Self Culture

A recommendation of W. Ellery Channing's lecture on self-education

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau occasionally refers to an enigmatic figure, whom he calls merely “the poet.” Most scholarly editions of the text identify this figure with William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister, author, and moralist. During his stint at Walden Pond, Thoreau was frequently visited by Channing, even in the depths of winter:

“The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love.¹

Next to Thoreau’s enduring reputation, Channing has almost vanished from sight. This architect of Transcendentalism whose genius Emerson was quick to recognize, sits unread by all but scholars of 19th century New England. In his introduction to Channing’s first volume of poems Emerson wrote: “We have already expressed our faith in Mr. Channing’s genius, which in some of the finest and rarest traits of the poet is without a rival in this country.” Despite this praise by the godfather of American literature, Channing is largely neglected in the 21st century, an age in which he would have likely felt quite at home. Several years ago, quite by chance, I stumbled upon a lecture by Channing preserved by the Innermost House Foundation. The lecture is titled “Self Culture” and served as an introductory address to the Franklin Lectures, delivered in Boston, in September 1838. As is likely evident from its title, the lecture is about a perennial theme that is having a resurgence at present: self-education. His work deserves our attention to its freshness of vision of the independent life of the mind.

Channing’s teachings on self-education rest upon two axioms which he presents at the beginning of the discourse. The first is that greatness depends upon “force of soul,” which can be found everywhere, in any era. The second, is that self-culture is actually possible, not a mere dream. Channing thinks most of us do not know our own nature well, and if we did we would recognize this possibility. Self-culture is possible because as human beings we possess the ability to shape and re-form ourselves, inwardly.

The consequence of the first axiom, its universality, is expressed in Channing’s characteristically ebullient voice:

“The truly great are to be found everywhere, nor is it easy to say in what condition they spring up most plentifully. Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little abroad. Perhaps the greatest in our city at this moment are buried in obscurity. Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.”

Channing shares Thomas Gray’s certainty that there must be many “mute, inglorious Miltons,” obscured by poverty and illiteracy. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, Channing does not assume that such a condition negates the possibility for greatness of soul. On the contrary, Channing seems to think that the magnanimous, in the original sense of the word, have the road of moral greatness always open to them, and in this sense he is simultaneously radically democratic, and a believer in the aristocracy of the soul. Human beings are made in the image of God, and possess an unalienable greatness flowing from this fact. On the other, he believes that moral and intellectual greatness must be achieved through considerable effort.

Channing is also careful to note the crucial difference between many of his fellow citizens and their counterparts in the rest of the 19th century world:

In this country the mass of the people are distinguished by possessing means of improvement, of self-culture, possessed nowhere else.

For Channing, this is an advantage of immeasurable value. Americans radically expanded the practice of democratizing access to the means of learning, even before Carnegie libraries, and widely circulated periodicals. Free lecture series, increasingly inexpensive books, theatre productions, and the beauty of the natural world were available to many more people in America than most other places in Channing’s time. The democratic class structure and American commitment to free enterprise further strengthened the sense that one could rise in the world through self-cultivation, even if such a result was only at best of secondary value to Channing. On the contrary, he believed that self-culture is itself the goal of life, and must not be subordinated to any other purpose, even subconsciously.

When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else.

Like Aristotle, Channing believes that human excellence, arete, is itself the goal of life. If we have any other goal in mind, we are not engaged in liberal education, one proper to a free human being.

Channing begins his advice on self-culture by assuring the reader that is in fact possible, not a dream. Human nature itself is structured to allow for the growth of the organism through cultivation. After such assurances, analysis begins. Channing identifies self-culture as moral, religious, intellectual, social, practical, natural, and beautiful.

Channing agrees with both Franklin, whose name adorns the lecture series in which this address was given, and with Aristotle that the moral virtues are the foundations of intellectual self-culture. While not dismissing Franklin’s pragmatism entirely, Channing clearly favors the Aristotelian understanding of virtue as an end in itself and the prerequisite for contemplation; the goal of life. He wholeheartedly affirms that mastering one’s appetites is the path to inner freedom, and believes that we ought to align ourselves with our duties to such a degree that we find joy in them and never waver in them. Informed by a millennium and a half of Christian thought he also affirms the power of religion as a form of self-culture, and was himself a Unitarian minister. The moral life is an end in itself for Channing, but also, “The moral and religious principles of the soul, generously cultivated, fertilize the intellect.” Much of the moral life must ultimately be for the sake of the intellectual life.

For Channing, intellectual culture is not the accumulation of facts and information, but the honing and refinement of the power of judgement, of our force of thought. He sees the intellect as the tool which allows us to judge what is true and false, to find reality. In order to use it properly, one must cultivate the practice of “disinterestedness,” which Channing refers to as the soul of virtue. Truth must be pursued disinterestedly, that is, with the passions tamed by reason, in order to be found at all.

