Education for the Gleam of Light: Emerson’s Transcendentalism and its Implications for Contemporary Moral Education

Abstract

WHAT CHOICE IS THERE BEYOND SELFISH INDIVIDUALISM? THE DILEMMA IN MORAL EDUCATION In this age of value diversification and moral uncertainty, our dilemma is the tension between our undeniable wish for personal satisfaction and the need to acknowledge the diverse goods of others. In the absence of any absolute moral values, personal measures often guide our daily moral choices. However, as the contemporary problems of the young demonstrate, this pattern can easily lead to a narrowly ego-centered, selfish individualism. In response, moral education today emphasizes care for others, the service of the community, the awareness of a common cultural good, and in its more reactionary form, the reinforcement of social control. This alternative, however, can easily take an oppressive form, and in the worst case, become a moral totalitarianism inhibiting individual freedom. This extreme alternative is as dangerous as egoism since there certainly is a need for a strong ethic of self-reliance, especially today when many young people lose the will to be responsible creators of a better life and society. The question is: Is there another choice beyond selfish individualism? A pressing question for moral education today is how to maintain a space for individual freedom to focus on one’s self, to be oneself, while releasing the self toward a larger common aim beyond a narrow egocentrism, and to do this without suppression. A vision of moral education is needed to cultivate an individual who can satisfy these conflicting needs and live a holistic moral life. As one such possibility, this essay presents a mediating standpoint: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism. Emerson is usually considered to be a progenitor of American individualism. His transcendentalism, however, fuses an ethic of selfreliance with a transcendence of narrow egocentrism. I would like to show that Emerson’s transcendental notion of the gleam of light is central to his holistic ethic for human perfection and gives us a fresh perspective from which to reexamine moral education today.