that when we tap into that deep wisdom in ourselves,

00:05:04.940 we know much more than we're aware of. And we're much more powerful than we give ourselves credit

00:05:10.720 for. So Emerson is famous for his essay called Self-Reliance. It's all about being an individual.

00:05:17.680 I think everyone's probably read that at some point, maybe in high school and college.

00:05:21.500 What did Emerson mean exactly by self-reliance? And what do you think people get wrong about his

00:05:26.860 idea of self-reliance? This is huge. This may be the biggest takeaway from my book is that we have

00:05:33.860 misunderstood what he meant by self-reliance. Self-reliance has so often been misinterpreted

00:05:39.780 as isolationism, arrogance, egotism. But Emerson said that there is nothing so weak as an egotist and

00:05:48.500 that self-reliance is reliance on God. Now, whether we think of God as being God up in the sky of

00:05:54.880 traditional religion or just spirit, realizing that self-reliance is a reliance on the thing

00:06:00.800 in us that's bigger than our personality. And when you get that, it takes you out of the victim's

00:06:07.340 seat. So many of us live our lives putting our power outside of ourselves, feeling like we're

00:06:13.160 victims of circumstance. And self-reliance is the antithesis of that. It says that we can take back

00:06:19.120 our power by recognizing that we have a choice in how we respond to circumstances. We have a choice

00:06:26.060 in how we see ourselves and the world. And when you develop what psychologists call an internal locus

00:06:32.060 of control instead of an external locus of control, it shifts the way you live. You start to look inside

00:06:38.840 for guidance instead of always seeking authority outside yourself. And you also learn to know yourself

00:06:46.860 and to think for yourself. You know, of course, the first premise of all philosophy is to know

00:06:51.680 thyself. And that's very much at the heart of self-reliance. Without self-knowledge, we can't

00:06:57.100 live empowered lives. So what you've done in your book, Lessons from an American Stoic, is I think you

00:07:02.680 did a great job. As you looked at all of Emerson's work, his essays, his letters that he wrote to

00:07:08.200 various friends, his journals, and extracted lessons on how we can become more self-reliant in an

00:07:16.340 Emersonian sort of way. And you developed, created 12 lessons. I want to talk about some of these

00:07:20.880 lessons today and how we can become more self-reliant. And the first one, you mentioned

00:07:24.940 character is destiny, or you called it character is everything. And in this section, you talked about

00:07:30.200 Emerson's idea of compensation. How can Emerson's idea of compensation help us discover our character?

00:07:39.260 Compensation basically says that for every sweet, there is a sour, that for every weakness,

00:07:44.600 there is a strength. And understanding that there's a duality in human life that we need to

00:07:50.540 make space for if we want to be whole people. That means incorporating what we call the shadow

00:07:57.060 into our self-awareness and into our self-acceptance. So compensation means accepting your own

00:08:07.100 contradictions and understanding that, as he said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little 0.99

00:08:14.220 minds. That when we're constantly aspiring to be consistent, monolithic, that leads to conformity

00:08:21.740 and it leads to a very unrealistic expectation of who we are. The fact is we're all mixed bags and

00:08:27.560 that's what makes us unique. That's what gives us our originality. There's nothing wrong with that.

00:08:32.160 The problem is that we spend so much of our lives judging ourselves for the things that we

00:08:36.700 can't accept or that we wish were different and pushing them away.

00:08:40.880 So what Emerson is all about embracing all of who we are and then using that mixed bag,

00:08:47.960 that motley crew of characters inside ourselves, using all of that to become as unique and particular

00:08:55.500 and original as we can be in our lives. So it's not about smoothing out the rough edges and it's not

00:09:02.460 about hiding the things in us that we're ashamed of. It's about owning them and seeing how they can

00:09:07.740 inform us. Because another thing he said and compensation is about is understanding that

00:09:13.060 our faults, our losses, our disappointments are also teachers.

00:09:17.180 Yeah, I think that's a really useful idea of understanding even personal weaknesses you might

00:09:21.940 have. It might be the source of your strength. Someone who might think, well, I'm just not

00:09:26.600 very extroverted, right? I can't put myself out there and be sort of like the life of the party.

