Dhaka International University
A Research Work
On
Emerson’s Transcendentalism; concept of
Man, God and Nature.
Course
Title: Research Monograph
Course No:
B.A. (Hon’s) in English
Submitted By
Md Kamruzzaman Patwary
Registration No: 255251
Class Roll No: 33
Semister No: 12th
Batch No: 23rd
Department of English
Dhaka International University
Supervised By
Tahmina Sultana
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Dhaka International University
Submission
Date: 12th July, 2014
Letter
of Recommendation
This is my
pleasure to recommend that the research paper entitled Emerson’s
Transcendentalism; concept of Man, God and Nature- submitted by Md Kamruzzaman
Patwary having roll no: 33 and registration no: 255251, B.A.(Hon’s) in English
at Dhaka International University, in partial fulfillment of requirement for
the degree of Bachelor of Arts is the candidate’s own achievement and is not
co-joined work with anyone else. His work is methodical and thoughtful. He has
carried out his research work under my supervision and guidance.
I wish him
every success in life.
…………………………………………………
Tahmina
Sultana
Assistant
Professor
Department
of English
Dhaka
International University
Acknowledgement
At the beginning, I would like to give thanks my parents who
have brought me up so successfully, then my thanks go to nature which is the
greatest source of knowledge and finally I would like to give thanks to
Professor Tahmina Sultana, Department of English, Dhaka International
University to agree to be my supervisor of the research program and providing
me with scholastic guidance and valuable instruction in carrying out this
research work very successfully.
Special thanks also go to the Liberians of the library of the
permanent campus Satarkul, Badda of Dhaka International University. The
cooperation of the Liberians which were found valuable to this study and all
the teachers of the department of English and all the friends who gave me
precious time and provided data for this study.
Sincerely Yours
…………………………………………………….
Md Kamruzzaman Patwary
Roll No: 33
Registration No: 255251
Department of English
Dhaka International University
Dedication
I have dedicated this research work to all freedom fighters
who have sacrificed their blood to present us with an independent land.
Abstract
This thesis provides details about historical background of
American Transcendentalism, a theoretical, philosophical and literary of the
first half of the nineteenth century in the United States and of New Age
religion originating roughly at the turn of the same century and maturing in
the 1970’s in the form of the New Age Movement. The work focuses on the
influence of American Transcendentalism as one of the shaping factors, which
contributed to the emergence of New Age. The attention is placed primarily on
the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through a detailed analysis of selected
Emerson’s essays parallels are drawn between the beliefs held by the Transcendentalists,
mainly Emerson, and general beliefs shared with the New Age community.
Following the historical development of both traditions, we discover the point
of convergence, namely the New Thought movement originating in the second half
of the nineteenth century.
Key Words: Transcendentalism, Reason and
Understanding, Self-Reliance, American democracy, a completed process of
secularization, Idealism, Oneness, Nature, Experience, Expression.
Chapter -1
Introduction
Introduction
A philosophy which says that thought and spiritual things are
more real than ordinary human experience and material things which are
transcendentalism. Transcendentalism was a movement in philosophy, literature
and religion that emerged and was popular in the nineteenth century New England
because of a need to redefine man and his place in the world in response to a
new and changing society. The industrial revelation, universities, westward
expansion, urbanization and immigration all made the life in a city like Boston
full novelty and turbulence. Transcendentalism was a reaction to an
impoverishment of religion and mechanization.
A religious, philosophical and literary movement,
Transcendentalism arose in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Critics generally cite 1836 to 1846 as the years when the movement flourished,
although its influence continued to be felt in later decades, with some works
considered part of the movement not being published until the 1850s.
Transcendentalism began as a religious concept rooted in the ideas of American
democracy. When a group of Boston ministers, one of whom was Ralph Waldo
Emerson, decided that the Unitarian Church had become too conservative, they
espoused a new religious philosophy, one which privileged the inherent wisdom
in the human soul over church doctrine and law.
Among Transcendentalism’s followers were writers Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, educator Boston Alcott,
and social theorists and reformers Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing.
Authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickenson and Edgar Alan
Poe also felt the influence of Transcendentalism. Important works from the
movement include Emerson’s Nature “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”,
Thoreau’s Walden, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass
Novels such as Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The
Blithe dale Romance also had transcendentalist learning.
It is no coincidence that this movement took off just as the
American literary tradition was beginning to blossom. Transcendentalism though
inspired by German and British romanticism was a distinctly American movement
in that it was tied into notions of American individualism. In addition to the
theme of American democracy, transcendentalist literature also promotes the
idea of nature as divine and the soul as inherently wise. Transcendentalism
also had a political dimension, and writers such as Thoreau put their
transcendentalist beliefs into action through acts of civil disobedience to the
government. The nineteenth century was a volatile one, beginning with the hope
and promise of democracy and the development of an American identity and moving
towards mass devastation and division by the middle of the century. Slavery and
the Civil War, women’s rights, growing industrialization and class division all
of these events were influential and each had a role to play in the
transcendentalist movement.
There is more than one definition of the literary movement of
1836 to 1846 of several New England writers known by that name. It was
essentially a religious-spiritual movement expressed in poetry and prose.
Transcendentalism began as a religious concept rooted in the
ideas of American democracy. When Ralph Waldo Emerson decided that the
Unitarian Church had become too conservative, they espoused a new religious
philosophy, one which privileged the inherent wisdom in the human soul over
such church doctrine and law.
And they may be defined in a somewhat wider perspective as
children of the Puritan past who, having been emancipated by Unitarianism from
New England’s original Calvinism, found a new religious expression in forms
derived from romantic literature and form the philosophical idealism of Germany
Miller.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the other main proponents of this
philosophy notably Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William Ellery
Channing, and Orestes Augustus Brown son believed
that the Unitarianism current in academic and intellectual
circles at that time were becoming too much like the entrenched bureaucratic
Christian ties of Europe such as Roman Catholicism and the Anglican Church and
less like the kind of religious on which much of New England was founded. It
must be remembered that one of the main sources of argument between the Church
of England and the Puritans and other New World sects, although by no means the
only point of contention was the self-determination of the faithful
relationship with God. This coincided with the American belief in democracy,
and shunned religious hierarchy such as the ones coming into being in the
Unitarianism of the time. One of the most famous works of this movements title
supports this; the essay by Emerson entitled “Self-Reliance” explains most of
the Emerson’s and the movements, main tents. Essentially it is a religious
belief that holds that every human being may find God within the “genius” of
his own self that trusting thyself is the most important virtue, and people
that are truly self-reliant will find God and follow the right path.
Nonconformity should not frighten the faithful from trusting themselves and
everyone has the responsibility to think for themselves. This is a
simplification, of course, but Emerson is rejecting the ideas of a received
knowledge from outside such as from a church hierarchy determining a person’s
faith in God. Emerson thought this essentially personal and only possible
through self-realization. Transcendentalists wrote poetry too. Thoreau, for
example, wrote early in his life of his struggle to find his true self and to
relate not very transcendentalist was concerned with the same things. While
Emerson may have been largely concerned with religion, and Thoreau with the
self, Alcott commented on the two other authors, and Fuller wrote about women.
But these writers were joined in the spirit of American individualism,
expressed mainly in religion terms. I will not molest myself for you. I do not
wish to be profaned. And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this
love, would prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant demand
they make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their
portrait, that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics. Their
quarrel with every man they meet is not with this kind, but with his degree.
There is not enough of him, - that is the only fault. They prolong their
privilege of childhood in this wise, of doing nothing, but making immense
demands on all the gladiators in the lists of action and fame. They make is
feel the strange disappointment which overcasts every human youth. So many
promising youths, and never a finished man! The profound nature will have a
savage rudeness, the delicate one will be shallow or the victim of sensibility,
the richly accomplished will have some capital absuridity,
and so every piece has crack. This is strange, but this
masterpiece is a result of such an extreme
delicacy, that the most unobserved flaw in the boy will
neutralized the most aspiring genius,
and spoils the work. Talk with a seaman of the hazards to
life in his profession, and he will ask you, where are the old sailors? Do you
not see that all are young men, and we, on this sea of human thought, in like
manner inquire, where are the old idealists? Where are they who represented to
the last generation that extravagant hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest
to ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth and at the
matron age of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one
asks, where are they who represented genius, virtue, as the invisible and
heavenly world to these? Are they dead, taken in early ripeness to the gods, as
ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea die out of them, and
leave their unperformed body as its tomb and tablet, announcing to all that the
celestial inhabitant, who once gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be
better with the new generation? We easily predict a fair future to each new
candidate who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths
bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction, they
expose our poverty, and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor
limitary benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits a great influence,
which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits
continually with new ones so that, though absent, he should never be out of
mind, his name never far from my lips, but if the earth should open at my side,
or my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter to the
Universe. But in our Experience, man is cheap, and friendship wants its deep
sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but do not; when
deed, word, or letter comes or not, they let us go. These exacting children
advertise is of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them,
they pay you only this one complement, of satiable expectation; they aspire
they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and
persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, are they terrible friends,
whereof poet and priest cannot but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds,
and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.
With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
cannot be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in
people. They say to themselves, “it is better to be alone than in bad company”.
And it is really a wish to be met, the wish to find society for their hope and
religion, - which prompts them to shun what is called society. They feel that
they are never so fit for friendship, as when they have quitted mankind, and
taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or
the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy creation of the
fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these for the time shall seem
real, and society the illusion.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw
them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good
citizens, not good members of society, unwillingly they bear their part of the
public and private burdens, they do not willingly share in the public
charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprises of education, of
missions foreign or domestic, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in the
temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire
whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as life hear that their
friend is dead, as that he is a transcendentalist for then is he paralyzed, and
can never do anything for humanity. What right cities the good world, has the
man of genius to retreat for work and indulge himself? The popular literary
creed seems to be. I am a sublime genus, I ought not therefore to labor. But
genus is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genus: exalt
it. The good, the illuminated, sit apart from the rest, censuring their
dullness and vices, as if they thought that, by sitting very grand in their
chairs, the very brokers, attorneys and congressmen would see the error of
their ways, and flock to them. But the good and wise must learn to act, and
carry salvation to the combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below.
One part of these children, it is replied, that life and
their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such trifles as
you propose to them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your great
and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen, paltry
matters. Each cause as it is called say abolition, temperance, say Calvinism or
Unitarianism, becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have
been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and
convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You make
very free use of these words “great” and “holy” but few things appear to them
such. Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and
the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the
general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle, and as no
great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by which
they are maintained. Nay, they have made the experiment, and found that, from
the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies
of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillion-room and the
morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which
intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without
an aim.
Objectives
Nature expresses Emerson’s beliefs that each individual must
develop a personal understanding of the universe. Emerson makes clear in the
Introduction that men should break away from reliance on second hand
information, upon the wisdom of the past upon inherited and industrialized
knowledge.
The main objectives of this research paper are to find out
the magnificent contribution of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And essayist, lecturer,
and poet who led the transcendentalist movement and he is one of the well-known
individuals among American literatures.
·
It
will help me to know Ralph Waldo Emerson.
·
It
will help me to know about Transcendentalism.
·
It
will help me to know to understand his contribution in English literature and
other sectors.
·
It
will help me to conceptualize the matter of Man, God and Nature.