Channing expresses admiration for our ability to perceive beauty, which is integral to his understanding of self culture. Following Kant, he sees an intimate relation between the beautiful qualities of the soul and the beautiful or sublime as found and experienced in nature. “One thing I would say; the beauty of the outward creation is intimately related to the lovely, grand, interesting attributes of the soul.” The beautiful soul is the cultivated, elevated, ennobled inner perfection of human existence. It is motivated by a powerful vitality, order, and a driving idea around which it can organize itself. For Channing, self-culture itself can serve as such an idea, giving light and heat to the inner life: “A great idea, like this of self-culture, if seized on clearly and vigorously, burns like a living coal in the soul.” Filled with such an idea, the self-cultivating soul naturally reaches towards methods and means to achieve its lofty goal.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

For Channing, books are the closest thing we have to a royal road to self-education, one that has been opened to masses of people and provides the surest passage to self culture. The road is through books, the repository that Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Channing claims that books open up a conversation with minds far more capacious than our own. We are the heirs to the most precious thoughts from the past, if we will only read.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Books open the door to true equality, a fact that W.E.B Du Bois affirms in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk. Books are the true levelers of society, the legislators of communities, the spiritual guides of the human race. Through books we are privy to the thoughts of Plato and Proust, to the insights of Woolf and Wordsworth. In lines that Du Bois would nearly exactly echo sixty years later, Channing elucidates the great elevating power of literature:

No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof; if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the workings of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.

His examples are fascinating: Wisdom literature, epic English poetry, the most revered of poet-playwrights, and the namesake of the lecture series, the model autodidact Benjamin Franklin. Like his friends Thoreau and Emerson, he surveyed wisdom literature in a manner that embraced East and West, and his views could perhaps be called a perennialist outlook. He is cosmopolitan in his vision of a universal republic of letters. His other choices seem appropriate to the man Thoreau called “the poet.” Channing emphatically does not endorse reading current works of passing value, but expects readers to trust the judgement of time.

The New York Public Library. Photo credit: Siggi Tittjung via Pexels

For the purpose of accessing great books, Channing recommends “social libraries” and would have likely loved the public libraries of the following two centuries which still lend out hundreds of millions of books a year even while serving increasingly primarily as a tech hub for the disenfranchised. Channing underscores the importance of access even further: “Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this.” Like Thoreau, he believed that books are the treasured wealth of the world, and belong on the shelves of every cottage and apartment. These books, these “silent teachers” spread throughout the communities of North America, constitute a force unmatched even by the law and machines. Their quiet influence shapes the destiny of our society, according to Channing, forming the common mind in its civic duties.

Alongside books, the natural world is Channing’s great teacher, whom he wishes all to have access to. An early proponent of what would become the national park movement, Channing asks, in 1838, “why shall not the public lands be consecrated (in whole or in part, as the case may require) to the education of the people?” Wilderness forms robust human beings, a point that the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas emphasized in his memoir, Of Men and Mountains. Douglas goes so far as to attribute his success in large part to having spent his childhood and adolescent summers climbing the high peaks of Oregon and Washington. For Channing, wilderness provides an encounter with beauty, reality, and heightened awareness. All of these are necessary for contemplation and self knowledge. Like Thoreau, Channing perhaps thought cultivation could best occur where human life and nature meet; for Thoreau, the cultivation of the beanfield, a liminal space between the wild and Concord, naturally leads him to consider the cultivation of virtue. Channing also could not avoid the influence of contemporary European thought which had recently indulged in an intense fascination with the sublime and the beautiful, particularly in the form of the grandeur of the Alps and the bucolic landscapes of English farmland and the Lake District. It has been said, not inaccurately, that the American answer to the Pantheon, Chartres, and Cologne Cathedral is the Tetons, Grand Canyon, and Big Sur. The American wilderness provides the fullest space for the Kantian cultivation of the experience of the sublime, a central part of self culture from a 19th century perspective.

All of this may sound impractical, and Channing admits that it does. At the core of his democratic optimism which he obstinately clings to, is the certainty that there is no incompatibility between the ordinary laborer, physical and mental, and the highest refinements of culture. In fact, he insists that any ignorance of this compatibility is mere snobbery and prejudice. The laboring, ordinary man or woman, contains the most exalted aspects of human nature.

The laborer, under his dust and sweat, carries the grand elements of humanity, and he may put forth its highest powers. I doubt not there is as genuine enthusiasm in the contemplation of nature, and in the perusal of works of genius, under a homespun garb as under finery.

Along the lines of Sertillanges in The Intellectual Life, Channing offers concrete advice on pursuing self-culture in the midst of a busy, ordinary life. He anticipates Sertillanges in the belief that a single hour a day spent studying an interesting subject brings unexpected insight and gains in knowledge. He is delighted by the possibilities being opened by modern science and governance, and offers a solution to the crisis of meaning looming on the horizon, anticipated by Nietzsche and brought into full swing in the 20th century. Channing’s optimism remains distinctly modern, even with his Aristotelian overtones. He celebrates, as “the happiest feature of our age,” the development of the masses’ intelligence, self-respect, and access to the comforts of life. He leaves his listeners with a final injunction, eager to preserve the best of modern achievements:

Awake! Resolve earnestly on Self-culture. Make yourselves worthy of your free institutions, and strengthen and perpetuate them by your intelligence and your virtues.

I will leave you with an encouragement to read this nearly forgotten Transcendentalist and embark, in whatever small measure, on the project of self-culture which he so eloquently defends.

1. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Modern Library, New York, 2000. P. 252.

All quotations from Channing are from Self Culture: An Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, delivered at Boston, Sept 1838. The full text can be found at: Innermost House Foundation