Self Reliance Emerson Rhetorical Analysis

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” As stated before there are three main sections of this essay and the first one is the importance of self-reliance. Emerson believes that relying on others judgements is cowardly and without inspiration or hope but a person with self-esteem exhibits originality and is childlike yet mature (Rose, 2017). “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” Emerson was trying to promote self-experience and to be confident because as he states later what you think may just be just as great as something you hear from a stranger tomorrow. Emerson believes that the self-esteemed are “childlike” and maintains that children
are models of self-reliant behavior due to being to young to be cynical, hesitant, or hypocritical. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Emerson is attempting to drive home the importance of resisting pressure to conform to society’s formalities.
To become a man would mean that we must mature from being a child, and maturing is a type of conforming but it all depends on how you go about it. Emerson uses the metaphor “Corpse of a memory” throughout the essay, and this metaphor is important in this essay. To break this down it would mean someone who is afraid of contradiction. However, it is important as we mature to reevaluate our ideas and admit if they are faulty as he does when he mentions Joseph “Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.” " No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” What Emerson is trying to say here is that it is better to be true to your evil nature than it is to conform or behave correctly because society deems your true nature as evil. Good and evil are in the eye of the beholder, and both sides of a conflict believe that they are good and the other side is evil. To bring a real-world example into this take radical Islam and the American
people. Radical Islam believe that we are the ‘evil’ people in this situation and that they are the ‘good’ ones due to their perspective of the world. Meanwhile, Americans believe the opposite that we are the ‘good’ ones and they are ‘evil’. ip with God?