·
It will help me to be competent about the gaze
on American Transcendentalism and I will be able to narrate the total concept
of the research.
So this thesis brings me a golden opportunity to know the
style, dictation, virtues, follies and other information about
“Transcendentalism”, “concept of Men”, God and Nature. Our age is
retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies,
histories, and criticism. The forgoing generations beheld God and nature face
to face, we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of
insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the
history of theirs?
According to Emerson, people in the past had an intimate and
immediate relationship with God and nature, and arrived at their own understanding
of the universe. All the basic elements that they required to do so exist at
every moment in time. Emerson continues in the Introduction, “The sun shines
today also”. There is more wools and flax in the fields. There are new lands,
new men, and new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Emerson’s rejection of received wisdom is reinforced by his
repeated references throughout nature to perception of familiar things, to
seeing things a new. For Emerson and for Thoreau as well, each moment provides
an opportunity to learn from nature and to approach an understanding of
universal order through it. The importance of the present moment, of
spontaneous and dynamic interactions with the universe, of the possibilities of
the here and now, render past observations and schemes irrelevant. Emerson
focuses on the accessibility of the laws of the universe to every individual
through a combination of nature and his own inner processes. In “Language,” for
example, he states that the relation between spirit and matter “is not fancied
by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all
men.” In his discussion of “intellectual science” in “Idealism” he writes that
all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion into higher realms
of thought. And at the end of the essay, in “Prospects” he exhorts, Know then
that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect.” Each man is
capable of using the natural world to achieve spiritual understanding , Just as
men in the past explored universal relations for themselves, so may each of us,
great and small, in the present: “All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you
have and can do.
In discipline, Emerson discusses the ways in which each man
may understand nature and God through rational, logical “Understanding” and
through intuitive reason. Although the mystical, revelatory intuition leads to
the highest spiritual truth understanding too, is useful in gaining a
particular kind of knowledge. But whichever mental process illuminates a given
object of attention at a given time, insight into universal order always takes
place in the mind of the individual, through his own experience of nature and
inner powers of receptiveness.
Unity of God, Man and Nature
Throughout Nature, Emerson calls for a vision of the universe
as an all-encompassing whole, embracing man and nature, matter and spirit, as
interrelated expressions of God. This unity is referred to as the Over soul
elsewhere in Emerson’s writings. The purpose of the new, direct understanding
of nature that he advocates in the essay is, ultimately, the perception of the
totality of the universal whole. At present, Emerson suggests, we have a
fragmented view of the world. We cannot perceive our proper place in it because
we have lost a sense of the unifying spiritual element that forms the common
bond between the divine, the human, and the material. But if we approach nature
properly, we may transcend our current focus on isolated parts and gain insight
into the whole. Emerson does not offer a comprehensive scheme of the components
and workings of God’s creation. Instead, he recommends an approach by which we
may each arrive at our own vision of totality.
Emerson asserts and reasserts the underlying unity of distinct,
particulate expressions of the divine. In the introduction, he emphases man’s
and natures parallel positions as manifestations of the universal order, and
consequently as means of understanding that order. He elaborates upon the
origin of God of both man and nature in discipline, in which he discusses
evidence of essential unity in the similarities between various natural objects
and between the various laws that govern them.
Each creature is only a modification of the other; the
likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and
the same. Hence it is that a ruler of one art or a law of one organization
holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity that it is really seen,
it lies under the undermost garment of nature and betrays its source in
universal spirit.
Our striving to comprehend nature more spiritually will
illuminate natural order and the relationships within it as manifestations of
God. In Idealism Emerson stresses the advantages of the ideal theory of nature
the approach to nature as a projection by God onto the human mind rather than
as a concrete reality. Idealism makes God as integral element in our
understanding of nature, and provides a comprehensively inclusive view.
Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle
of persons and things of actions and events of country and religion not as
painfully accumulated atom after act in an aged creeping past, but as one vast
picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the
soul.
Spiritualization hastened by inspired insight will heal the
fragmentation that plagues us. Emerson writes in Prospects. The reason why the
world lacks unity and lies broken in heaps, is because man is disunited with
himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the
spirit. By drawing upon our latent spiritual capabilities and seeking evidence
of God’s order in nature, we will make sense of the universe.
Throughout nature, Emerson uses analogy and imagery to advance
the concept of universal unity. In chapter 1, he suggests, through the analogy
of the landscape, the transformation of particulate information into a whole.
Regarded from a transcendent, “poetical” point of view, the many individual
forms that comprise the landscape become less distinct and form an integrated
totality. In addition to the poet, the painter, the musician, and the architect
are all particularly sensitive to perceiving wholes.
Emerson also uses the imagery of the circle extensively to
convey the all-encompassing, perfect self-containment of the universe. For
example, in “Beauty” he describes the way in which the structure of the eye and
the laws of light conspire to create perspective.
By the mutual action of the eye’ structure and of the laws of
light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what
character so ever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the
particular objects are mean and infecting, the landscape which they compose, is
round and symmetrical.
In discussing the similarities between natural objects and
between natural laws in “Discipline”, Emerson reiterates and expands the image,
making it more complex and comprehensive. It is like a great circle on a
sphere, comprising all possible circles, which, however, may be drawn, and
comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute End is, being or
entity seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.
The circle is thus not only all-encompassing, but allows
multiple approaches to the whole.
Emerson develops the idea of each particle of nature as a
microcosm reflecting the whole, and as such a point of access to the universal.
In “Discipline” he writes of “the Unity of Nature” the Unity in Varity, and
goes on to state:
a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the
whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a
microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
The idea of microcosm is important in Emerson’s approach to
nature, as it is in Thoreau’s. Because the parts represent the whole in
miniature, it is consequently not necessary to see all of the parts to
understand the whole. Through an insight akin to revelation, man may understand
the big picture from just one example in nature. We need not be slaves to
detail to understand the meaning that detail conveys.
Reason and
Understanding
From the beginning to the end of Nature, Emerson stresses the
particular importance of the intuitive type of comprehension, which he calls
reason, in the terminology of English Romantic poetry. Reason is required to
penetrate the universal laws and the divine mind. At the beginning of the
introduction, he calls for a poetry and philosophy of insight and a religion by
revelation his first references to intuition in the essay. Kantian Reason is
linked with spiritual truth, Lockean Understanding with the laws of nature.
Because Nature is a kind of manual for spiritualization, reason holds a higher
place in it than Understanding. Although Understanding is essential for the
perception of material laws and in its application promotes a progressively
broader vision, it does not by itself lead man to God.
In Beauty, Language and Discipline, Emerson examines Reason’s
revelation to man of the larger picture behind the multiplicity of details in
the material world. In Beauty, he describes the stimulation of the human
intellect by natural beauty. He offers artistic creativity as the extreme love
of and response to natural beauty. Art is developed in the essay as an
insightful synthesis of parts into a whole, as are such other expressions of
human creativity as poetry and architecture. The intuitively inspired formation
of this sense of wholeness is similar to the comprehension of universal law, the
ultimate goal advocated in Nature. In “Language” he describes the symbolism of
original language as based in natural fact, and the integral relationship
between language, nature, and spirit. He defines Reasons as the faculty that
provides apprehension of spirit through natural symbols, and connects spirit
with the universal soul itself.
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his
individual life. This universal soul, he calls Reason it is not mine or his,
but we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is
buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the
type of reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call reason,
considered in relation to nature, we call spirit. Spirit hath life in itself.
And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language.
Reason, which imparts both vision into the absolute and also
creative force as well, is thus presented more as God’s reaching out into man
than as an active capacity solely within man.
In prospects, Emerson implores his readers to trust in reason
as a means of approaching universal truth. He writes of “matutina cognition”
morning knowledge of man. This concept of morning knowledge is echoed in
Thoreau’s writings in the heightened awareness that Thoreau presents in
connection with the morning hours. It is a spiritual, enhanced, spontaneous
insight into higher truth. In Prospects, Emerson puts forward examples of
intuition at work the traditions of miracle, the life of Jesus, transforming
action based on principle such as the abolition of slavery, the miracles of
enthusiasm, as those of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers, animal
magnetism hypnosis, prayer, eloquence, self-healing, and the wisdom of
children. These examples make evident the instantaneous in-streaming causing
power that constitutes reasons. Emerson explores at length the difference
between understanding and reason. Both serve to instruct man. However,
Understanding is tied to matter and leads to common sense rather than to the
broadest vision. Emerson grants that as man advances in his grasp of natural
laws, he comes closer to understanding the laws of creation. But reason is
essential to transport man out of the material world into the spiritual. In
“Idealism” Emerson asserts that intuition works against acceptance of concrete
reality as ultimate reality, thereby promoting spiritualization.
In Spirit, Emerson presents the notion of the mystical and
intuitively understood universal essence a potent, comprehensive life force
which, expressed in man through natures agency, confers tremendous power.
Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale
the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and
truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the creator, is
himself the creator in the finite.
Reason provides perception of God’s creation and a direct
link with God, and reinforces the divine within man. It bestows on man an
exalted status in the world. And man’s identification with God, his elevation
through vision, underlies Emerson’s sense of nature as a tool for human
development. Man is second only to God in the universal scheme. The material
world exists for him.
Both man and nature are expressions of the divine, Emerson
declares in Nature. Man, in his physical existence, is a part of the material
world. But throughout the essay, Emerson refers to man’s separateness from
nature through his intellectual and spiritual capacities. Man and nature share
a special relationship. Each is essential to understanding the other. However,
Emerson makes clear that man enjoys the superior position. In his higher
abilities, he represents an endpoint of evolution. Moreover, man has particular
powers over nature. Nature was made to serve man’s physical and, more
significantly, intellectual and spiritual needs.
In the poem with which Emerson prefaced the 1849 second
edition of Nature, man’s place as a developmental pinnacle is conveyed in the
lines, And, striving to be man, conferred by the inner qualities of mind and
spirit.
Man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He
is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every
other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects,
nor these objects without man.
Man’s ascendency over nature is powerfully expressed in the
final passage of the essay:
The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with
observation, domination such as now is beyond his dream of God, he shall enter
without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to
perfect sight.
Indeed, although Transcendentalism is sometimes perceived as
a simple celebration of nature, the relationship that Emerson and other
Transcendentalist suggested was considerably more complex.
In Chapter 1, Emerson describes nature’s elevation of man’s
mood, and the particular sympathy with and joy in nature that man feels. But he
adds that nature by itself is not capable of producing human reaction. It
requires man’s inner processes to become meaningful: “Yet it is certain that
the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in
a harmony of both. And in beauty focusing on nature’s existence to satisfy
man’s need for beauty, he states that nature is not in and of itself a final
end:
But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of
inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It
must, therefore, stand as a part and not as yet the last or highest expression
of the final cause of Nature.
Nature’s meaning resides in its role as a medium of
communication between Good and man.
Emerson stresses throughout nature that nature exists to
serve man, and explains the ways in which it does so. In “Commodity” he
enumerates the basic material uses of nature by man. He then goes on to point
out the fact that man harnesses nature to enhance its material usefulness. In
Beauty, Emerson discusses the power of natural beauty to restore man when
exhausted, to give him simple pleasure, to provide a suitable backdrop to his
glorious deeds, and to stimulate his intellect, which may ultimately lead him
to understand universal order. Man’s artistic expression is inspired by the
perception and translation is his mind of the beauty of nature.