00:09:31.360 Well, then Emerson would say, well, what sorts of good things come from that? Like what does

00:09:35.700 allow you? Maybe you're a little bit more introspective. Maybe you are able to connect

00:09:39.240 better on a more intimate level, one-on-one with people. So I like that idea. And you see in Emerson's

00:09:44.780 writing, like he struggled with that. He was always pointing out his flaws and he'd often compare

00:09:49.960 himself maybe to Thoreau, right? He said, well, Thoreau's out there living the ideas of transcendentalism

00:09:55.880 better than I am. But I think one of the strengths that Emerson had, Thoreau was out there

00:10:01.880 looking at bullfrogs and building sheds. But Emerson was a great writer. He was a good public

00:10:06.400 speaker. So even though he wasn't really good at the hands-on, you know, self-reliance of

00:10:11.420 transcendentalism, it was a strength because he was able to be a great speaker and spread these ideas

00:10:16.320 of transcendentalism. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And he was very hard on himself. He had been

00:10:22.220 a really insecure little boy. Nobody was expected very much of him. He had these very popular,

00:10:28.500 good-looking brothers who were outgoing. And he was this chubby, introverted little guy who

00:10:34.800 nobody expected much of. So from the time he was a little boy, he had an inferiority complex and

00:10:41.280 problems with self-esteem. And he struggled with that throughout his life. And it's part of what

00:10:46.040 made him such a great writer is that he was able to be so candid about himself and so human with

00:10:52.540 himself. And as you said, there were many things that he couldn't do well. He couldn't build a shed

00:10:57.800 on his own land that he loaned to Thoreau to build the shed at Walden Pond. He couldn't do that. And

00:11:04.660 he did envy Thoreau for a lot of his hands-on abilities. But Emerson was a far greater writer.

00:11:11.480 He was a much deeper thinker. And Thoreau took many of his ideas from Emerson. So this isn't to take

00:11:17.840 anything away from Thoreau. He was a unique and powerful soul. But Thoreau also had, of course,

00:11:24.660 his many, many flaws, not being able to connect with other people, not being willing to put his

00:11:31.320 work into the world in a way that was satisfying to him. There were ways that Thoreau felt like a

00:11:36.960 failure as well. And what Emerson is saying is that trying to be someone else's idea of what a powerful,

00:11:44.480 strong, successful person looks like is a disaster. He said that imitation is suicide and that you reach a

00:11:52.700 certain point in your life that you realize that if you don't start to follow your own genius,

00:11:59.600 that voice of guidance inside yourself, you're never going to reach the destination that is meant for

00:12:04.840 you. All right. So another lesson is you are how you see. And this is all about perspective.

00:12:10.340 How did Emerson expand his perspective on himself and in his life?

00:12:14.320 Through self-inquiry, that really was his primary means of self-discovery. And it's also the path of

00:12:22.520 self-reliance is understanding oneself. One way that he did that was through journal writing.

00:12:28.220 He turned inward as did the ancient Stoics in his journal and exploring his inner life,

00:12:34.620 asking himself the kinds of deep questions that we don't often ask in the everyday conversation.

00:12:41.140 Who am I? What am I doing here? What do I mean? What is this life for? Those are the kinds of

00:12:47.080 questions that he explored in his journal. And it gave him a deeper sense of who he was. And he came

00:12:52.940 to see that, as he put it, people do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a

00:12:58.640 confession of their character. He came to see that the way he was seeing the world said more about him

00:13:05.200 than it did the outside world. And he said, what is life but the angle of vision? So it's all

00:13:11.040 about questioning our angle of vision, questioning our perspective in an ongoing way. Because of

00:13:17.480 course, what's true for you today may not be true for you next week. And that's why self-inquiry,

00:13:22.640 particularly journal writing, is a practice. We're always starting over. And that's why you can sit and

00:13:28.640 ask the same questions week after week, month after month, and get different answers. Because we are

00:13:34.340 constantly changing, and our needs are changing, and who we are shifts. As Emerson said, the same world

00:13:42.120 is a hell and a heaven, depending on how we look at it. And that goes back to that law of compensation,

00:13:48.200 understanding that everything has both sides to it, depending on the way you frame it, and what it

00:13:54.180 means to you.

00:13:54.860 Yeah, the journal writing, that was really important to Emerson. He called his journal

00:13:59.160 the wide world. And then one of the first things he did when he met Thoreau, he said, are you keeping

00:14:03.940 a journal? And Thoreau at the time wasn't keeping a journal. And Emerson was like, you should keep a

00:14:08.140 journal. And because Thoreau started keeping a journal, we have all this great writing because of that.

00:14:13.480 And that's another common thing with Emerson and the Stoics. A lot of people have probably read

00:14:18.700 Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Those are basically, those are journal entries. Those were for himself.

00:14:24.580 They weren't meant to be public writings. They were just him writing in a journal, telling him to

00:14:29.780 get his act together. And so there's another Stoic connection right there.

