Irving Babbit refers to Emerson as "one of the modern apostles of self-reliance"
nor can it be maintained that Emerson the chief American champion of self-reliance, is conspicuously humble.In speaking of humility, Babbit continues:
If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt to be at once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back to the ancient individualism that Rousseau and Emerson in some respects revive and seek to get at the causes of its final failure. The Stoic bases his optimism primarily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith in his instincts, but on faith in reason. To know the right thing is about tantamout to doing it. Reason and will thus tend to become identical. The Stoics themselves conceived that in this matter they were simply following the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question is, as a matter of facct, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again brings up the great point at issue between European and Asiatic as to the relation of intellect and will. The chief religious teachers of Asia have, I have already said, asserted in some form or other a higher will to which man must submit in his natural sef (and in Asiatic psychology intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter the pathway of peace. A comparison between Plato and Buddha might help to elucidate this contrast between East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring together philosophy and religion but even so he put far less emphasis on the role of the mind than Plato. The list of "unthinkables" he drew up is almost equivalent to a denial that life can in any deep sense of the word be known at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind (mano) of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the Platonic mind (nous). It is, nevertheless, significant that "mind" is for the Buddhist an organ of the flux, whereas Plato exalts "mind" to the first place [I would interject Plato is acutely aware of the secondary role of ratiocination; that awareness accounts for Socratic ignorance; nor should we forget the emphasis on the soul and the concomitant hope for immortality] It is a less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one's body as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit about one's "mind." A Buddhist might regard as the underlying error of Occidental philospohy the tenency that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify thought with being. Why should so chimerical a creature as man identify either thought or any other part of himself with being? As Pindar says, What are we, what are we not? Man is but the dream of a shadow." Pindar apparenlty feared lest he might flatter unduly man's conceit of his own permanene if he had called him even the shadow of a dream. To suppost that one can transend the element of impermanence, whether in oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any sense of the word, is to forget that "illusion is an intergral part of reality." The person who confides unduly in "reason" is also prone to set up some static "absolute"; while those who seek to get rid of the absolute in favor of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get rid of standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of an intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as in life it is actually experienced, unity and multiplicity are indissobly blended.--Irving Babbit, Democracy and Leadership
This may help explain how on the one hand Emerson would never have become a modern Communist.
Further reading of Babbit would also help to show how Emerson's self likewise tends to irreligion [consider that Communism has been called a Christian heresy) and that he becomes one proper channel for the exaltation of the self-sufficiency of instinct in our country, an instinct which moreover denies instrinsic evil in human nature. "The entertainment of the proposition of depravity," replies Emerson, "is the last profligacy and profanation."
Ironically, this "lat profligacy" can also be the view of the Communist and appears to be the deficiency in the thought of Plato, and elsewhere.
And a good philosopher would remember the most significant American thinker prior to Emerson: Johnathan Edwards, who understood that profligacy, although with great exaggeration.
More excellent comments on Emerson are found in Babbit's The Masters of Modern French Criticism.