The Sensitive Young Man Question
And the Answer of the Occidental Buddha
What is a sensitive young man to do? This is the scalding hot question on every lip, at the start of every other think piece and the basis of at least a half dozen new political movements.
But that this question has suddenly come to predominate our discourse makes sense: if popular history among self-described sensitive young men is to be believed, just yesterday, as it were, in the not-so-distant past it was easier for their like to get by in life (without taking up work their temperament cannot abide). We hear, for instance, that the young Hegel lived for a period as a Hofmeister (house tutor), first to an aristocratic family where he labored on a book-length essay outlining a sort of Kantian Jesus,1 and later to the family of a wine merchant where, perhaps in the spirit of that change, he swapped his temperate idol for a more Romantic Christianity defined by the mystical experience of love. Often in the same breath, we also hear of Hölderlin, who was once Hegel’s friend, and in fact had helped him obtain that latter position, but who, as it happened, was not able to keep his own similar gig simply because he also made a spirited discovery regarding the mystical experience of love (with his employer’s wife), and who therefore—after spending a period in a clinic2 after a ‘hypochondrias’3 diagnosis—took up an admiring carpenter’s offer to live in the latter’s tower-room overlooking the Neckar River, where he spent the remainder of his life playing piano, writing poetry, and entertaining visitors. Indeed, sometimes across the channel we even hear of Oliver Goldsmith, who after despairing of learning medicine at the University of Edinburgh first embarked on a walking tour of Flanders, France, and Switzerland (busking with his flute as he went) and then settled in London where he was quickly employed as a writer of a series of letters4 for the Public Ledger in which he pretended to be a Chinese tourist named, ‘Lien Chi.’5
Yes, not too long ago, we are to believe, all a sensitive young man had to do to agreeably get by in the world was wander into the nearest coffeehouse, declaim a verse or two and in short order he would be swarmed by princes, editors, merchants, and the like offering him the opportunity (in exchange for light labor or even just the privilege of his presence) to muse for years at a time upon his preferred interests: systematic philosophy, translations of Pindar, whimsical literary experiments, etcetera. True, these opportunities were seldom lucrative, but at the very least they afforded these tender specimens of manhood a perch from which they could shine the lights of their genius over town and vale. It was a simpler time!
Alas, the world has become less simple. The blue flower of Novalis has given way to blue jeans and the Nasdaq. Nowadays when sensitive young men wander into coffeehouses preaching poesy, representatives of moneyed respectability do not rush toward them with outstretched hands. Instead, they are left alone with the hazelnut croissants to wonder at how the free market does not much demand them.
So sensitive young men wander in search of a way of agreeably getting by and like another great wandering people have become a pressing social question the answers given to which vary. Some would-be thymotic prodigals suggest that these sensitive young men gird up their loins, take up warlording, bodybuilding, falconry, convincingly reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, or perhaps start an app offering decentralized seed-oil-free dogfood delivery. Other, more ostensibly religious individuals suggest instead that sensitive young men focus on their spiritual and familial life by embracing the ancient and integral teachings of Holy Mother Church, become postliberal podcast pundits, sire two-dozen children in a Zillow-identified area of affordable wilderness, or perhaps just work at a beltway thinktank. The more prosperity-minded, however, suggest that sensitive young men ape a meme coin, become Panda Express managers, or start a driveway cleaning pyramid scheme. Truly, there are things to be said against and in favor of these many suggestions (and colorful combinations thereof).
Indeed, now that the debate about what sensitive young men are to do has really taken off, some other voices have gone so far as to prudently caution that any given answer is really much too general to be useful: that advice must be tailored to the sensitive young man in question. And of course—how reasonable! But is there really nothing at all to be said to sensitive young men that might be generally helpful? Certainly, perhaps in due course the New Administration will establish a dedicated Sensitive Young Man Bureau. But if society at large is forced to wait until then, it might be too late. What a tragedy it would be if even a single one of these purple-hearted-persons were to whither on the vine!6
But whom could we look to for such advice? It would have to be someone who had successfully guided sensitive young men in the past (and ideally in our recent past). He would have to be a sort of sage, a prophet—a great spiritual teacher. Is there any such man to be found in all the world?
Well, there is tell of at least one man with all the right credentials. Harold Bloom calls him “the prophet of American Religion,”7 and in his own time, he was known variously as the ‘Buddha of the West’ and the ‘Sage of Concord.’ But generally, he was best known as Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Without Emerson the transcendentalists would never have transcended much. Putting aside his philosophical influence, would Whitman’s Leaves of Grass have become so well-known without Emerson’s unintentionally gilded support?8 Would Henry David Thoreau have given us Walden, had Emerson not lent him the use of his pond-side land? Would William James have fathered American Psychology had Emerson not been his godfather?
Wherever you find Romanticism springing up in America, wherever you find that the seeds of the sublime have taken on the character of our soil and bloomed into flowers with unmistakable red, white, and blue petals, there you will find that at some point Emerson and his disciples had dutifully tilled and sown. True, his advice might be a bit dated given that we live in such a very modern time. But consider two pieces of his writing notable for their respectively profound effects on at least two sensitive young men.9
The first piece, a passage from Emerson’s Literary Ethics (originally an oration delivered to the Literary Societies of Dartmouth on July 24, 1838), was cited almost in full by the Irish-born American journalist and novelist Frank Harris in his multi-volume autobiography, My Life and Loves, which was once banned in our country and Britain owing to its prurient accounts (with accompanying photographs and sketches) of his ‘romantic’ exploits. He describes the passage as “that divine message.” It reads:
“Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar's place, and hope, because I thought, that, standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect, whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What is this Truth you seek? what is this Beauty?' men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;' — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world, that creates the extreme need of the priests of science … Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not takeaway your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.”
