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 shared. However, Emerson ultimately suggests that even if humans do not share experiences themselves, they share a structure of experience—namely, one that is bound by the limitations of the human subject in space and time.
Emerson suggests that the individual is limited and unable to perceive the totality of existence. “We find ourselves,” Emerson writes, “in a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” The smallness of our actions in comparison to the apparent boundlessness of experience makes it difficult for us to “know to-day whether we are busy or idle.” It is almost impossible in daily life to understand how a person’s discrete actions, choices, and experiences sum up to a human life. The limitations of our experience become the limitations of the world. “Souls never touch their objects,” and instead of experiencing objects—things or people—one just experiences a version of them, what might be called a phenomenon that is filtered through one’s particular individual self, or, to use Emerson’s word, soul. The individual should therefore be conceived not as some stable set of characteristics but rather as a unit of stability in a flowing stream of experience. The individual experiences “a train of moods like a string of beads,” each of which is a “lens” onto reality.
Every soul, Emerson explains, has an individual “temperament” or disposition toward reality. No matter how hard one tries, this inborn attitude determines how one will behave and how one will experience life. If moods are like beads, experienced in succession, “Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” It is the perspective from which we experience reality. People perceive of themselves to be autonomous and to have experience of the world and of themselves that is more or less objective. But Emerson points out that the human temperament is “ a prison of glass which we cannot see,” which determines the overall contours of our experience and our actions. This holds true for other individuals, who seem to be in control of their lives but in reality are “creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass.” This “individual texture” cannot be corrected or changed, no matter how hard one works.
Although individuals long for static truths and experiences, and seek to describe them through art and philosophy, Emerson asserts that the only thing that remains constant is temperament. Reality, filtered through humans’ ever-changing bodies and minds, never stays constant. One basic proof for the inconstancy of human experience is the way people’s opinions change. We as humans have a “love of the real” compels us to seek out examples of permanent truths, like great works of art of literature. But then preferences change and we may suddenly prefer to read something else. Just as the human body, when healthy, is constantly changing, so is the mind. “Health of body consists in circulation,” Emerson writes, “and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associations.” Although we may have some inherent longing for the permanent, our mind needs change in order to be healthy. Therefore, we “live amid surfaces,” rather than profound truths; our “office is with moments,” rather than with eternity.
Although we try to capture something of eternity through our vain efforts to develop predictive science and our fervent religious faith (which Emerson contemptuously refers to as “our idolatries”), our experience simply doesn’t allow us to get to the heart of nature. Ultimately, since “nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates,” a human intelligence cannot perceive what is permanent and orderly about experience. It is only from the perspective of “divinity” that there is any stability in human society. When viewing human behavior from the farthest possible remove, one can see that “divinity is behind our failures and follies.” Some divine plan structures what seems to be the fickleness and unreliability of human behavior.
Experience, in Emerson’s essay, is something that happens in and for an individual subject. Because that individual subject is constantly in flux, experience is also in flux, and stable reality—in the form of religious or scientific truth, or even knowledge of other human beings—is not accessible to human beings. In order to perceive the unity in a human life, and in human society more broadly, one must consider reality from the perspective of a divinity, where all change reveals itself to be part of a broader unifying order. That unity, however, is beyond the scope of human experience.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Individual and Subjective Experience ThemeTracker
The Individual and Subjective Experience Quotes in Experience
The lords of life, the lords of life,—
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name;—
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look:—
Him by the hand dear nature took;
Dearest nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, “Darling, never mind!
To-morrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!”
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that there, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is how shallow it is. […] Souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. […] It does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. […] Nothing is left us now but death.
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus....We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.
Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. […] To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or approval.
Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels and life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. […] All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,—subjects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of them. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided or doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: […] The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside.