00:14:34.120 Yeah, it's absolutely true. We wouldn't have the Meditations if Marcus Aurelius hadn't kept a

00:14:38.460 journal. We wouldn't have Walden if Thoreau hadn't kept a journal when he was at Walden Ponds. A lot of

00:14:45.280 what later became the book Walden were journal entries. So this is really about understanding that we

00:14:52.840 have this tool at our disposal, this tool of self-inquiry. And you don't have to be a great writer to do

00:14:59.300 that. It's not about creating beautiful prose. It's about having the willingness to ask deep

00:15:03.920 questions and tell the truth. And that's something, of course, we don't often do. You know, we think that

00:15:09.920 we do. We go through our lives being mostly honest people trying to, you know, do the right thing. But the

00:15:16.000 fact is that we all dissemble and lie every day of our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways.

00:15:23.360 And what journal writing helps you to do is cut through that. Because, of course, you can't lie

00:15:28.280 to yourself in quite the same way as you do to other people. And that's the beauty of self-inquiry,

00:15:34.540 is that you challenge your own narratives. And because, of course, we are story-making animals.

00:15:39.720 That's what we do. It's how we survive in the world. We create interpretations of our experience.

00:15:46.320 But the interpretation is not the truth. You know, what happened is not your idea about what

00:15:51.520 happened. So what journal writing helps you do is get between those two things and tweak them apart.

00:15:57.520 So you see, ah, this is what happened. And that's what I told myself about what happened.

00:16:02.420 And when you can disidentify from the story, that's when you begin to awaken to what is true.

00:16:08.940 And a different, a more authentic way of being in the world.

00:16:13.060 So another lesson is build your own world. And this is all about becoming a non-conformist.

00:16:18.580 Transcendentalists were big on this idea of non-conformity. What did Emerson mean by

00:16:22.980 non-conformity? Because that's a word people throw around a lot. Well, I'm a non-conformist. But

00:16:27.320 I think Emerson had a deeper meaning to that.

00:16:30.180 He did. And it goes to what we've been saying about trusting this voice inside us. We all have

00:16:36.220 what he called genius. That comes from the Romans were the first to use the word genius. And what

00:16:42.260 they mean by that is our muse or the tutelary deity that we come into life with that is unique to us.

00:16:49.380 And the only purpose of your genius, it's also called the daemon by the Greeks, is to guide you

00:16:56.160 toward your own fruition. And so the non-conformist is devoted to listening to the voice of their own

00:17:03.420 genius and trusting their own intuition and their own inner guidance. Emerson said,

00:17:09.820 to be yourself in a world that's constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest

00:17:14.140 accomplishment. We have to swim against the tide because, of course, society doesn't want a

00:17:20.600 citizenry of non-conformist. Society survives by people coloring inside the lines, doing what they're 0.98

00:17:27.600 told to do, and being socialized. And of course, we need to be socialized as social animals. We need to

00:17:32.820 cooperate. That's all true. But when it comes to making the deep decisions in our own lives and

00:17:38.620 the choices that matter to us, it's a disaster to try to follow someone else's daemon, someone else's

00:17:45.800 muse. We end up living somebody else's life. Emerson says that society is not your friend,

00:17:52.320 and it's really important to remember that. So it doesn't mean being antisocial necessarily,

00:17:57.880 but it means understanding where your power lies. Your power lies in yourself. As Emerson said,

00:18:04.520 my authority comes from my non-conformity. We don't want to be living according to other people's

00:18:10.860 standards of goodness and thereby becoming hypocritical, which is what happens a lot.

00:18:17.360 Folks live outwardly one way, but inside there's something else. He's trying to unify the inside with

00:18:24.080 the outside so that we are whole, and it heals the division and the conflict that comes up when we

00:18:30.300 are trying to impersonate other people. Yeah, Emerson called that double consciousness.

00:18:35.560 Exactly. Exactly.

00:18:37.260 And in that chapter about non-conformity, you make the case that both Thoreau and Emerson were examples

00:18:43.660 of non-conformity in their own way. Thoreau, he really embraced this idea of non-conformity in a way

00:18:50.880 that even Emerson, and we were talking about this earlier, how Emerson kind of envied Thoreau.

00:18:56.940 And there's this great quote that Emerson said about Thoreau's embrace of transcendentalism.

00:19:02.700 He said,

00:19:04.360 Thoreau gives me in flesh and blood my own ethics. He is far more real in daily practically obeying them

00:19:10.700 than I. And then Emerson also said this of Thoreau, he walked abreast with his days and felt no shame

00:19:16.960 in not studying a profession. For he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

00:19:22.540 But Emerson could be a non-conformist in his own way. When he was a minister, his thoughts on God

00:19:27.760 started to change. And then he gave this address to the Harvard Divinity School,

00:19:32.360 where he said some stuff that upset a lot of people. He said some things that people thought

00:19:37.900 were heretical. And so he was denounced. But even though he was denounced, he never replied to the

00:19:44.300 criticism. He just let his word stand. And I mean, he wasn't invited back to speak at Harvard again,

00:19:51.020 I think it was like for something like 30 years. So that took some chutzpah too.

