Self-Culture and the Private Value of the Humanities

Henry David Thoreau's essay "Life without Principle" opens with a complaint about one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's lyceum lectures: "I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies" (Thoreau 1973, 155). That acts of communication are enriched when their authors bring their full selves to the task is an idea that Thoreau articulated repeatedly in his writing life, as in the opening of Walden, when he reminds readers that even though the "I" is omitted in much writing, "it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking" (2004, 3). We can bury that "I" with the passive voice, mask it with omniscience, or embrace it. Thoreau insisted on the embrace—for his own part and for others. "Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives" (3). Unlike the navel-gazing that fuels so many Facebook feeds, Thoreau's appetite for the immediate and the intimate emerged from a desire to trust in and develop the self outside of the bounds of convention, tradition, and prejudice. Like Emerson and many of the other Transcendentalists, Thoreau believed "self-culture" had a crucial role to play not only in the improvement of the individual, but also in the betterment of the community and the nation. A term first explored publicly by the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in an 1838 address, "self-culture" does not refer to a culture of the self or of selfishness, nor to a cult of bootstrap individualism, every man and woman for themselves. The term does not refer to a culture at all, but voices an imperative to cultivate the self: it is "the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature" (Channing 1845, 354). For Thoreau, a man who famously declared that he "did not wish to live what was not life," the very substance of being itself was at stake when contemplating the imperative of self-culture (2004, 90).

Thoreau's deep investment in the personal came to mind when I was asked, as part of a roundtable at the 2018 meeting of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19), to consider how we might adapt certain nineteenth-century practices and attitudes in order to improve the social and political climate in our country. Having recently attended an NEH Institute devoted to Transcendentalism and Reform, I knew I wanted to consider the Transcendentalists as models for bringing the life of the mind to a general audience in order to promote the public humanities. And in two of Transcendentalism's central figures—Emerson and Thoreau—I saw overlapping, but distinct, examples for how to do that.

Who speaks, in forums beyond the academy, of the humanities? And who is listening?

In the mid-nineteenth century in New England, Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker delivered lyceum lectures to groups of men and women eager to continue their educations, expand their intellectual horizons, and debate the issues of the day. Though by the 1840s lyceum lectures had helped to foster what we now think of as the public humanities, it's worth recalling that promoting the humanities was not the aim of the movement's organizers. The lyceum movement, which began in the 1820s, was born of local efforts to share knowledge about science and technology, which then meant making practical improvements to farming, husbandry, and manufacturing. Of the 143 lectures given during the first five years of the Concord Lyceum (1828–33), fifty discussed science or technology. If we're looking for parallels between the nineteenth century and our own, one evident analog to the lyceum is the TED Talk (TED standing for technology, entertainment, and design). On its website, the TED organization proclaims its mission to be "spreading...