The second piece, which comes from Emerson’s Illusions—in a way a sort of poetic recapitulation of the first in the form of a parable—was cited by John Jay Chapman, a descendant of the Founding Father for whom he was named, the son of a president of the New York Stock Exchange, a renowned essayist in his time, a crusader against Tammany Hall, and an absolute romantic. Case in point: when he was a law student, he fought the astronomer Percival Lowell (now infamous for his speculations on Martian canals) for love of a woman, but after winning felt such remorse that he burnt off his whole left hand in atonement. In the title essay of one of his early collections, Emerson and Other Essays, he says of the parable, “it comes from the very bottom of Emerson’s nature.” It reads:
“Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone.”
Now, it is true: this sort of advice does not encourage sensitive young men to become the bronzed idols of their own ambition nor crusaders for the latest religious enthusiasm, nor even profiteers in search of ‘generational wealth.’ Of course, sensitive young men might become strong, respected, or financially secure by following Emerson’s advice, but that’s not its proper aim. To put it bluntly, the idea is that every man is a creature in time beholden to a timeless calling. What matters is heeding that call and following it through to the end. There is no promise of what is conventionally called ‘success.’ Of the three figures mentioned above, for instance, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Goldsmith, none lived lives that would wholly garner the approval of anyone whose voice now bellows most loudly in the ears of today’s sensitive young men. Their lives were unconventional and all came to miserable ends. (That Hölderlin, the only one of the three to live a long life, spent the majority of his long years in madness is telling). Indeed, this sort of life is not even a guarantee of a legacy. That the names of those three figures live on to varying degrees in popular memory, while Harris and Chapman are now literary footnotes at best is not surprising to anyone who has studied the history of sensitive young men.
Open any anthology of poetry or philosophical essays from two or three centuries ago and you will swiftly find a hundred names of purple-hearted youths who poured forth their souls in ecstasy whose biographies have faded from the record for want of care. But we already know this—what sensitive young man has not read the line, “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” and at the instant not felt a pain so hard and so deep that its truth was not only immediately unquestionable, but engraved on his innermost being? Really, the question at hand is not about fame or consequence. The question of what a sensitive young man is to do is ultimately a question of how he is to live.
In an essay on Napolean,10 Emerson presents a critically11 saturnine picture of the titan that for better or worse has become every sensitive young man’s hero par excellence since Stendhal. Partway through he writes, “Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron.” Yes, say what you will about Napoleon, but if you say anything that’s true then in so many words you will find yourself saying the same. Amid the tinsel and pomp of his coronation, there he was: Napoleon. Easy enough! Anyone, as it were, could be Napoleon there. But then he was also Napoleon on Elba. That is greatness! That is what it means to heed one’s destiny. That is how a creature in time proves his kinship with a timeless sublime. Yes, we are made of dust and cannot help it. But we can work ourselves up into a whirlwind that captures the light of Providence and so takes on the glimmer of eternity such that when the time comes and that dust returns to the earth, there will be no cause to mourn and our souls will sing for joy with the angels.
The book-length essay, Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), was found among Hegel’s papers posthumously and published in 1906.
The clinic in question was run by Dr. Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth, a medical man notable for inventing a special mask to prevent the mentally ill from screaming. That he was the doctor who treated Hölderlin is a happenstance so ripe with poignancy that it’s remarkable some enterprising producer has not yet turned it into an operetta.
Some scholars nowadays characterize Hölderlin’s condition as schizophrenia.
These letters (inspired by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters) were later collected in The Citizen of the World.
For more information on the events of Hegel, Hölderlin, and Goldsmith’s lives, see Terry Pinkard’s Hegel: A Biography, David Constantine’s Hölderlin, and Washington Irving’s Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography.
Consider how much more tragic The Bacchae would be if when Pentheus at long last spied the Maenads on Mt. Cithaeron, he just saw them eating raisins by the handful.
Bloom gives Emerson this lofty title in The American Religion.
Following the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman sent a copy to Emerson who replied with an encouraging letter, which included the phrase, “I greet you at the Beginning of a Great Career.” Shortly after, Whitman, as much a genius of self-promotion as poetry, had the full letter published in The New York Tribune and arranged with his publisher to have the latter phrase printed in ostentatious gold leaf on the book’s next edition (quite possibly the first use of a blurb as a marketing tool in publishing). In classic fashion, due to these antics, Emerson suddenly became much more critical of the work, Whitman became a celebrity, and one edition later his publisher went bankrupt. Truly, in American literary drama quidquid latet, apparebit; nil inultum remanebit.
For larger excerpts of Harris and Chapman’s commentary on the quoted passages, see the section on Emerson in Huntington Cairn’s anthology, The Limits of Art.
“Napoleon; Man of the World” (originally a lecture later published as an essay in Emerson’s Representative Men).
In the venerable tradition of romantics criticizing other romantics, Emerson criticizes Napoleon for being too bourgeois.