Why you NEED great men

Ralph Waldo Emerson entered Harvard at 14, was friends with Napoleon's nephew, and gave 1500+ lectures in his life. One of his best ever lectures, given in 1850, was called "The Uses Of Great Men." What can love do for us? How do great men save us? Top insights from the essay👇

Certain ideas, and even actions, are only extracted from us in the presence of certain people. Emerson on how worthy peers pull clarity and greatness out of us: “I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”

Great geniuses bring with them a “promise of explanation.” They are “related to us” and yet superior, thereby making a transfer of insight possible. Emerson: “I have observed there are persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions which I have not skill to put.”

Great ideas are suffused with the power to evangelize themselves: “The river makes its own shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome - harvests for food, institutions for expression, weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it.”

Emerson believed that each man is destined to be a tamer of some chaotic “district of nature.” Via the means of inexplicable attraction, each man receives the call to become an “agent and interpreter” of something. For Euclid it was “lines,” for Dalton it was “atomic forms.”

Emerson believed nothing in nature has meaning till a man makes it a part of his schemes: “Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing its lover and poet. It would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human deliverer!”

Great men are the “mapmakers of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”. Emerson: “Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer." Life is enriched by “the men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.”

Emerson on how our peers bound us: “It is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries what they know without effort. We catch it by sympathy, as a wife arrives at the moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop.”

It’s very hard for us to “take another step” beyond the prejudices, preferences, and horizons of our peers. But the greats pledge “fidelity to universal ideas” not their historical peers. Therefore greats “defend us from our contemporaries.” They make alternative dreams possible.

Emerson: “This is the key to the power of the greatest men - their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods. Great men exist so that there may be greater men.”