In Language, Emerson details language’s uses as a vehicle of
thought and, ultimately, through its symbolism and the symbolism of the things
it stand for, as an aid to comprehension and articulation of spiritual as well
as material truth. A person effectively expresses himself, Emerson notes, in
proportion to the natural vigor of his language. Nature both exists for and
intensifies man’s capabilities.
In discipline, he introduces human will, which, working
through the intellect, emphases aspects of nature that the mind requires and
disregards those that the mind does not need. Thus man imposes himself on
nature, makes it what he wants it to be.
Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It
receives the domination of man as meekly as the ass on which the Savior rode.
It offers all its kingdoms to man as the material which he may mold into what
is useful.
Emerson develops this idea in Idealism, in discussing the
poet’s elevation of soul over matter in “subordinating nature for the purpose
of expression giving emphasis and drawing connections as suits the message he
wishes to convey. Nature is thus fluid, ductile and flexible, changeable by
man.
Emerson asserts throughout Nature the primary of spirit over
matter. Nature’s purpose is as a repression of the divine to promote human
insight into the laws of the universe, and thus to bring man closer to God.
Emerson writes of nature in Spirit as “the organ through which the universal
spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.
He explores the relationship between matter and spirit extensively in Language,
in which he discusses the correspondence between material and moral laws, and
in idealism, in which he presents the concept of nature as a projection by God
on the human mind, as opposed to a concrete reality.
Emerson’s discussion in Language is based in three premises:
that words even those used to describe intellectual or spiritual states
originated in nature, in an elemental interaction between mind and matter that
not only do words represent nature, but, because nature is an expression of the
divine, the natural facts that words represent are symbolic of spiritual truth,
and that the whole of nature not just individual natural facts symbolizes the
whole spiritual truth, Emerson writes.
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors
because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral
nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.
Because the laws of the material world correspond to higher
laws in the spiritual world, man may “by degrees” comprehend the universal
through his familiarity with its expression in nature. Emerson states that the
symbolism of matter renders every form significant to hidden life and final
cause. ” Moral law, as he suggests in discipline, lies at the center of nature
and radiates to the circumference.” At the end of language, Emerson works
toward the ideal theory in presenting all the particulars of nature as
preexisting in necessary ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by
preceding affections, in the world of spirit. He writes that a fact is the end
of last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world. Maters thus issues from and is secondary
to spirit.
In “Idealism” and “spirit”, Emerson takes a philosophical
leap in asking whether nature exists separately, or whether it is only an image
created in man’s mind by God. Although he says that the answer cannot be known,
and that it makes no difference in man’s use of nature, he suggests that
idealism is preferable to viewing nature as concrete reality because it
constitutes “that view which is most desirable to the mind.” Emerson supports
the ideal theory by pointing to the ways in which poetry, philosophy, science,
religion, and ethics subordinate matter to higher truth. But he also
acknowledges that idealism is hard to accept from the commonsensical point of
view the view of those who trust in rationality over intuition. “The brokers,
the wheelwright, the carpenter, the roll-man, are much displeased at the
intimation, he writes at the beginning of “Idealism.” Correspondence provides a
bridge between matter and spirit. In denying the actual existence of matter,
idealism goes much farther.
In various ways in Nature, Emerson appears to suggest that
the natural world does, in fact, exist separately from spirit. For instance, he
carefully distinguishes between man’s inner qualities and his physical
existence, between the “ME” and “NOT ME”, which includes one’s own body. His
progressive argument is marred by this seeming contradiction, and by his
hesitancy to state outright that nature is an ideal, even while he discusses it
as such. He only goes so far as to say that idealism offers a satisfactory way
of looking at nature. But he does not want to sidetrack his reader by
attempting to prove that which cannot be proven.
Emerson concludes the essay by asking his readers to open
themselves to spiritual reality by trusting in intuitive reason.
There are far more excellent qualities in the student than
preciseness and infallibility. A guess is often more fruitful than an
indisputable affirmation, and a dream may let us deeper into the secret of
nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
Through receptivity to intuition, we may rise above narrow
common sense and transcend preoccupation with material fact.
Statement of the topic:
Our American literature and spiritual history are, we
confess, in the optative mood, but who knows these seething brains, these
admirable radicals, these unsocial worshipers, these talkers who talk the sun
and moon away, will believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving
its mark.
They are lonely the spirit of their writing and conversation
is lonely; they repel influences they shun general society. The incline to shut
themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in
the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be
sure, does not like this very well it satin, who so goes to walk alone, accuses
the whole world. He declares all to be unfit to be his companions it is very
uncivil, nay, insulting, Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does
not proceed from any whim on the part f those separators but if anyone will
take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from
temperament and from principle, with some unwillingness too and as a choice of the
less of two evils for these persons are not by nature melancholy sour and
unsocial, they are not stocks or brute but joyous susceptible, affectionate
they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. Like the young
Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day but are you sure that you
love me. Nay, if they tell you their whole thought, they will own that love
seems to them the last and highest gift of nature that there are persons whom
in their hearts they daily thank for existing, persons whose faces are perhaps
unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit lave penetrated their solitude, and
for whose sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of another character,
which inspires a new a new interest in our own, to behold the beauty lodged in
a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension, that I am instantly forced
home to inquire if I am not deformity itself: to behold in another the
expression of a love so high that it assures itself, assures itself also to me
against every possible casualty except my unworthiness these are degrees on the
scale of human happiness, to which they have ascended and it is fidelity to
this sentiment which has made common association distasteful to them. They wish
a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you and they do
not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity
which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken of love.
Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If you do not
need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then
I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it , you would
not understand what I say.
But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons,
we must say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the objections
of the man of the world, but not too easy to dispose of the doubts and
objections that occur to themselves. They are exercised in their own spirit
with queries, which acquaint them with all adversity, and with the trials of
the bravest heroes. When I asked them concerning their private experience, they
answered somewhat in this wise: It is not to be denied that there must be some
wide difference between my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain brief
experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market, in some place,
at some time, whether in the body or out if the body, God knows and made me
aware that I had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law existed
for me and all that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience and the
worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more. Well, in the space of an
hour probably I was let down from this height I was at my old tricks, the
selfish member of a selfish society. My life is superficial, takes no root in
the deep world I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility
of seeing an Universe which I do not use I wish to exchange this
flash-lightening faith for continuous daylight this fever-glow for a benign
climate.
These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand
in wild contrast. To him who looks at his life from these moments of
illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless, and
subaltern part in the world. That is to be done which he has not skill to do,
or to be said which others can say better, and he lies by, or occupies his
hands with some plaything, until his hour comes again. Much of our reading much
of our labor seems mere waiting it was not that we were born for any other
could do it as well, or better. So little skill enters into these works, so
little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what
to do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or
govern the state. The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the
two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show
very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one
prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and
paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater
disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my faith, what am I, what but
I thought of serenity and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky,
presently the clouds shun down again yet we retain the belief that this petty
web we weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with veins of the blue,
and that the moments will characterize the days. Patience then is for us, is it
not patience, and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into
some new infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to
reflect that, though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our
indigence nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any
kind.
But this class is not sufficiently characterized, if we not
omit to add that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal
trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty each in its perfection including the
three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the same
taste is observable in all the moral movements of the time, in the religious
and benevolent enterprises. They have a liberal, even an artistic spirit. A reference to Beauty in action sounds, to be
sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In
politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the
bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted restitution which granted it.
But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and the pauper, and the
drunkard is for Beauty, is for a necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the
beneficiary. I say, this is the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue
totters and trips, does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere;
they preach and denounce their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still
liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches
to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we are
tempted to smile, and we flee from the working to the speculative reformer, to
escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for these days derision and criticism!
We call the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean,
escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the true. They are
lovers of nature also, and an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world
for the violated order and grace of man.
There is no doubt, a great of well-founded objection to be
spoken or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose
traits we have selected no doubt they will lay themselves open to criticism and
lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be of them as of any. There will
be cant and pretension; there will be subtitle and moonshine. These persons are
of unequal strength, and do not all prosper. They complain that everything
around them must be denied; and of feeble, it takes all their strength to deny,
before they can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors insist on their
respect to this institution, and that usage to an obsolete history to some
vocation or college or etiquette or beneficiary or charity or morning or
evening call which they resist as what does not concern them. But it costs such
sleepless nights, alienations and misgivings they have so many moods about it
these old guardians never change their minds; they have but one mood on the
subject, namely, that Antony is very perverse, that it is quite as much as
Antony can do, to assert his rights, abstain from what he thinks foolish, and
keep his temper. He cannot help the reaction of this injustice in his own mind.
He is braced-up and stilted all freedom and following genius all sallies of wit
and frolic nature are quite out of the question it is well if he can keep from
lying injustice, and suicide. This is no time for gaiety and grace. His
strength and spirits are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower
those around them without effort. Their thought and comes in like a flood,
quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics, they surrender
themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication
reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf church
and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding, preoccupied and advancing
mind, and thus they buy happiness of greater momentum lose no time, but take
the right road at first.
But all these of whom I speak are not proficient; they are
novices they only show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has
greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their charge, and
deserve a large power. Their heart is the ark in which the fire is concealed,
which shall burn in a broader and universal flame. Let them obey the Genius
then most when his impulse is wildest then the hero travels alone is the
highway of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of
our nature but its persistency through its power to attach itself to what is
permanent.
Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and
must behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue
from them to the state. In our Mechanics Fair, there must be not only bridges,
ploughs, carpenters’ planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer
instrument, rain gauges thermometers, and in society besides farmers, sailors
and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges
and meters of character persons of a fine, detecting instinct who betray the
smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there
might be room for the exciters and monitors collectors of the heavenly spark
with power to convey the electricity to others or as the storm-tossed vessel at
sea speaks the frigate or line packet to learn its longitude, so it may not be
without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare and gifted
men, to compare the points our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from
superior chronometers.
Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when
every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of
stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a
larger business, for a political party, or the division of an estate, will you
not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and
principles not marketable or perishable. Soon these improvements and mechanical
Transcendentalism is the belief that the most important truths in life are
beyond human reasoning. People who practice transcendentalism are called
transcendentalist. One way to look at transcendentalist is to see them as well
educated people that wanted to create a truly unique American body of literature.
Transcendentalist believed it was time for literary independence and they went
around writing bodies of literature, essays, novels, philosophy, and poetry
making them completely different from any other country. Transcendentalist
stressed emotions over reasoning, they believed that a system of philosophy,
should regard the processes of reasoning as the key to knowledge of reality.
Almost all transcendentalist were at one time or another a teacher. The
teaching experience provided them with a hand on out look at the problems
facing American education. It originated among a small group of intellectuals
who were developing their own rekigion.
Margaret Fuller was one of these teachers. She was hired as a
teacher in Bronson Alcott’s school where a fellow teacher Elizabeth Peabody
became her close friend. She met an English reformer named Harriet Martineau
who introduced her to Ralph Waldo Emerson. From 1839- 1844, she earned a living
by sponsoring her famous conversation, to which she invited many educated women
who were mostly the wives of men like; Emerson and Theodore Parker and also
women who were developing careers of their own. Fuller contributed art and
literature criticism to the Dial. The Dial was only published for two years but
was a turning point in the American literacy development. Fuller also helped
build the development of Brook Farm, and though she never lived there she
visited often. In 1842 Margaret Fuller tried to remove herself as editor from
the Dial and Emerson took her place as editor.