00:19:54.900 Oh, it absolutely did. No, he was not a coward. Thoreau was an extreme. Thoreau was somebody who

00:20:02.580 truly lived outside the margins of what you would call normality in a way that Emerson didn't. Emerson

00:20:10.560 was a pretty solid bourgeois. He was married, he had children, he lived in the same house.

00:20:15.860 Thoreau rejected many of the things we associate with a civilization. But Emerson was a very brave

00:20:23.560 man. He was a seventh generation minister. He had this amazing job at 28 as the head of the second

00:20:29.880 church in Boston, a very prestigious job. And he gave up the pulpit. He walked away from it. And

00:20:36.400 that was, you know, that was a scandal that he did that people called him a pagan and a pantheist,

00:20:42.620 but he didn't care. So it wasn't that he backed away from other people's judgment. It's that he was a

00:20:50.280 more self-conscious soul than Thoreau. He was more circumspect. So they had a different kind of courage.

00:20:59.500 But that's important too, because one thing that Emerson says is never try to imitate another person's

00:21:04.620 courage, that we all have our own version of what brave looks like. So we need not try to imitate

00:21:10.800 other people's way of being in the world. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our

00:21:15.220 sponsors. And now back to the show. So another lesson, one of my favorites was, without confidence,

00:21:25.220 the universe is against me. What did Emerson mean by confidence?

00:21:28.700 You know, confidence comes from the root word for with faith. And for him, confidence was having faith

00:21:37.800 in that thing in us that knows, that genius, that voice of guidance, which is connected to the divine,

00:21:46.320 however you think of the divine. So for him, confidence had to do with tapping into the thing

00:21:51.840 in us that's bigger than our personality. He talked about us having a giant within us,

00:21:57.880 and that when we discover that giant, it frees us of so many of our fears. And also when you have

00:22:05.500 confidence, as I'm sure you've seen in your own life, when you, as he said, once you make a decision,

00:22:10.920 the universe conspires to make it happen. So confidence has charisma connected to it. Confidence

00:22:17.280 has a kind of a magnetism. And it means being rooted in what is true for you, which is something

00:22:23.360 that's always changing. So that's why consistency is an overrated virtue, according to Emerson,

00:22:29.840 because what you care about today isn't what you're going to care about in a couple of weeks.

00:22:34.260 And confidence comes from being true to your own changes and your own changeability and being

00:22:40.640 connected to that internal locus of control that I was talking about earlier. Instead of feeling like

00:22:46.700 life is happening to us, it's more like life is happening through us. And we are not the victims

00:22:52.740 of circumstance. We can always shift our relationship to our circumstances and gauge our responses. And

00:23:01.060 this, of course, is the heart of Stoicism, is learning to gauge your responses to the outside world and to

00:23:06.980 external conditions. And then you realize that external conditions aren't running your life. Your mind is

00:23:13.240 running your life. And how you respond to those conditions is what determines your well-being.

00:23:18.960 And you also talk at the beginning of that chapter how Emerson's idea of confidence was also tied up

00:23:24.240 with this idea of enthusiasm. But it's the Greek idea of enthusiasm. What is that idea?

00:23:31.420 Well, the Greek word root for enthusiasm means with God. It means filled with God. So once again,

00:23:38.880 it's connected to spirit, whatever a person calls spirit. Many people are allergic to the G word.

00:23:45.800 They can't stand religion. That's fine. Enthusiasm is connected to passion and spirit, the thing that

00:23:52.260 enlarges us, that takes us beyond what we're capable of. Enthusiasm is a real joy in living and connecting

00:24:01.080 to the power that's bigger than we are. And that's, of course, connected to nature. Nature is one of our

00:24:06.600 primary means of tapping into that higher form of energy. And that's what enthusiasm is. That's what

00:24:15.280 confidence is. And that's why, of course, he, like Thoreau, talks so much about learning from nature,

00:24:21.120 spending time in nature, remembering that you are nature, seeing the lessons that nature can teach

00:24:27.020 you. He talks about watching ants on the ground and learning from their industriousness,

00:24:32.080 or learning tranquility from the clear blue sky, or learning durability and stamina from the way

00:24:40.060 the water hits a rock and the rock can just bear the water hitting it over and over and over. We learn

00:24:46.720 from nature. We learn these lessons about how to be a whole human being from connecting to the natural

00:24:53.220 world. And one of his sacrilegious ideas was saying that we are nature. And that since nature is God

00:25:00.840 on earth or the representation of the divine on earth, we also are divine. And that was blasphemy

00:25:07.940 for him to say that. But it's really the root of Emerson's wisdom is that as parts of nature,

00:25:14.000 we share all the qualities of nature. And that includes the ability to free ourselves and to adapt

00:25:21.300 and the resilience and the ability to regenerate and recreate ourselves. All of these are visible in the

00:25:28.180 natural world. And when you connect to that, it gives you enormous vitality and confidence and

00:25:33.580 enthusiasm. Okay. So confidence was required to live a self-reliant life and confidence required

00:25:41.300 enthusiasm or vitality. And you have a whole chapter about vitality. It's called a stream of power runs

00:25:47.760 through you. And that's that whole idea of life is streaming. We're part of nature. We can tap into that.

