Creativity and Genius Theme Analysis

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 ideas recurring over and over again in different guises. Yet human beings are not entirely without creative powers, and in “Experience” Emerson describes each individual’s capacity, simply through living, to embody the creative force of divinity (described at times in Christian terms as God, at others, in classical terms, such as the First Cause). Emerson suggests that in being an individual, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable person, each individual brings something new to the world.

According to Emerson, humans spend most of their time and energy in the day-to-day activity of living. They move through life largely unconnected to the realm of creativity and genius. It is as if humans are partially asleep, or move through reality like ghosts, not entirely in touch with reality or their full powers. Their faculties are almost entirely absorbed in the tasks of living, and do not have “an ounce to impart or to invest” in the world. Most days are “unprofitable,” and it is difficult to understand when creativity happens. In retrospect, “our life looks trivial.” Most of life is so occupied with preparation, routine, and recollection that “the pith of each mans genius contracts itself to very few hours.” Even a poet spends relatively little time actually creating. Emerson’s metaphor of life as a “train of moods like a string of beads” also reflects his insistence that people experience life as a series of discrete moments rather than one long arc. It is therefore difficult to execute large projects or to think about questions more elevated than those presented by one’s immediate experience.

Although much of human behavior and experience is predetermined by “temperament,” Emerson argues that each individual has the capacity to manifest the creative energy of the divine in his or her actions. Most of the time, a person’s inherent predispositions determines his or her behavior. The “individual texture holds its dominion” and cannot be overcome through intentional action. This does not necessarily determine our thoughts and feelings but does “fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.” There is therefore always some limitation on our experience that we cannot really perceive. Yet every “intelligence” still has some connection with the “creative power” of the world. Emerson uses the metaphor of “a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes.” Although for the most part humans do not have connection with reality per se, and are kept by nature as “fool and plaything” rather than agent or representative, there are moments in which the creative force in nature manifests through individuals. One way in which this creative energy is made manifest in individuals is simply through their existence. Each individual was impossible, unthinkable, unimaginable before he or she came into the world. Even though people may manifest divine creativity, that faculty is not necessarily independent or autonomous. Writing, which appears to be an act of independent creation, is the result of some divine force. “There is nothing of us in our works,” Emerson writes. “All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having.” Writing, like all of human behavior, is just one in the “series of surprises” that make up life.

Because creativity is the manifestation of the divine in the individual, and not really an autonomous action, there is no fundamental difference between the genius of great artists, leaders, or scientists, and that of normal people. Experience is made up of a “subject and an object” and the interaction between the two. “What imports it,” asks Emerson, “where it is Kepler and the sphere; Columbus and America; a reader and his book; or puss and her tail?” Great historical individuals should be thought of as “geologists” of the soul, showing the rest of the world what the soul contains and what it looks like. The “partial action of each strong mind”—that is, the extent to which these individuals achieve some sort of greatness through action in the world—illuminates one part of the soul. If similar action were simultaneously achieved in all other areas, the soul would attain “her due sphericity,” and would be fully expanded. The human being who could do in every domain what Napoleon did in the domain of politics would achieve “the transformation of genius into practical power,” as Emerson puts it in the closing line of his essay. This individual would attain a transcendent autonomy approaching the divine.

Just as human knowledge is circumscribed by the nature of the individual subject, so is human creativity. In “Experience,” Emerson laments the way in which humans seem to be incapable of getting past the small trials of daily experience to achieve creative autonomy. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that, following the death of his son, Waldo, Emerson calls into question the ability of an individual to bring something new into the world.) Humans do create—Emerson, for one, writes, as did Homer and Shakespeare and Milton—but Emerson suggests that even that creative faculty is actually a manifestation of the divine creative energy at the heart of nature. Emerson concludes “Experience”—a generally mournful essay, that insists over and over again on the limitations of human beings—by fantasizing about the transcendence of the human condition to achieve a “practical power” that no human has ever achieved.