Inventions will be superseded these modes of living lost out
of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats
of trade, or the geologic changes all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the
sea beach with a white colony today, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few
hermits strove proclaim by silence, as well as by speech not only by what they
did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to
reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves a new in other, perhaps
higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in Fuller union with the
surrounding system.
Significance of the
title:
Transcendentalism and Introduction of Transcendentalism I was
given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly
Transcendental. Charles Dickens in American Notes (Reuben). I should have told
them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest
way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations. Henry David
Thoreau in Journal 4 (Reuben). To be great is to be misunderstood. Over the
years many minds have tried, with various successes with respect to a target
reader, to define the concept of transcendentalism. The definitions provided by
Transcendentalists themselves may appear to be “transcendental” indeed too many
who study it, using Charles Dickens terminology. In order to preserve the air
of seriousness and at the same time show their eloquence they very often failed
to have regard for the recipients of their texts, exactly as Perry Miller aptly
observes: “That generation was, by our standards, terribly verbose. Miller
continues by saying that politeness was the main reason for their verbosity
resulting in pages of “bowing, scraping, preliminary conciliation, and a
display of erudition”. What is more, having the whole issue of The Boston
Quarterly Review to fill up by him, Orestes A. Brownson, one of the
Transcendentalists, was highly repetitious. To transcend means to be capable of
seeing things from let us say non-standard, no conform, surely minority point
of view. The connotation of this word, thanks to this movement, acquired
additional overtones suggesting “radical” change of one’s beliefs, cutting
oneself off from the social norms and standards, freeing oneself from the
patterns gained through a process of socialization, revaluating one’s religious
beliefs and, most importantly, discovering a new authority of the self. New
Agers would use terms such as: to see the bigger picture, to perceive things
from a higher perspective, to raise one’s consciousness, to escape from the
“Matrix”. Surprisingly, these expressions apply to Transcendentalism of the
nineteenth century as well as to the New Age movement of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. 13 According to Miller, Transcendentalism was “the protest of these
few troubled spirits against what their society had confidently assumed was the
crowning triumph of progress and enlightenment their protest was entirely
spontaneous and instinctive.
Transcendentalism is the belief that the most important
truths in life are beyond human reasoning. People who practice
transcendentalism are called transcendentalists. One way to look at
transcendentalist is to see them as well educated people that wanted to create
a truly unique American body of literature. Transcendentalist believed it was
time for literary independence and they went around writing bodies of
literature, essays, novels, philosophy, and poetry making them completely different
from any other country. Transcendentalist stressed emotions over reasoning,
they believed that a system of philosophy, should regard the processes of
reasoning as the key to knowledge of reality. Almost all transcendentalist were
at one time or another a teacher. The teaching experience provided them with a
hand in out look at the problems facing American education. It originated among
a small group of intellectuals who were developing their own religion.
Margaret Fuller was one of these teachers. She was hired as a
teacher in Bronson Alcott’s school where a fellow teacher Elizabeth Peabody
became her close friend. She met an English reformer named Harriet Martineau
who introduced her to Ralph Waldo Emerson. From 1839- 1844, she earned a living
by sponsoring her famous conversation, to which she invited many educated women
who were mostly the wives of men like; Emerson and Theodore Parker and also
women who were developing careers of their own. Fuller contributed art and
literature criticism to the Dial.
The Dial was only published for two years but was a turning
point in the American literacy development. Fuller also helped build the
development of Brook Farm, and though she never lived there she visited often.
In 1842 Margaret Fuller tried to remove herself as editor from the Dial and
Emerson took her place as editor.
Literary reviews:
This overview only highlights the most relevant sources, and
it certainly does not aim to present the entire volume of fiction and
scholarship written on that subject. Primary literary sources: Joel Porte’s
volume of Emerson’s essays and literatures: Nature; Addresses and Lecturers.
Essays: First and Second series, Representative Men, English Traits, the
Conduct of Life. For New Age, the ideas presented in this thesis are largely
based in Esther and Jerry Hicks’ book, “The Law of Attraction”. It is a
channeled material. Esther Hicks channels the group entity known as Abraham.
Her thoughts substantially pervade the New Age movement. She is also the only
channeling author who runs her own radio show at Hayhouseradio.com the internet
radio station operated by an enormously successful New Age publishing company
the Hayhouse. Other primary sources are New Age movies The Secret and What the
Bleep Do We Know Down the Rabbit Hole and also other channeled but not
published material such as Laura Knight Jadczyk channeling the Cassiopaeans (www.cassiopaea.org), Brad Johnson channeling Adronis
(www.adronis.org) and Darryl Anka channeling Bashar (www.bashar,org) 9 Secondary literature sources: For
Transcendentalism, it is Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists, An Anthology
with the author’s valuable comments about lives and various issues the
Transcendentalists had to face. Frederick Finseth’s M.A. Thesis Liquid Fire
within Me: Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early
Evangelicalism explaining the reasons of tension between Unitarians and Transcendentalists.
Also, Patrick Keane’s Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: the
transatlantic” light of all our day” which goes into details about the
influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge in Emerson. Above all Paul P. Reuben’s
American Transcendentalism is providing an excellent overview of basic tenets
of Transcendentalism. Paul P. Reuben Ph.D. is a professor emeritus at the
California State university Stanislaus’ department of English. For New Age, it
is Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture, Esotericism is
the Mirror of Secular Thought. A truly extensive study of New Age phenomenon providing
not only the information concerning historical development, which I used
primarily, but also information about New Age Science, Quantum Physics, the
nature of channeling and the components that construct New Agers’ perception of
reality. This book was indispensible for my research. Also, Paul Heelas’ The
New Age Movement, a more contemporary perspective on New Age, focusing on
sociological aspects and the tendency towards prosperity orientation within the
movement having its root in the New Thought of the nineteenth century. Glenn R.
Mosley’s New Thought, Ancient Wisdom: The History and Future of the New Thought
Movement a comprehensive overview of the development of this tradition, which
constituted a point of ideological convergence of Transcendentalism and New
Age. Finally yet importantly, Olav Hammer’s Strategies of Epistemology from
Theosophy to the New Age, a source of information about New Age were
impressive.
Synopsis of the
research paper:
The contents, we will start with Transcendentalism and its
development, the reason and ideas that lead to its emergence and the immediate
predecessors of this tradition. Then we will have a look at the major cause
that leads some Unitarians to reevaluate.
Their beliefs, to become Unitarian 11 dissidents and later
Transcendentalists, which is presented in this thesis by Emerson’s Harvard
divinity School Address. We will also follow the responses that Emerson
instigated. We will continue with the romantic traces of influence in Emerson’s
work, as Romanticism was influential for New Age as well. Then we will explore
some philosophical concepts deriving from Romanticism , namely those of Reason
and Understanding because there is a significant parallel of the lower self
(ego) and higher self (our spirit) employed in New Age Thinking. We will then
proceed to slightly more metaphysical concepts in New Age, which can also be
found in Emerson’s essays, namely the essence of consciousness, time and
matter. This part will be concluded with a description of the Brook Farm
project, which has its parallel in the contemporary New Age Findhorn community.
Moving on to New Age section, we will start with general definitions and
demarcation of the field as New Age is a broad concept. We will mention some
practices typical of New Age as well as the most influential authors and their
best sellers. To grasp more fully the New Age thinking we will have a look at
the beliefs and ideas about New Age science. Then we will learn about
channeling being an important source of acquiring information within the
community. Then finally to move on to the historical origins and development of
New Age. This huge development section will start with Western Esotericism as a
basis for the ideology. Then we will jump straight to eighteenth and nineteenth
century Romanticism and Occultism, since Romanticism, as I have already
mentioned, was important for the Transcendentalists. We will familiarize
ourselves with two important figures, namely Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton
Mesmer, as the former of the two influenced Emerson, and the teachings of the
latter represented an important connecting element bridging the
Transcendentalism, influenced by Swedenborg, and the New Age via the rise of
the New Thought Movement. We will explore Emerson’s influence on New Thought
and its offshoots. We will then continue with oriental influences of both
traditions and the emergence of American Harmonia religions, roots of which can
be traced to Emerson. Finally, we will follow New Age achieving its maturity as
a fully secularized movement in the 1970’s. In the last concluding section, we
will compare the basic tenets of both traditions to see the parallels between
their respective specifically expressed beliefs.
Findings:
He experienced nature and the beauty of it. Walden Pond was
miles away from any society, but he thought, “The village was too far from the
nature. The society is moving away from the nature and moving closer to
industries. While living at Walden Pond, he was seeking the very essence of
life and to find the truth of nature. He stated that “things do not change, we
change”. He implies that nature should not change for the people. We should
change with the nature. In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau people to resist the
government policies with which they disagree.” This challenged people to go for
what they believe in. Thoreau protested against the government due to the war
between Texas and Mexico. Thoreau states that the government is best which
governs the least. That government is best which governs not at all. The
government over thinks of what they are doing, that’s why Thoreau recognizes
that the government is not responsible to revolutionize. In addition, the army
is that the government is controlling it. Thoreau’s works define being an
American because he went against the government, which people in the 1800s did
a lot of and he challenged the American government. His works also define being
a Transcendentalist because he found the truth of nature and sacrificed two
years of his life to live in the woods, surrounds by nature.
Dickenson saw life in a completely different way than did
Emerson and Thoreau. Her poems were exquisitely elaborate including “her
eccentric use of punctuation and irregular meter and rhyme”, which are unlikely
to be used in poems. Her writing is so unique that it is in its own category.
In her poems, she discusses death and cycle of life. In “Because I could not
stop for Death”, the human takes a carriage ride and passes places that are
important, like the school, where children strove, at recess in the ring, we
passed the fields of Gazing Grain-, we passed the setting Sun”. This is like
the cycle of life because these places are starting from the beginning, at
school, to the end, watching the sunset. In “The Soul selects her own Society”,
Dickenson states for ample of nations. She implies that the soul can only
choose one person out of an entire nation, possibly to save that one person.
Dickinson’s works define being an American because they talk about the American
life, death and society etc. Even though Dickenson was living by herself, she
still thought about the society and the American life outside of her house.
Emerson, Thoreau and Dickenson are the major writers during
the time of Transcendentalism. They left their normal lives to write about
their beliefs and to find the truth of it. They went through though experiences
to go for what believed in and to put those beliefs into their writings.
Conclusion:
Transcendentalism blossomed during the 1800s with the help of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickenson. They were
Transcendentalists who expressed their beliefs through writings from poems to
essays and they believed that “ the individual was at the center of the
universe”. The idea of transcendentalism is complex and for this reason, only a
number of people understood it. Emerson, Thoreau and Dickenson, were one of the
many people who were transcendentalist. These writers went out of their way in
society to their present belief.
Emerson’s beliefs were mainly on “the human mind because it
was the most important force in the universe” (Prentice Hall 384). In “Nature”,
Emerson viewed nature as “the plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign,
a perennial festival dressed” (Emerson 388). God made nature and some view it
as just trees, leaves and grass, etc. Yet Emerson saw the true beauty in
nature. He saw it as if lights, tinsel, ornaments, etc. already decorated it.
