Thursday, March 1, 2012

One Man

"The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

I found the above quote to be one of the most interesting ones in "The American Scholar." I had to read it over a few times to try to get the full idea of what it is saying to sink into my brain, and I'm still not sure that it has fully fused in there. I had never really thought about society before in the way that Emerson does, but the more that I think about it, the more it makes sense. He says that there is One Man, and it takes an entire society to make up that One Man, which, in a way, I agree with. Each person within a society is important to making that group prosperous, whether the person is a farmer, or businessman, or President, and without that person the community is hurt as a whole. However, Emerson also states that a person must be able to break away from their own position in society and be able to take over another person's if it is needed, which is often true: if a person in a society gets hurt or is, for any reason, unable to perform their usual work, there needs to be someone ready to step in for them in order to keep everything running smoothly. The part of the quote that I find most interesting however is the very end, where he states that: "the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." I partially enjoy this quote so much because I find it amusing to imagine all these different body parts just walking down the street, or sitting in an office going over paperwork, but I also like it because it forces me to think about what makes a society function fully. How do we get to a place where we can say that we are One Man (or One Human), rather than just a bunch of individual body parts that do their own thing and never come together?

2 comments:

  1. Like the well-known proverb states, "It takes a village to raise a child." Similarly, it's so true that a whole village only functions properly with the hard work from each and every individual within it Relating this to the ordinary, we often fail to recognize every action and deed that we do, or that others do, that inevitably affect society as a whole. We go about our own daily business, giving little attention (or none at all) to others' business.

    I woke up this morning and made two over-medium eggs for breakfast. Did I even consider how I was able to get those eggs? No. I even read and acknowledged "Eggland's Best" on the carton, but did this leave me astonished at the fact that these eggs would be impossible and inaccessible to me without the work from the chickens, the folks from Eggland's Best, the drivers that transported the eggs, the workers at Hannaford who sold and bagged these eggs? Sadly, nope. However, such a task (making some eggs in a frying pan) is extraordinary when we step back from our daily routines to consider how different society, or life in general, would be if it weren't for each and every individual within society. As laid out by this rather silly example, my breakfast would not have been possible had it not been for the other body parts of our One Man. Although in this example many individuals did their own thing, they came together, in a way, because I was able to make eggs for breakfast this morning. We may not always acknowledge such a seemingly ordinary task as a collective effort, but in reality, it is.

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  2. I also really like the last part. Emerson certainly has a way with metaphors. As his point is that all men should be as one man, it is very appropriate that he talks of the various parts that make a man. Oh Emerson, you are so clever.

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