00:25:53.000 But what's interesting about Emerson's life, he wrote these just really inspiring prose about

00:25:59.180 vitality and confidence. One of my wife's and I's favorite quotes from Emerson is,

00:26:05.000 God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. It's very bracing and very stirring.

00:26:09.920 But if you look at his personal life, his private life, it seemed like this idea of confidence,

00:26:15.060 enthusiasm, and vitality was something that he struggled with. What did that look like in his life?

00:26:19.740 Well, first of all, physical vitality was a struggle for him. He was never a strong man

00:26:26.240 physically. He had tuberculosis from the time he was a young boy. He used to envy the vitality of the

00:26:33.100 people around him. He had to measure out his energy very carefully to do the work that he wanted to do.

00:26:40.160 And he was constantly lamenting his lack of animal power, he used to call it. His animal forces were weak.

00:26:47.560 And yet he recognized that that vitality is something that's streaming through us.

00:26:55.080 As he said, man is a conductor of a whole stream of electricity. So we are electric beings. And this,

00:27:02.020 of course, reminds you of Whitman and singing the body electric. This was very much an idea in the air

00:27:08.120 at that time. And vitality is that force that through the green fuse drives the flower,

00:27:14.980 as Dylan Thomas put it, is something that we all have access to, and we need to learn to husband it.

00:27:20.820 And that's something Emerson talks about a lot. That goes to nonconformity as well, because we can't

00:27:25.980 fritter our energies away trying to imitate other people. We need to be clear about how our own

00:27:32.400 stream of electricity operates. And his was intermittent, and it was not as strong as it might have been.

00:27:40.260 So he had to be very careful about it, feeding himself well, physically, spiritually, and

00:27:46.460 intellectually in order to strengthen himself, because it was something that didn't come easily

00:27:53.200 to him.

00:27:53.980 I think that's interesting about Emerson, how he lacked that physical vitality. And as a consequence,

00:27:57.920 he may have realized the importance. You know how important something is when you lack it,

00:28:02.720 right? And so he understood the importance of vitality.

00:28:05.100 And I think also, I think he was trying to perhaps transfer, kind of bring up this idea of not just

00:28:10.860 physical vitality, but also spiritual vitality. Like, if you can't be vital in your physical life,

00:28:17.160 you can live a strenuous, vital life spiritually. And what's interesting, Friedrich Nietzsche was an

00:28:23.260 admirer of Emerson. And what's interesting about Nietzsche's work is, you know, he's known for the

00:28:28.200 Ubermensch and the Overman, and it's all very bracing and vital sort of prose. But like Emerson,

00:28:34.300 Nietzsche, he was frail, he was sick, like he spent most of his life just traveling to different

00:28:39.540 places to different sanatoriums and hotels to recuperate from different illnesses. Nietzsche

00:28:44.260 realized he lacked physical vitality. So he admired it. But I think he also was trying to come with this

00:28:49.500 idea of spiritual vitality as well.

00:28:52.580 Yeah, that's true. You know, Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, talks about

00:28:58.040 viriditas, that green force that flows through us and that animates the universe.

00:29:03.760 It's also the force of eros. And that's what we're talking about. So there's physical vitality. Do you

00:29:09.760 have a strong body or a weak body? And what's your physiology? And then there's this spiritual vitality

00:29:15.380 that we all partake of. And regardless of the state of your body, that can be extremely strong.

00:29:23.880 And it was in Emerson. His spiritual vitality never wavered. It was his physical vitality that he

00:29:30.120 worried about and that was such a struggle for him. But learning to nurture that viriditas,

00:29:36.260 that green force in us, that erotic force in us, has a lot to do with how effectively we live

00:29:43.800 and the joy we're able to feel and how much we're able to connect with other people, how engaged we

00:29:49.980 are. Without that, it's very difficult to be in the world in a way that matters without having that

00:29:58.240 spiritual vitality, which has to do with attention. It has to do with compassion and empathy.

00:30:04.340 And it also has to do with interest. The thing I love about Emerson is he was so interested in life

00:30:11.560 and learning. And you see that with most people who have that kind of vitality we're talking about.