In addition, Emerson compared himself to “a transparent eyeball” and “he sees
all” the currents of the Universal Being. He can see everything and everyone
around the world. In Self-Reliance”, Emerson conveys that one must follow for
what they believe in. They have to accept themselves “for better for worse”
Emerson states, “A man is relieved and gay when he put his heart into his work
and done his best”. He implies that one must love their job and loves to work
hard because at the end they will be happy. In addition Emerson viewed the
human soul as part of an “Over Soul”, a universal spirit to which all beings
returned after death”. The Over-Soul is similar to reincarnation, where after
one person dies, that person will come back to life, but in a different form,
like, an animal, an insect, or a human. Emerson’s works define being an
American because they gave him the freedom to write what he wanted. Also, his
works define being a Transcendentalist because they include descriptions of the
deep sense of nature, human soul and Individualism.
Chapter -2
Life and works of
Emerson:
With the perception and description of the topic I would like
to depict with the life background of the Author Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essayist,
poet, lecturer, philosopher, Unitarian minister, and central figure among the
American Transcendentalists was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803.
He was the fourth of eight children born to the Reverend William Emerson
(1769-1811), who was the pastor of the First Church in Boston, and Ruth Haskins
Emerson (1768-1853). Emerson’s roots in both concord and in the ministry were
deep. On his father’s side, his ancestry extended back to early colonial
Massachusetts, to the Reverend Peter Bulkeley (1583-1776), a puritan who had
come from England and, in 1635, become a founder and the first minister of
Concord. Bulkeley’s grand daughter had married the Reverend Joseph Emerson, son
of Thomas, a settler in coastal Ipswich, Massachusetts. Joseph’s grandson
Joseph, also a minister, was the father of William Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s
grandfather. William Emerson (1743-1776), minister of the First Parish in
Concord, had gone to Fort Ticonderoga in New York to serve as chaplain of the
Revolutionary army, because ill and died before he could return to Concord.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s material grandfather was successful Boston merchant John
Haskins (1729-1814) a cooper and distiller.
William Emerson and Ruth Haskins were married on October 25,
1796. Their eight children were Phebe Ripley (1798-1800) John Clarke (1799-1807).
William (1801-1868) Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) Edward Bliss (1805-1834). Robert
Bulkeley (1807-1859) Charles Chauncy (1808-1836) and Mary Caroline (1811-1814).
William and Ruth Emerson paid careful attention to both the religious and the
intellectual development of their children, and provided a stable early home
life for them. William, a liberal minister with a taste for literary activity,
encouraged scholarship as well as religious devotion in his sons. He was a
sociable man, well-respected in the community. His public position brought
frequent visitors to the Emerson home. Ruth Haskins was a pious woman who met
the various demands placed upon her as the wife of a prominent man and as a
mother. The Emerson lost their first child, Phebe Ripley, in 1800. Their second
child, John Clarke, died in 1807 from tuberculosis a constant, looming threat
in the nineteenth century, and one that repeatedly touched Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s life. From childhood, Emerson was close to his brothers William,
Edward Bliss, and Charles Chauncy. Robert Bulkeley (called Bulkeley) was
mentally retarded. His condition and care concerned his brothers until his
death in 1859.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s world was radically altered in 1811,
when his father died, leaving Mrs. Emerson to support and raise the young
family on her own. Although she managed to care for and to educate her sons,
financially insecurity quickly became a fact of life. The First Church granted
her a stipend for a time, as well as the use of the parish house. Mary Moody Emerson
(1774-1863), William Emerson’s unmarried sister, stayed with the family for
several months after her brother’s death, and returned again later. A woman of
strong religious devotion and intellect, conservative in some ways and liberal
in others, opinionated, unafraid to express herself either face to face or in
her letters, she was a powerful influence in Emerson and his brothers. Her
correspondence with him in the1820s helped to inform his Transcendentalism.
The Emerson brothers stayed in Concord from time to time
during their childhood. The Reverend Ezra Ripley, who had married Phebe Bliss
Emerson, the window of Revolutionary minister William Emerson, was their
step-grandfather. When in Concord, Ralph Waldo stayed at the Old Manse,
Ripley’s home, and formerly the home of their grandfather William Emerson. From
November 1814 until the following spring, the entire Emerson family lived at
the Manse. Their temporary relocation was prompted by fear of a sense of their
ancestors’ importance in the town. In Concord, they had the opportunity to
experience both small town life and the pleasure of nature. Having returned to
Boston in 1815, Mrs. Emerson took in boarders to keep her household financially
afloat. The family moved frequently, but Ruth Emerson, encouraged by her
sister-in-law Mary Moody Emerson, steadfastly applied herself to providing her
sons with an education that reflected the standards, the values, and the
aspirations of her late husband.
Emerson’s education began in Boston, at Dame school (a school
for small children, in which the basics were taught by the woman in her own
home). He then attended grammar school. In 1812, he entered the Boston Public
Latin School, where his studies included Latin and Greek. He simultaneously
attended a separate writing school. After the family’s 1814-1815 stay in
Concord, Emerson read extensively on his own in the spring of 1815 and returned
to Boston Latin in the fall. He was a serious, though unremarkable student.
Ralph Waldo Emerson entered Harvard College in 1817 as
president freshman, or orderly, a position that helped pay his way through
college and that required him to serve as messenger for Harvard’s president,
John Kirkland. He also tutored and later served as a waiter in the junior
commons, and during college vacations taught in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the
college preparatory school kept by the Reverend Samuel Ripley (son of Ezra
Ripley) and his learned wife Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley.
Emerson’s Harvard curriculum included Latin, Greek, English,
History, Mathematics and modern languages. Emerson read English philosopher
John Locke as part of his formal studies. A middling student, he read widely on
his own. Shakespeare, Montaigne, Swift and Byron were among the authors he
selected independently of his class work. His Harvard teachers included George
Ticknor in modern languages, Edward Everett in Greek, and Edward Tyrrell
Channing in English composition. (In 1815, Ticknor and Everett in Greek had travelled
to Europe and studied at the University of Gottingen, where they were exposed
to the German literature and thought that would become so important to the New
England Transcendentalists.) Emerson was a member of Harvard’s Pythologian Club
(a literary society). He won a prize for an essay on Socrates and graduated
from Harvard in 1821.
The first surviving journal volume kept by Emerson dates from
his college years. (His manuscript journals are located in the Houghton Library
of Harvard University.) He kept a journal until 1875, when declining health and
diminished intellect made it impossible for him to continue. As with Thoreau’s
journal, Emerson’s journal entries become the basis for his lectures, essays,
and books. They were sufficiently developed that Emerson sometimes extracted
passages just as they were for use in lecture or publication. He indicated his
awareness of the value of his journals to his thought and writing in the first
entry he made in the volume for 1837, in which he described his journal as his
“savings” bank to be drawn upon in future endeavors. Although maintained over a
longer period of time than Thoreau’s journal, Emerson’s is not nearly as
extensive as Thoreau’s Emerson was less inclined than Thoreau to regard
Journalizing as an end in itself.
After graduating from Harvard, Emerson taught in the Boston
school for girls kept by his brother William in their mother’s home. He felt
himself ill-suited to the work and did not enjoy it, but he continued because
he needed to contribute toward the education of his younger brothers, Edward
and Charles. In 1823, William left to study theology at Gottingen, leaving
Waldo (the name that he had decided in college that he preferred) to keep
school alone. Shortly before his twenty first birthday, Emerson decided that he
would devote himself to the ministry. His decision was not an unexamined one.
He had already expressed doubts about formal religion and his personal fitness
to preach it. Nevertheless, he entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1825.
Almost immediately, poor health interrupted his studies and, along with the
need to continue teaching in order to earn money, prevented him from taking a
degree. In 1826, he was approached to preach, and delivered his first sermon in
Waltham.
Having decided against a career in the ministry, William
Emerson had returned from Gottingen in 1825. In 1826, William and Edward (who,
beset by health problems, had in 1825 also hone to Europe) began to study law
William as an apprentice in a New York law office, Edward in Daniel Webster’s
Boston office. Waldo’s health again declined. Showing symptoms of tuberculosis,
he travelled south in 1826, to Charleston, South Carolina, and St. Augustine,
Florida, to regain his health. He worked on sermons and developed a friendship
with Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon and an atheist. His health improved,
he returned to Boston in 1827 and served as a supply preacher to parishes in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1827, while in Concord, New Hampshire,
Emerson fell in love with Ellen Louisa tucker, daughter of the late Beza
Tucker, a successful Boston merchant. Ellen, considered beautiful, was an
intelligent, confident girl, a writer of poetry, and the love of Emerson’s
life. She, like Emerson, was also tubercular. In March of 1829, Emerson became
pastor of the Unitarian Second Church of Boston. He had been asked to serve as
the colleague of the ailing Reverend Henry Ware, whom he soon succeeded.
Emerson was generally well-liked by his congregation, which appreciated the weekly
sermons that he delivered with directness and simplicity. The necessity of
producing sermons on a regular schedule fostered discipline in writing, and the
delivery of these sermons honed Emerson’s skills in public speaking. But
preaching also forced Emerson uncomfortably to consider how much church
doctrine he truly accepted. At the same time, he became aware that he possessed
a certain emotional aloofness that made it difficult for him to deal with some
of the personal interactions required of a pastor. Nevertheless, at this point
his prospects for a long career in the ministry were promising. In September of
1829, when Ellen’s precarious health seemed stable, the two were married.
Emerson’s pastoral salary and the likelihood of prosperity
through Ellen’s inheritance from her father gave Emerson a new, welcome
financial security. He bought books for his personal library and enjoyed the
benefits of urban life, including a subscription to the Boston Athenaeum and
access to the Harvard College Library and the Boston Library Society. He read
Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne, and British Romantic writers Coleridge and
Carlyle, among other authors. Coleridge made a particularly deep impression on
him. At the same time, Emerson’s life expanded in other ways. He accepted roles
in public life that never interested his future friend Henry David Thoreau. In
1829, Emerson was chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate, in 1830 and 1831 and a
member of the Boston School Committee. Later, when he moved to Concord, he
would assume an important place in community life. Moreover, in 1863, he would
serve on the West Point Board of Visitors, and from 1867 to 1879 as an overseer
at Harvard.
In December of 1830, Emerson’s brother Edward, also experienced
tubercular, sailed to Puerto Rico in search of a more healthful climate.
Emerson’s wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died on February 8, 1831, at the age of
nineteen. Emerson was desolate, but quickly returned to his duties at the
Second Church. After Ellen’s death, he had an increasingly difficult time
pushing back the doubts at that he had long felt about orthodox Christianity.
In the summer of 1832, Emerson wrote a letter to his church, recommending the
observation of the Lord’s Supper (the communion) as a remembrance rather than a
sacrament, and asking to discontinue the use of bread and wine. The church
rejected his proposal. On September 9, 1832, Emerson delivered a sermon in
which he explained his position and resigned from his pastorate.
