Experience

by

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Themes and Colors
The Individual and Subjective Experience  Theme Icon
Stoicism, Skepticism, and Hope Theme Icon
Creativity and Genius Theme Icon
Social Life and Individualism Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Experience, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

The Individual and Subjective Experience

Emerson’s essay “Experience” is concerned with the individual subject—the thinking, feeling person who has experience. For experience of any kind does not exist without an individual subject to have that experience. (If there weren’t a subject, who would be doing the experiencing?) Emerson believes that, instead of experiencing reality directly, individuals experience reality as it seems to them. Therefore, experience is something that happens on the level of the individual and is not…

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Stoicism, Skepticism, and Hope

One of the primary themes of Emerson’s “Experience” is limitation. Emerson’s theory of the individual and his or her subjective experience of the world limits the sphere of human knowledge and agency. Although Emerson himself does not employ the term stoicism—which refers to an ancient philosophical school that sought calm and well-being by withdrawing from the world into the self—the worldview he develops in “Experience” is based on the fundamental idea expounded by…

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Creativity and Genius

Emerson begins “Experience” by lamenting the fact that human begins are not capable of “new creation.” People have the ingenuity to live but not to participate in the divine act of creation. Much of one’s life is preoccupied with the details of living, and so the average person rarely has time in which to be creative. The result is that the history of literature and art is dominated by “very few spontaneous actions,” the same…

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Social Life and Individualism

According to Emerson, all individuals are isolated from reality and from each other, unable to plumb the depths of nature or ever fully to grasp the “temperament” that rules the life of other individuals. Emerson therefore advocates a kind of individualism, since according to his theory of experience, every person is essentially alone in his or her own mind. True social interaction is barely possible, and when it does occur, it is unsustainable. When…

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