Self-reliance and nonconformity: is 'trust thyself' the ground of integrity, or a licence for whim and moral egoism?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A man must trust himself — must believe that what is true in his own heart is true for all men — and refuse the conformity and the foolish consistency that make him an echo of others. But the self I bid you trust is not your whim or your appetite; it is the deep place where your private thought opens onto the universal soul.1 To be self-reliant is to be God-reliant; the two are one.2345

Sources

  1. It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
    Essays, First Series
  2. II. SELF-RELIANCE "Ne te quaesiveris extra." "Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late.
    Essays, First Series
  3. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us.
    Essays, First Series
  4. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
    Essays, First Series
  5. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day.
    Essays, First Series

Where the argument is made

  • "Self-Reliance" (Essays: First Series, 1841): "Trust thyself"
  • "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"
  • "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"
  • the provocation "if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."

How the argument was received

His most famous and most misread doctrine; charged with licensing selfishness, caprice, and indifference to others.