Still grieving for Ellen, shaken by Edward’s condition, and
exhausted by the soul-searching that had led to his resignation, Emerson sailed
for Europe on December 25, 1832. He arrived at Malta, traveled through Italy,
visited Paris, and headed for England and Scotland. The trip opened his eyes to
the world and provided opportunities to meet people who stimulated and
influenced him. He met English writer Walter Savage Landor in Florence, American
sculptor Horatio Greenough in Rome, Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
William Wordsworth in England, and Thomas Carlyle with whom he developed a
lasting friendship and correspondence in Scotland. Emerson arrived back in the
United States in October of 1833.
On his return, he served as a supply minister in various
Unitarian parishes a practice that he continued for years and took up a new
career as a lecturer, an occupation that engaged him for over four decades.
This rise of the lyceum in America fortuitously coincided with Emerson’s need
to find a new occupation. Lecturing allowed him to draw on skills that he had
developed as a preacher, gave him scope to refine ideas on God, man and nature
that he had been pondering, and fostered expression of his literary
aspirations. Moreover, it provided an income. He delivered his “Uses of Natural
History” in Boston in November 1833, proclaiming, “The whole Relation of
understanding of man’s place in the universe, which the lecture platform
permitted him to develop more fully and to clothe in powerful, suggestive
vocabulary and style. The influence of his reading he was stimulated by the
German philo0sophers, Goethe, Plato, the Napoleonic writers, eastern sacred
books, the English Romantics, the Swedish mystic Swedenborg, Montaigne, and
others converged and reacted with his Unitarian background and were distilled
into his own particular brand of visionary idealism as he readied his thoughts
for public presentation. He delivered lectures which he read to his audiences
in a range of subjects among them history, Italy, and great men including
Michelangelo, Martin Luther, and John Milton. He presented a lecture series
titled “the Philosophy of History”, “Human Culture,” and “The Present Age”. And
he found success. Audiences were ready to hear what Emerson had to say.
Having established himself as a lecturer and looking forward to
a literary career, Emerson settled in Concord, the home of his ancestors, a
place that offered peace and access both to nature and to the advantages of
Boston. In October of 1834, just two weeks after Edward’s death in Puerto Rico,
Emerson and his mother moved into the Old Manse as Ezra Ripley’s boarders.
While living at the Manse, Emerson worked at writing Nature, which upon
publication in 1836 would unleash a period of intense expression of
Transcendental thought, and reaction to it.
Emerson quickly become Concord’s most prominent citizen, a
man respected and beloved by his townsmen. Along with his concord heritage, his
characteristic humility and inclination to deal with others directly and
kindly, no matter what their station in life, made residents of the town feel
that he was truly one of them. He delivered his first public address in the
town on September 12, 1835, the two hundredth anniversary of Concord’s
incorporation. The manuscript of the address is now in the Concord Free Public
Library. In 1837, Emerson’s poem “Concord Hymn” written at the request of the
town was sung at the dedication of a monument erected near the site of the
North Bridge to commemorate the Concord Fight of April 19, 1775. Over the
years, he served the town as a Sunday school teacher in the First Parish,
through its lyceum, as a member of its School Committee and Library Committee,
and through attendance at town meetings a form of local democratic government
that he appreciated. He also made Concord a destination for pilgrims who hoped
to meet one of the most recognized men in America.
On September 14, 1835, two days after his civic debut at Concord’s
bicentennial celebration, Emerson married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth,
Massachusetts, and brought her back to Concord to live in the home (called
“Bush”) that he had bought on the Cambridge Turnpike. He and Lidian (Emerson
changed her name to prevent the final from turning into through local
pronunciation) had a relatively stable, happy married life, although it lacked
the intensity of Emerson’s first marriage. Lidian was a spiritual and
intellectual woman. Their relationship was based on mutual respect and upon
shared love and concern for their children. The second Mrs. Emerson understood
and accepted how deeply her husband had cared for his first wife, but at times
she had difficulty coping with his emotional aloofness and with his absences
from the household while on lecture tours and trips. The Emerson’s had four
children Waldo (1836-1842), Ellen Tucker (1839-1909), named for Emerson’s first
wife.
The year 1836 was one of the most eventful in Emerson’s life.
His younger brother Charles, a lawyer, had become engaged in 1835 to Elizabeth
Hoar, daughter of well-known Concord lawyer Samuel Hour and sister of Ebenezer
Rockwood Hoar, George Frisbee Hoar, and Edward Sherman Hoar intelligent learned
and widely respected, Elizabeth Hoar was always welcome in the Emerson home. In
May of 1836, Charles Emerson died of tuberculosis – a severe blow to his
fiancée and to the Emerson’s. Emerson was restored in October, when Lidian gave
birth to their first child, Walso. In the same year, he met transcendental
thinkers Margaret Fuller and Bronson Allcot, who later became a neighbor, was a
friend until Emerson’s death in 1882. In 1836, Emerson also wrote the preface
to an American edition of Carlyle’s Sator Resartus. Moreover, Emerson’s own
Nature was published by James Munroe in September of the year. While hardly a popular success, Nature was
taken seriously by those who, like the author himself, sought new insights to
replace dogma, conversation, and received wisdom. With the publication of
Nature, both Emerson’s reputation as a thinker and Transcendentalism as a
movement gained momentum. Shortly after Nature appeared, a group gathered at
George Ripley’s home in Boston at the urging of Frederic Henry Hedge, for the
free discussion of theological and moral subjects. The first meeting of the
informal “Transcendental Club” included Ripley, Hedge, Emerson, Alcott, Orestes
Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, and Convers Francis. Later meetings included
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,
Thoreau, and others. Club met until 1840, providing opportunity for the
exchange of ideas and leading to the establishment of the Dial.
The Dial, named by Bronson Alcott, was issued between July of
1840 and April of 1844. Margaret Fuller was its first editor; Emerson took over
from Fuller in 1842. He was a major contributor of poems, essays, and reviews
to the magazine throughout its four-year run. Although The Dial did not
circulate widely, it was nevertheless important as a stimulus to and medium for
Transcendental thought. Aside from Fuller and Emerson, contributors included
Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria child, James Russell Lowell, Theodore Parker,
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Henry David Thoreau and Jones Very.
Nature was followed in quick succession by two other
expressions of Transcendentalism, Emerson’s “American Scholar” address before
the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard (1837) and his “Divinity school Address”
before the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838). “The American
Scholar,” referred to by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “our intellectual Declaration
of Independence,” called for a new American thought based on intellectual
self-reliance rather than the thought of the past. Published in 1837, it was
well received. In “The Divinity School Address,” Emerson deplored the lack of
vigor and meaning in established religion and urged men to from a more direct,
individual understanding of God “The Divinity School Address” also published
the year it was delivered, was defended by those sympathetic to Transcendental
thought and denounced by more conservative members of the Unitarian clergy and
by biblical scholar and Harvard Divinity School professor Andrews Norton.
(Norton’s Discourse on the latest form of identity was published in 1839. As a
result of “The Divinity School Address” Emerson was not welcome at Harvard for
decades.
Emerson tried to remain above the controversy that “The
Divinity School Address” generated. He continued lecturing and began to pull
together his first collected edition of essays, which was published by Munroe
in Boston under the title Essays in March of 1841. It was also issued by James
Fraser in London, with a preface by Thomas Carlyle, in the same year, a fact
that indicates the degree of recognition that Emerson had achieved by this
time. The volume met with mixed reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It was
inclined to censure both for its theology and its philosophy, a book in that
“the meditative and wise man may find ambrosial food, but which will prove
poison to the simple and undiscerning.” A reviewer for the English Literary Gazette
for September 25, 1841, stated that Essays “out-Carlyle’s Carlyle himself,
exaggerates all his peculiarities and faults, and possesses very slight
glimpses of his excellences. Although the reviews were mixed, Emerson’s work
was acknowledged as significant. His Essays second Series was published by
Munroe in October of 1844 and in London by John Chapman in November of that
year. This volume reinforced Emerson’s reputation both in America and abroad.
For the remainder of his life, even after his creative spark had died, he
enjoyed a position of preeminence among American thinkers and men of letters.
In the other thought, the materialist takes his departure
from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist
takes his departure from his consciousness and recons the world an appearance.
The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, Social art, and
Luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent
of space or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another
measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take
in his consciousness, not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only
reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors.
Nature, literature, history are only subjective phenomena. Although in his
action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men,
even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after
the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives
of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely,
property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful
fidelity of details the laws of being, he does not respect government, except
as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor arts; for
themselves; but hears; as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his
consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought,- that
is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts
you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded
center in himself, center alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to
regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to
that aforesaid Unknown Center of him.
From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, thus
beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is
simpler to be self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is, to be
self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does
not violate me; but best when it is likes to solitude. Everything real is
self-existent. Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity. All that
you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are the perpetual
creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of those
that are independent of your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains
to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will
go well. You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance.
Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the
difference will transform my condition and economy. The mould is invisible, but
the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of
circumstance, but it is the power of me. Am I in harmony with myself? My
position will seem to you just and commanding. Am I vicious and insane? My
fortunes will seem to you obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I
associate, and, so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar. Jesus
acted so, because he thought so. I do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any
reality; I say I make my circumstance: but if you ask me, whence am I? I feel
like other men my relation to the fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, nor
even thought, but which exists, and will exist.
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of
spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the
human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in
ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principal should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of
man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is anything positive,
dogmatic, and personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth
of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm
other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.
In action, he easily incurs the charge of antinomianism by
his avowal that he, who has the Lawgiver, May with safety not only neglects,
but even contravenes every written commandment. In the play of Othello, the
expiring Desdemona absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant Emilia.
Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello exclaims.
By the late 1830s, Emerson had befriended Henry David
Thoreau, who had reunited to Concord after graduating from Harvard in 1837. In
1841, the younger man joined the Emerson household as a handyman, in which
capacity he took care of things that the well-known, much-demanded, and
distinctly unhandy Emerson could not. In his biography of his father written
for the Second Series of Memoirs of members of the Social Circle in Concord
(1888) Edward Waldo Emerson recalled Thoreau’s stable presence, his usefulness about
the house and garden, and his particular rapport with children. Whatever distance
eventually came between Emerson and Thoreau, Thoreau’s friendship was always
valued by Mrs. Emerson and her children. Thoreau lived with the Emerson until
1843, and returned to look after things while Emerson made his second trip to
Europe, in 1847 and 1848. In 1844, Emerson offered Thoreau the use of property
he had purchased at Walden Pond, where Thoreau moved in 1845. In January of
1842, shortly after the death of Thoreau’s brother John, the Emerson’s child
Waldo died of scarlet fever. The Emerson’s were overwhelmed with grief. With
time, Emerson was able to come to terms with his loss. He later wrote the poem
“Threnody” in honor of Waldo.
In the 1830s, Concord was already sensitive to the issue of
slavery, but Emerson’s involvement in abolition grew slowly. Concord residents
took an active part in the Middlesex Country Anti-Slavery Society, established
in 1834. The Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Concord was formed in 1837; Lidian
Emerson belonged to it from the beginning. Other members of Emerson’s family
(his aunt Mary Moody Emerson and his brother Charles) also openly expressed
antislavery sentiment in the 1830s. Emerson delivered his first antislavery
address in Concord in 1837, in response to the murder of abolitionist publisher
Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. But his speech disappointed many. It focused
not so much on the wrong of slavery as on the right of free speech. It took
time for him to overcome equivocal feelings about abolition. He was committed
to the ideas of the central importance and the dignity of the individual, but
he had difficulty overcoming a sense that slaves had not displayed evidence of
a potential for full development. Moreover, like Thoreau, Emerson believed that
reform could be affected only through the individual, not through organized
movements. Following the delivery of his 1837 speech, Emerson did not speak
publically on the subject again until 1844.