00:30:17.060 They may not be physically strong, but when they have that enthusiasm, that vitality that's connected

00:30:22.700 to spirit, it can go a long way to making up for whatever debility there is in the body.

00:30:29.580 Yeah. We have one of our mottos in our house, in our family is don't be a potato head. 0.98

00:30:34.940 And basically it's, we don't want, like, I don't want to be that way. And we don't want our kids to

00:30:39.400 be the sort of type of person. You're in a class and someone's giving a lecture on some topic where you

00:30:45.880 just disengage and you're just kind of looking at the person's slack jawed and not really paying

00:30:50.400 attention. I want them to be like engaged with it. Like there's, there's an opportunity to like

00:30:54.140 learn something. So yeah, I think you can take away that from Emerson. He wasn't a spiritual potato

00:30:58.560 head. He was not a spiritual potato head, not at all. He was fascinated by life. He was fascinated

00:31:05.120 by people and he was a keen observer of things. Outwardly, you had this well-brought up, you know,

00:31:11.900 Yankee, you know, Boston Brahmin, but inside he was a passionate man with dramatic emotions and big

00:31:19.760 upheavals and big joys and big sorrows. And that aliveness comes through in his work and it comes

00:31:25.760 through in his understanding of human nature. You have a lesson on relationships called

00:31:30.580 thorn in my flesh and Emerson, if you read his writings, he had a very, he had high ideals for

00:31:37.280 relationships, but it seemed like he struggled with them for most of his life. What did Emerson

00:31:42.060 struggle with when it came to relationships? You know, this really was his tragic flaw. If you look at it

00:31:49.120 from the sort of old heroic Greek way, his tragic flaw was his inability to be intimate. You know,

00:31:56.880 he had tremendous difficulty connecting emotionally with other people. And he had a lot of grief over

00:32:05.480 that. He said, the love you withhold is the pain that you carry. And he carried a lot of pain around his

00:32:12.640 withholding of love, even from the people he cared about most. At one point in the journal, he says,

00:32:18.540 even at home, he looks at the people in his own house as across an abyss. So he was profoundly

00:32:27.120 alienated in a part of himself and very withdrawn and shy. And so for him, relationships were an ongoing

00:32:37.040 mystery and challenge. He had a very close relationship with Margaret Fuller, who was

00:32:43.100 many people thought the most learned woman of her day. And it was a tortured, difficult relationship.

00:32:49.740 And he, they pined for each other and they had these intense, long intellectual conversations. And he,

00:32:55.800 he worshiped her. He idolized her in certain ways, but then he could be in the same room with her and

00:33:01.140 he'd feel himself being repulsed. And part of it was that she had the hots for him and she was constantly

00:33:07.400 trying to seduce him. And he was a married man and he was not attracted to her. But part of it was

00:33:13.780 this discomfort with emotion and connection and something around that, that he could do it in his

00:33:22.060 mind and he could do it in the abstract. But when it came to actually expressing it to the individual,

00:33:28.380 showing his own vulnerabilities, that was very, very hard for him. And he thanked Margaret

00:33:34.560 afterward. He had to finally pull back from the friendship, though he never stopped loving her.

00:33:39.460 He had to pull back from the friendship, but he thanked her after that for starting to crack through

00:33:45.200 his resistance. He said to her, I'll never go quite back to my old Arctic ways. So he knew how chilly he

00:33:52.640 could be and he didn't want to be that way, but that was his, in certain ways, his temperament and his,

00:33:58.000 his nature. And he was always trying to open up more and overcome that, that distance that he felt

00:34:05.720 from other people. Well, him and Thoreau, they had a really close friendship, but it was often

00:34:10.140 strained. What was that like? That was a very strained relationship. Yeah. He, he loved Henry

00:34:16.120 and Henry loved him. And there was a lot of tension between them because they were very critical of one

00:34:26.240 another for all the reasons that we've been talking about. You know, there are ways that Emerson didn't

00:34:31.360 think that Thoreau was living up to his potential. And there are ways that, that Thoreau thought that

00:34:36.320 Emerson was a prig and couldn't loosen up and needed to break free of his bourgeois, you know, lifestyle. 0.99

00:34:44.840 They judged each other. They had a very contentious relationship.

00:34:48.140 But Emerson was at the end of the day, Thoreau's real mentor. You know, he was seven years older

00:34:55.260 than Thoreau. They weren't quite contemporaries. So they admired each other tremendously. And then

00:35:01.560 they would get into the kind of emotional confusion and haggling that a lot of close friends do. You

00:35:08.140 know, everyone is imperfect. And the closer you get to them, the bigger their imperfections become,

00:35:13.420 the more obvious they become. And he was very aware of the ways that Henry was unkind and the ways that

00:35:22.000 he refused to, to join in. You know, Henry would never join in with other people, even when it would

00:35:29.240 have benefited him and them. So Henry, Henry could be a bit withholding in a way that Emerson wasn't.

