In Self-Reliance, how does Emerson explain what a person's relation to God should be - Essay Example

As a means of understanding this, this brief essay will seek to quantify and discuss Emerson’s viewpoint with relation to the way in which man should integrate with an appreciation for and a relationship with a god. Accordingly, by seeking to answer the question of how god exists within Emerson’s rubric and epistemology, the reader will be more able to integrate with the ideals of self-reliance as well as the critiques that he offers with relation to the outwardly and inwardly flawed nature of extant religion and faith as he sees it within the current world.

The main determinant that Emerson was attempting to explain to the reader was the overall importance of accepting a level of self determination that seemed to Emerson as so intrinsically part of the formation of the new Republic in which the treatise itself was ultimately penned. Although there is a high level of inference that can be drawn from the reading of “Self-Reliance”, the acceptance of the nature and relationship that the individual should have with a higher power forms something of anew construct within the times.

Providing a clear break with the dogmatic interpretations of a fundamentalist god that had so thoroughly been explicated by those who ultimately founded the nation, Emerson seeks to integrate with the reader an understanding that outside of oneself is not the direction that one should look for meaning and understanding. Rather Emerson encourages the reader to look within as a means of finding rationality, faith, hope, and reason. Rather than fall prey to these fundamentalist interpretations, Emerson claimed that the god that should most be heeded and should be sought to be understood was the god that lives inside each and every human being.

In this way, Emerson was channeling aspects of the New Age movement long before such a title or understanding came into existence. Interestingly, although one might assume that Emerson would go on to reduce the overall importance of such a god due to the fact that his approach was ahead of its time and may lend itself somewhat towards a form of atheism, this is not the case. Rather, Emerson continues to reaffirm that the existence of god within the individual is just as important and morally equivalent to any prior conceptions of an external god that have been put forward by classical religions for centuries.

Ultimately, such a world view allows Emerson to claim that such an eventuality will allow for human progress whereas other interpretations of god and of religion have failed. He justifies this by stating that self-reliance allows making to be wholly accountable to himself and his interpretation and relationship with god (Emerson 22). Conversely, Emerson relates that alternative views allow for one to hide behind the convenience of historical interpretations and differing shades of moral attributes and determinations that have sullied traditional religion for many thousands of years.

In such a way,