Chapter -3
Discussion on God, Nature
& Man:
Nature is an experience of solitude. He first notes that when
one wants to be alone, one can look at the stars because they inspire a feeling
of respect, because they remain inaccessible. He adds, if the stars should
appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and
preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been
shown, all the objects in nature entail such an impression of wisdom, happiness
and simplicity. Emerson insists on the importance of this link between man and
nature. He says, his intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his
daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in
spite of real sorrows. This power of ecstasy is not due only to nature, but to
the human, to the harmony between the two. In fact, on contact with nature we
become an integral part of God.
Finally, Emerson adds that we have to use the pleasure of
nature with some moderation because nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Emerson raises really current issues when he refers to the
benefits of nature on the human soul, when he explains that nature helps to
free us from daily worries. For instance, in the chapter about Beauty, he says
“The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and
sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds
himself we are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. But, in cities
today, everybody is not able to see far enough and to be in contact with nature
trees are sparse, forests even more and sometimes, even the sky is not
accessible because of pollution. In the chapter about nature, he writes that
“in the woods, we return to reason and faith. Standing on the bare ground, my
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean
egotism vanishes”, he raises a real problem: are people who do not have access
to nature condemned never to return to reason, nor escape mean egotism? When
studying Thoreau’s philosophy of nature and transcendentalism, it could be
interesting to emphasize in the influence of Emerson’s work on the definition
of an American Identity. In his essay experience, he asks “Where do find
ourselves? And an answer might be that the American philosophy is based on the
concept of the “common”. Indeed, the independence of American thought requested
by Emerson is a claiming of the common. In The
American Scholar, he specifies I ask not for the great, the remote, the
romantic what is doing in Italy or Arabic what is Greek art, or Provencal
minstrelsy. I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the
familiar, the low give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and
future worlds. This demand for the popular, the common is built in opposition
with the elitism of European culture. It is not an answer to the problem of
knowledge, but a means to re-think the question of the relationship with the
world. According to Emerson, America has the capacity to re-invent tragedy, as
it can re-invent Kantian philosophy, following its own forms.
Emerson also claims for the pursuit of a better me, an
improvement of the self, as in Plato’s philosophy, but with the new idea of an
improvement, a change, in daily life, by the intelligibility of the daily, the
common, the concrete. He insists on the fact that perceptions are more reliable
than thoughts: there exists a world of thinking as in the cavern of Plato, but
the only world where I can change things is the common world. Here lies the
optimism of Emerson.
In Emerson’s philosophy, the original American does not exist
and never existed, and Americans are finally not settlers but migrants. Thoreau
says in Walden I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Emerson
and Thoreau are not philosophers of the American identity, but of migration.
Indeed, today, the process of migration is really better accepted in the United
States than in Europe, for instance. American people do not hesitate to move
from one end of the United States to the other work or to start a new job.
Emerson refuses Philanthropy, not from an egoistic point of view, but because
he considers that a charitable dollar is a mean dollar, because it is given to
a person in a context of inequality, thus maintaining the latter in a state of
inferiority. He refuses a society where giving alms is a necessity. As we have
seen in the chapter concerning discipline, Emerson defends a practical
idealism, and so is against charity and in favor of social action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most well-known American
Transcendentalist, has gained a worldwide reputation for his philosophy of
nature.
Owing to his great nature philosophy, not a few readers
believe that in order to live a genuine life, one has to lead the life of a
hermit just as the first sentence of Nature indicates to go into solitude, a
man needs to retire as much from his chamber as society. It will be a pity,
however, if Emerson’s treasure able thoughts are limited only to the advocacy
of nature. There are some other voices which still need to be investigated.
In 2000, Sarah Ann Wider declared: It is time to expand the
Emerson canon beyond Nature. Besides nature, it is time that we, as modern
readers, probe into other corners of the treasure house of Emerson’s
Transcendentalism. Recently, many scholars, such as Maurice Gonnaud, Len
Gougeon, Charles E. Mitchell and Peter S. Field, have published some noteworthy
works. In the past, many scholars marked Emerson as a man whose “prevailing
moods are lofty” and regarded him as a “superior person incapable of ease and
friendly contacts with ordinary people “Jackson. Recent studies, in contrast
are oriented toward Emerson’s association with society. They propose that
Emerson is not a remotely representative man peculiarly detached from his social
circumstances of his age on the contrary, he is a man who is both sensitive and
responsive to the concerns of his age. Starting from this point, this thesis aims to
study Emerson’s transcendental vision as a whole in which nature and society
are equally important. It will trace his social concern back to his philosophy
of nature because, instead of being separated from each other, nature and
society are both significant in the cultivation of the individual. Thus, by
investigating the importance of both, this thesis proposes to demonstrate that
Emerson’s transcendental vision involves not only nature but also society and
that instead of just being a transcendental thinker, he is also great doer.
Esotericism as described by Christopher Bochinger, who says
that in current New Age the concept of esotericism, is first and foremost a
concept referring to Individual culture according to the motto: You have it all
inside yourself, check it out! Thus, Esotericism changed from a special
tradition of knowledge into a special type of religion the journey within.
Similar to the word spirituality Esotericism thus become a surrogate word for
religion which accentuates its subjective element focused inner expectation.
For a long time people have understood only partially
Transcendentalism which arose in America in the nineteenth century. Generally
speaking, Transcendentalism, grounded in feeling and intuition, is defined as
“a turn away from modern society, with its getting and spending, to the senses
and objects of the natural world, which were regarded both as physical facts
and as correspondences to aspects of the human spirit. Stressing the importance
of nature, the Transcendentalists urge themselves and other people to feel and
immerse themselves in nature, for one is able to find his original self only if
he goes as much from his chamber as from society. This emphasis on nature is
great, but incomplete. There are other aspects of Transcendentalism worth
careful investigation. Among them, the advocacy of individualism and democracy
are two of the most important ones.
The Transcendentalists upholding of individualism and
democracy root in their emphasis in the importance of the individual. According
to William Harmon, self-reliance to be practiced at all times because the
Transcendentalists believe that in order to be a good individual, one need to
rely upon himself. They think that if a man trusts himself, he can then follow
the inner voice of his heart without being misguided by buzz around him;
likewise, if he is able to rely on himself, he will be a helping hand in society
instead of being a mere follower. Drawing on this idea, the Transcendentalists
exhort people to value the self, cultivate the self, and then in the end to
ameliorate the society as a whole, for a good society is made up of good
individuals.
This stress on the importance of the individual paves the way
for the development of American democracy for the self-reliant and self-trust
the transcendentalists advocate helps their fellowmen to imagine
self-government and a liberal but disciplined society. To put it another way,
self-governed government and a liberal but disciplined society. To put it in
another way, self-reliance and self-trust are important to the
Transcendentalists because they think a democracy society needs individuals
with a high degree of self-reliance and self-trust to build and maintain the
former ensures the independence of a government while the latter gives the
individual confidence in a democratic society.
A democratic society counts on the individuals and needs each
of them to be self-trusting and self-reliant. Thus, when Emerson appeals to his
fellowmen to be alone and get close to nature, he is actually asking the
individual to get along with his self, to be true to it and cultivate it
through immersion in nature. But Emerson does not mean for the individual to
get detached from society; on the contrary, he should attach himself to it, for
the individual, nature and societies are closely related. In short, only by
realizing the connection between them we can perceive Emerson’s transcendental
vision as a whole.
As discussed before, the cultivation of the individual
contributes to establishment and maintenance of an ideal society. Emerson
himself in the beginning was not so sure if man did need to interact with
society. Emerson himself in the beginning was not so sure if man did need to
interact with society. Yet, after he travelled to Europe, he realized the
necessity. He visited Europe in his thirties. There he met Wordsworth, Carlyle,
etc. and was touched by their thoughts and deeds. Watching them making efforts
to reform their society, he came to realize that in order to live a whole life,
it was necessary for man to interweave nature with society. Thus, influenced by
Europeans at the time, he got a broader perspective on the individual and
society.
Since The Declaration of independence was issued in 1776,
America had experienced a long phase of tumult and undergone different types of
government from independent states, the confederation to a central and national
government. Both leaders of the government and its people spent time in getting
adapted to a new nation. Sometimes, the government abused its strong power over
its people and man’s rights as well individuality were ignored. Under these
circumstances, people, like the transcendentalists stood up and asked for
individualism and democracy. They stated that government was not the master of
its citizens and that no government had the right over its citizens. Each
citizen, as an independent individual, should have enough free space to develop
himself and make his own decisions. In politics, Emerson indicates that the
growth of the individual is the antidote to this abuse of formal Government.
Accordingly, the self-reliant individual can end a government-centered
government and create a citizen-centered one.
Religion is another factor that made Emerson call people’s
attention to the individual’s importance. The eighteenth-century American
society was strongly influenced by Puritanism, which asserted man’s original
sin. People at the time believed that humans should be submissive to God and
that an individual should repent and atone for his own sin. Nonetheless,
Emerson stated our lives are for living not expiation. We do not live to
expiate but to improve ourselves and fulfill our dreams. In a society where the
individual were submissive and suppressed religiously, it was noteworthy that
Emerson emphasized the importance of the individual.
The Transcendentalists stressing the importance of the
individual was also shown in their attitude toward slavery issue. Along with
the spring up of textile industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, slavery problem was getting more and more serious. Due to the mass
textile industry, cotton was badly needed. Factories required a large number of
workers to plant, chop and pick cotton. The slave trade was then geared up to
meet the labor demand. In this slavery system, slaves were deprived of basic
human rights, nor could they choose their way of living. Such a system
astonished Emerson and other transcendentalists. They could not accept the fact
an individual could be allowed to legally buy and sell another individual and
dominate his life. This slavery system so violated the transcendentalist’s
notion of individualism that some of them, including Emerson, devoted
themselves to abolishing the system.
In chapter III, the significance of society, I will
investigate the relationship between the individual and society. Indeed in
writings, such as “The American Scholar”, Emerson points out that the
individual can cultivate himself through immersion in nature, but at the same
time he emphasizes that the individual needs to interact with the society to be
a whole man. In other words, not only nature but also society is both important
for an individual each fit reproduces the other. In Emerson’s philosophy,
immersion in nature is necessary for the cultivation of the individual while
involvement with society is at the same time indispensable. In brief, Emerson’s
transcendental vision concerns not merely nature but also society. By analyzing
his social concern, I hope to unfold Emerson’s view on interrelationships
between the individual, nature, and society.
Emerson not only talks about this interrelationship but also
practices it. Thus, in the chapter there, I will discuss Emerson’s practice of
his convection. I will study the more detailed social, economic and political
situations of his age and investigate his responses to them. There will be
three main focuses in this chapter the historical context of Emerson’s ideas
his concern over the society, and his practice and action. I will try to put
Emerson in the historical context and illustrate the interrelation between him
and society to demonstrate the close relationship between the individual and
society.