00:35:36.580 Emerson was generous spiritually. He couldn't always be generous emotionally, but he was generous

00:35:41.660 spiritually. Henry was not. And he was cantankerous and very, very judgmental. And he had a way of

00:35:49.600 kind of finding the fault and the flaw in everything that annoyed Emerson. You know, Emerson was somebody

00:35:57.160 who tried to look for the good and the true and the beautiful. Henry was somebody who looked for

00:36:01.920 the faulty, the hypocritical, and the problematic. So they were very different temperamentally that way.

00:36:08.680 And it became an issue very often in their friendship, which was kind of off and on. They were always in

00:36:13.900 each other's lives, but they were not always as close as they might have been.

00:36:19.960 So what lessons do you think we take from Emerson on developing good relationships?

00:36:25.460 The one that speaks to me most is the importance of intellectual connection. That doesn't mean that all

00:36:32.640 relationships have to be intellectual. But for him, for example, having deep conversation in a relationship

00:36:38.920 was the highest ideal. It was his drug of choice, you could say. He loved conversation. He wanted to

00:36:46.760 know what people he cared about thought, what they struggled with, what their ideals were, the places

00:36:53.400 that scared them. He wanted to know people in a very deep way. And that didn't always mean that he could

00:37:00.880 be as emotionally demonstrative as he wanted to be. But he really wanted to know, he cared about the

00:37:07.020 inner life of the other person. And that's something that we in our relationships don't always focus as

00:37:14.100 much on as we might. In friendships, we tend to, because friends are connected, because they tend to

00:37:20.420 be connected, because they share mutual interests. But for example, in intimate relationships with a lover

00:37:25.800 or a spouse, you know, to remember to care about the other person's inner life, you know, who are you

00:37:32.200 today? What do you believe in? What really means something to you? He was always encouraging us to

00:37:39.420 engage on that level. And that's really useful to remember, particularly these days in the age of ADD,

00:37:48.520 when we don't often give the people in our lives the attention that they deserve or that relationships

00:37:53.540 require to deepen. You know, something Emerson always talked about is that relationships take

00:37:58.200 time to deepen and to form. And they were always looking for instant gratification. He really cared

00:38:04.580 about the deeper values of a relationship that's based on knowing the other person, knowing them

00:38:11.380 the way we know as seekers, you know, we understand what really makes the other person tick.

00:38:19.060 So another lesson is death of fear. It's all about courage. And in this chapter, you recount

00:38:23.440 a moment in Emerson's life that would change him profoundly. His first wife, Ellen died. And then

00:38:29.520 it put Emerson in this deep, deep depression that lasted over a year. But then he did something to get

00:38:35.840 him out of that funk. What did Emerson do to get out of his depression?

00:38:39.700 This was shocking. He couldn't pull out of it. He was having suicidal thoughts. Nobody could help him.

00:38:46.600 And one day he realized that he had to shake himself out of this state that he was in,

00:38:52.020 in this frozen state. And so he went to the, without telling anyone, he went to the cemetery

00:38:58.360 where Ellen was entombed. And he opened her coffin to look at her face. He realized that he needed to

00:39:06.800 face his greatest fear, which was seeing her dead body and really getting that she was gone.

00:39:12.420 She had been the love of his life. She died when she was 19, after they were married only a year and a half.

00:39:19.120 He nursed her through tuberculosis. It was a horrible thing. And he needed to face the horror.

00:39:25.320 And when he did that, it shook him up. He changed profoundly. He didn't tell anyone about this.

00:39:31.780 And there's a very short mention of it in his journal. But after that, he quit the ministry.

00:39:36.820 He went to Europe. He met some of his great literary heroes. And he started to publish.

00:39:43.100 And his life shifted profoundly. And as Robert Richardson, his biographer said, after that fall

00:39:51.680 into depression, he would never again forget the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day.

00:39:58.440 He realized that life had even deeper value than he had realized before this grief drowned him in it.

00:40:05.360 And so it shook him up. It shook him back to life. And it was the best thing he could have done for

00:40:13.060 himself. So what can we learn from that experience on facing our fears to become more courageous?

00:40:19.080 Moving toward our fears head on and not avoiding them as much as possible. What we do and why fear

00:40:26.960 gets bigger is that we resist it and we try to avoid it. And the more we do that, the bigger it gets,

00:40:33.480 the more powerful the fears become. So as Emerson said, knowledge is the antidote to fear.

