The Hobgoblins of Little Souls

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

(Republished from 5775)

Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance” that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”. Let us try to understand precisely what he meant, and whether we should agree.

Our first question is what distinguishes wise from foolish consistency. Emerson stated several paragraphs earlier:

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency;

a reverence for our past act or word,

because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts,

and we are loath to disappoint them.

We feel a need to appear coherent over time to others, to live our story in such a way that it makes sense to them. In this way, we are bound by our past. This is certainly a vice to those who esteem authenticity as a prime value. It is worth exploring the extent to which it is also a vice for those who strongly value teshuvah, and if so, how it might be overcome.

Emerson identifies three sorts of people who are afflicted by the hobgoblin: little statesmen, philosophers, and divines. Great statesmen, philosophers, and divines each overcome it. Statesmen represent action, philosophers represent intellection, and divines represent experience. In each of these areas we are afraid of seeing incoherent to others.

Emerson adds a second prong to his definition:

In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

Here there is no concern for an external audience. Rather, we stand embarrassed before an intellectual mirror: can I, a devotee of Maimonides since my teens, act as if unconscious of the limits on G-d’s knowability? Theory, like clothing, can be a shield against experience. The naked mind leaves the soul exposed to temptation just as much as the naked body. But there are times and places for bodily intimacy, and perhaps the same is true for the mind.

This prong unifies the three characters. Whatever we have invested our sense of self in – deeds, thoughts, or experiences - we are profoundly reluctant to contradict.

There are two sorts of teshuvah – the kind which distances ourselves from our past, and the kind that transforms our past.

The first kind certainly comes up against the Emersonian hobgoblin, because we are in fact contradicting our past selves. How can I walk away when a conversation turns to lashon hora when yesterday I shared the latest gossip? Or: How can I publicly call out a prominent wrongdoer today when yesterday I denounced his/her critics as lashon-hora-mongers?

In other words, consistency is a defense against the charge of hypocrisy.

I often advocate for “sustainable hypocrisy”. It is often - although not always - unwise, unconvincing, and counterproductive for a defense attorney to become a prosecutor overnight, especially to those who believe in psychological displacement. In general, one should project a public image slightly better than one’s actual self, and then seek to live up to it. If one’s actual self suddenly leaps beyond one’s public image, it’s ok to manage the perception of that growth so that it appears more gradual.

An alternative strategy regarding the first Emersonian prong is to shift one’s social group completely, so that one has no externalized past to be consistent with. That is more viable if one sees people as wholly virtuous or vicious, or if one’s repentance is laser-focused. It’s much harder if one sees vices and virtues widely distributed across individuals and communities. What if I treasure my community’s support for my virtues, and yet recognize that the personal vices I wish to overcome are endemic within it?     

The relationship between the second kind of teshuvah and the Emersonian critique is harder to figure.

Emerson argues that character is fixed, and therefore genuine inconsistency is impossible.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

In apparent contrast, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik understands the highest form of repentance as the self recreating itself, as an expression of the soul’s absolute indeterminacy.

I say “apparent contrast” because there may be a path to reconciliation, if the recreated self can take ownership of the past by giving it new meaning. The question is whether identity can genuinely survive that sort of transition, whether it is coherent to say that one has changed the meaning of the past but not the past itself. (I hope that question asks for a wise rather than foolish consistency.)

Here is a possible analogy within Torah.

In Laws of Rebels 2:1, Maimonides writes:

If a Great Court interpreted via one of the middot (exegetical tools for deriving law from Torah) as it seemed them that the law was, and made the law,

but another court arose after them, and a different rationale seemed correct to them that contradicted the previous court’s ruling –

(the second court) may rule in contradiction (to the past ruling) as seems correct to them,

as Scripture says: to the judge who will be in those days –

you are obligated to follow only the court in your generation.

Rambam can be understood in at least two ways.

The first is that because absolute truth is unknowable, every generation must make the law in a way that accords with its perception of truth, even though that contradicts the previous court’s perception of truth, even if the previous court was greater “in wisdom and number” and every other relevant way. The only consistency we demand of Torah authority is procedural. We don’t need extreme circumstances to say that our predecessor’s interpretation was wrong, and that their mandate or prohibition contradicted the intent of Torah, and we know that they would say the same about ours.

The second way of understanding Rambam is that the Torah can mean different things legally in different times, that it can sustain its identity through that shift, and that one is entitles to look for different meanings because of a sense that the law ought to be different. The recent Taking Responsibility for Torah episode “An Unexpectedly Revolutionary Meiri” argues that this second way is explicit in a position cited (and perhaps adopted) by Meiri to Berakhot 21a.

I suggest that this way of understanding Rambam can provide a model for teshuvah as a way of reinterpreting one’s life to date as preparation for one’s life going forward. May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life, and then live as our best selves.

Shanah tovah!