00:40:39.840 So the more we know about our fears, the less control they have over us. So for him, for example,

00:40:46.880 he needed to know what Ellen's body looked like then. What was this thing that he was grieving?

00:40:53.780 And when he did that, it kind of cut his fear off at the knees. And that's something that we can all do

00:41:01.240 is when instead of when a fear comes up, instead of running away from it, we can look at it directly

00:41:07.920 and say, what are you? You know, when you do that, the fear diminishes immediately.

00:41:14.600 The spiritual teacher Ram Dass used to say that fears are like, instead of running away from our

00:41:20.280 fears and turning them into these gigantic, you know, these gigantic monsters, we can just see that

00:41:25.520 they're little schmooze and we can invite them in for tea. You know, so instead of giving them all

00:41:30.880 this power, we can say, oh, you're not, you're not all that. Come here, come in, sit down, let's have

00:41:36.360 some tea. And so we defang our fears that way. That's how, how we reduce our fears. So it's important

00:41:43.060 to face our fears and it's important to understand that they don't have to define us. Emerson was very

00:41:48.460 big on the idea that what happens to us is the external life. And so grief, for example, he had

00:41:56.080 a lot of grief in his life, but he realized that grief belongs to the external life. So things happen

00:42:02.260 to us and they pass and whatever is impermanent doesn't have a last, the lasting ability to disempower

00:42:11.340 us or to take away our joy for living. So understanding that fear is out there and it

00:42:17.880 doesn't have to run us was a huge insight for him personally and in his teaching.

00:42:25.180 And he got that from his, an aunt, Aunt Mary. She was this really staunch Protestant and she would

00:42:32.400 always tell her nephew to always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do all the

00:42:38.220 time. And I guess Emerson embraced that. Yes. And Mary Moody Emerson was a piece of work.

00:42:43.680 She was a strict Calvinist. She was a religious fanatic by any estimation. She used to travel in

00:42:52.160 a burial shroud. So in case she died, she could go right to her maker. She slept in a bed that was

00:42:57.620 shaped like a coffin. You know, she was a real eccentric, but one of her strengths was her 0.99

00:43:03.700 fearlessness and her ability to really push her nephews to confront the things that scared them

00:43:10.800 the most. And she was his biggest influence when he was growing up. She lived with the family

00:43:14.960 and she was his great spiritual tutor, you know, as well as his tutor in life in many ways. And she,

00:43:22.760 she lived fearlessly. She also was a woman in that age who lived in many ways like a man and couldn't

00:43:29.780 care less about the conventions of the time and what a woman was supposed to do or not allowed to 0.73

00:43:36.040 do. So she was a role model for him around originality and fearlessness. And here again,

00:43:43.300 Emerson said to be really strong, we must adhere to our own means and not attempt to adopt another's

00:43:48.900 courage. So while he could admire his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, he was not his aunt. He needed to find

00:43:56.780 his own courage and find the thing, the ways, his own path to self-empowerment. And this was an

00:44:03.500 ongoing process. He sometimes fell short and he would recriminate himself for his perceived failures.

00:44:11.080 And then he would try harder next time. So he was a work in progress like all of us.

00:44:16.220 Yeah. I love that idea of there's different types of courage based on your character. And he said,

00:44:20.520 this is great quote. There is a courage of manners in private assemblies and another in public

00:44:25.420 assemblies. A courage, which enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company whilst another

00:44:30.760 man who can easily face a cannon's mouth, dares not open his own. And he said like, those are all

00:44:35.600 different types of courage you can have. You got to find what your courage is good at and lean into

00:44:39.780 that. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:44:43.340 and your work? Thanks. It's wonderful to talk to you. Well, people can go to my website, which is

00:44:48.240 markmatusik.com and check out my work there. I also have a global online community for self-inquiry,

00:44:56.580 which is called the Seekers Forum. So people can go to theseekersforum.com and learn more about what

00:45:02.260 we do there. Fantastic. Well, Mark Matusik, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:45:06.020 My pleasure. Thanks so much.

00:45:07.580 My guest is Mark Matusik. He's the author of the book, Lessons from an American Stoic. It's available

00:45:11.980 on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Mark's work at his

00:45:15.820 website, markmatusik.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Emerson. We find links to

00:45:21.060 resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the

00:45:31.920 AOM podcast. The Art of Manly's podcast hosts guests from a wide range of fields. So you can

00:45:36.220 learn more about a wide range of topics. In the same week, we might discuss the rise and fall of

00:45:40.440 the golden age of action heroes and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you enjoy the ever fresh

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00:46:05.620 the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you time to listen to the AOM

00:46:09.420 podcast and put what you've heard into action.

00:46:15.300 Thank you for listening.

The Art of Manliness - June 14, 2023

How Emerson Can Help You Become a Stoic Nonconformist

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