The forth chapter the Concord World will survey how society
reacts to Emerson’s thoughts and actions and how he influences the people and
the society in and after the nineteenth century. Emerson’s journals and works
as well as his contemporaries will be scrutinized so as to put Emerson in the
context of the nineteenth century. Related writings and historical documents
will be explored. Speaking of Emerson’s influence on others, Anna Tilden Gannet
describes Emerson as the best of this world a phrase she reserved for the very
few individuals to whom she could look for inspiration. As Anna Tilden Gannett,
great deals of people share the same feeling about Emerson. He is a good
speaker, writer and philosopher. He intriguing words have inspired his followers
and readers. This chapter, then, aims to investigate people’s reactions after
being inspired by such a great wise man. I would like to study if their
attitudes change, if they begin to act and if the world changes because of
Emerson.
Transcendentalism, with Emerson as its leader, started in the
mid-1830s and ended in the late 1840s as a historical movement. It’s influences
whereas have not been limited by time its ripples continue to spread through
American culture Brickman. Emerson, through his life devotes himself to
promoting Transcendentalism and carrying out his ideals. He advocates that
immersion in nature and social concern are not opposed to each other, on the
contrary, they shore up each other and form two essential parts of his
transcendentalism.
Chapter-5
Critical analyses o f
transcendentalism:
As he returned from Europe in 1833, Emerson had already begun
to think about the book that would eventually be published under the title
Nature. In writing Nature, Emerson drew upon material from his journals,
sermons, and lectures. The lengthy essay was first published in Boston by James
Munroe in September of 1836. A new edition also published by Munroe, with
Emerson paying the printing costs, his usual arrangement with Munroe appeared
in December of 1849. This second edition was printed from the plates of the
collection Nature, addresses and lectures published in Boston in 1856 by
Phillips, Sampson, under the title Miscellanies, Embracing Nature, addresses
and lectures. Nature was published in London in 1844 in Nature, and Essay. A
German edition was issued in 1868. It was included in 1876 in the first
volume(Miscellanies) of the Little Classic Edition of Emerson’s writings. The
first volume (Nature, Addresses and Lectures) of the riverside edition, in 1903
in the first volume (Nature, Addresses, Lectures) of the centenary Edition, and
in 1971 in the first volume (Nature, addresses, Lectures) of the collected
works published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nature has
been printed in numerous collections of Emerson’s writings since its first
publication, among them the 1940 Modern Library The Complete Essays and other
writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (edited by Brooks Atkinson), the 1965 Signet
Classic Selected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (edited by William H. Gilman),
and the 1983 Library of America Essays & Lectures (selected and annotated
by Joel Porte).
Emerson preferred the prose text of the 1863 first edition of
Nature with a passage from the Neo platonic Philosopher Plotinus. The 1849
second edition included instead of a poem by Emerson himself. Both present
themes that are developed in the essay. The passage from Plotinus suggests the
primacy of spirit and of human understanding over nature. Emerson’s poem
emphasizes the unity of all manifestations of nature’s symbolism, and the perpetual
development of all of nature’s forms toward the highest expression as embodied
in man. Nature is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. In the
Introduction, Emerson laments the current tendency to accept the knowledge and
traditions of the past instead of experiencing God and nature directly, in the
present. He asserts that all our questions about the order of the universe-
about the relationships between God, man and nature- may be answered by our
experience of life and by the world around us. Each individual is a
manifestation of creation and as such holds the key to unlocking the mysteries
of the universe. Nature, too, is both an expression of the divine and a means
of understanding it. The goal of science is to provide a theory of nature, but
man has not yet attained a truth broad enough to components of the universe. He
defines nature (the “Not Me”) as everything separate from the inner individual-
nature, art, other men, our own bodies. In common usage, nature refers to the
material world unchanged by man. Art is nature in combination with the will of
man. Emerson explains that he will use the word “nature” in both its common and
its philosophical meanings in the essay.
At the beginning of Chapter 1, Emerson describes true
solitude as going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying
activities as well as society. When a man gazes at the starts, he becomes aware
of his own separateness from the material world. The stars were made to allow
him perceive the “perpetual presence of the sublime.” Visible every night, they
demonstrate that God is ever-present. They never lose their power to move us.
We retain our original sense of wonder even when viewing familiar aspects of
nature anew. Emerson discusses the poetical approach to nature- the perception
of the encompassing whole made up of many individual components. Our delight in
the landscape, which is made up of many particular forms, provides an example
of this integrated vision.
Nature is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. In
the introduction, Emerson laments the current to accept the knowledge and
traditions of the past instead of experiencing God and nature directly, in the
present. He asserts that all our questions about the order of the
universe-about the relationships between God, man and nature- may be answered
by our experience of life and by the world around us. Each individual is a
manifestation of creation and as such holds the key to unlocking the mysteries
of the universe. Nature, too, is both an expression of the divine and a means
of understanding it. The goal of science is to provide a theory of nature, but
man has not yet attained a truth broad enough to comprehend all of nature’s
forms and phenomena. Emerson identifies nature and spirit as the components of
the universe. He defines nature (the “Not Me”) as everything separates from the
inner individual –nature, art, other men our own bodies. In common usage,
nature refers to the material world unchanged by man. Art is nature in
combination with the will of man. Emerson explains that he will use the word
“in both its common and its philosophical meanings in the essay.
At the beginning of chapter 1, Emerson describes true
solitude as going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying
activities as well as society. When a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware
of his own separateness from the material world. The stars were made to allow
him to perceive the “perpetual presence of the sublime.” Visible every night,
they demonstrate that God is ever-present. They never lose their power to move
us. We retain our original sense of wonder even when viewing familiar aspects
of nature anew. Emerson discusses the poetical approach to nature- the
perception of the encompassing whole made up of many individual components. Our
delight in the landscape, which is made up of many particular forms, provides
an example of this integrated vision.
Unlike children, most adults have lost the ability to see the
world in this way. In order to experience awe in the presence of nature, we
need to approach it with a balance our inner and outer senses. Nature so
approached is a part of man, and even when bleak and stormy is capable of
elevating his mood. All aspects of nature correspond to some state of mind.
Nature offers perpetual youth and joy, and counteracts whatever misfortune
befalls an individual. The visionary man may lose himself in it, may become a
receptive “transparent eyeball” through which the “Universal Being” transmits
itself into his consciousness and makes him sense his oneness with God. In
nature, which is also a part of God, man finds qualities parallel to his own.
There is a special relationship, sympathy, between man and
nature. But by itself, nature does not provide the pleasure that comes of
perceiving this relationship. Such satisfaction is a product of a particular
harmony between man’s inner processes and the outer world. The way we react to
nature depends upon our state of mind in approaching it.
In the next four chapters- “Commodity,” “Beauty,” Language,”
and “Discipline” – Emerson discusses the ways in which man employs nature
ultimately to achieve insight into the workings of the universe. In Chapter-2,
“Commodity,” he treats the most basic uses of nature – for heat, food, water,
shelter, and transportation. Although he ranks these as low uses, and states
that they are the only applications that most men have for nature, they are
perfect and appropriate in their own way. Moreover, man harnesses nature
through the practical arts, thereby enhancing its usefulness through his own
wit. Emerson quickly finishes with nature as a commodity, stating that “A man
is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work,” and turns to higher
uses.
In Chapter -3, “Beauty,” Emerson examines nature’s
satisfaction of a nobler human requirement, the desire for beauty. The
perception of nature’s beauty lies partly in the structure of the eye itself,
and in the laws of light. The two together offer a unified vision of many
separate objects as a pleasing whole-“a well-colored and shaded globe,” a
landscape “round and symmetrical.” Every object in nature has its own beauty,
which magnified when perspective allows comprehensive vision of the whole.
Emerson presents three prosperities of natural beauty. First,
nature restores and gives simple pleasure to a man. It reinvigorates the
overworked, and imparts a sense of well-being and of communication with the
universe. Nature pleases even in its harsher moments. The same landscape viewed
in different weather and seasons is seen as if for the first time. But we
cannot capture naturally beauty if we too actively and consciously seek it. We
must rather submit ourselves to it, allowing it to react to us spontaneously,
as we go about our lives.
Secondly, nature works together with the spiritual element in
man to enhance the nobility of virtuous and heroic human actions. There is a
particular affinity between the processes of nature and the capabilities of
man. Nature provides a suitably large and impressive background against which man’s
higher actions are dramatically outlined. Thirdly, Emerson points out the
capacity of natural beauty to stimulate the human intellect, which uses nature
to grasp the divine order of the universe. Because action follows upon
reflection, nature’s beauty is visualized in the mind, and expressed through
creative action. The love of beauty constitutes taste, its creative expression,
art. A work of art- “the result or expression of nature, in miniature”-
demonstrates man’s particular powers. Man apprehends wholeness in the
multiplicity of natural forms and conveys these forms in their totality. The
poet, painter, sculptor, musician, and architect are all inspired by natural
beauty and offer a unified described in “Commodity,” the role of nature in
satisfying man’s desire for beauty is an end in itself. Beauty, like truth and
goodness, is an expression of God. But natural beauty is an ultimate only in as
much as it works as a catalyst upon the inner processes of man.
In Chapter-4, “Language,” Emerson explores nature’s service
to man as a vehicle for thought. He first states that words represent
particular facts in nature, which exists in part to give us language to express
ourselves. He suggests that all words, even those conveying intellectual and
moral meaning, can be etymologically traced back to roots originally attached
to material objects or their qualities. Although this theory would not be
supported by the modern study of linguistics, Emerson was not alone among his
contemporaries in subscribing to it. Over time, we have lost a sense of the
particular connection of the first language to the natural world, but children
and primitive people retain it to some extent. Not only are words symbolic,
Emerson continues, but the natural objects that they represent are symbolic of
particular spiritual states. Human intellectual processes are, of necessity,
expressed through language, which in its primal form was integrally connected
to nature. Emerson asserts that there is universal understanding of the
relationship between natural imagery and human thought. An all- encompassing
universal soul underlies individual life. “Reason” (intuitive understanding)
affords access to the universal soul through the natural symbols of spirit
provided by language. In language, God is, in a very real sense, accessible to
all men. In his unique capacity to perceive the connectedness of everything in
the universe, man enjoys a central position. Man cannot be understood without
nature, or without man. In its origin, language was pure poetry, and clearly
conveyed the relationship between material symbol and spiritual meaning.
Emerson states that the same symbols form the original elements of all
languages. And the moving power of idiomatic language and of the strong speech
of simple men reminds us of the first dependence of language upon nature.
Modern man’s ability to express himself effectively requires simplicity, love
of truth, and desire to communicate effectively. But because we have lost the
sense of its origins, language has been corrupted. The man who speaks with
passion or in images like the poet or orator who maintains a vital connection
with nature expresses the workings of God.
Finally, Emerson develops the idea that the whole of nature
not just its particulate verbal expressions symbolize spiritual reality and
offers insight into the universal. He writes of all nature as a metaphor for
the human mind, and asserts that there is a one-to-one correspondence between
moral and material laws. All men have access to understanding this
correspondence and, consequently, comprehending the laws of the universe.
Emerson employs the image of the circle much-used in Nature in stating that the
visible world is the “terminus or circumference of the invisible world.”
Visible nature innately possesses a moral and spiritual aspect. Man may grasp
the underlying meaning of the physical world by living harmoniously with
nature, and by loving truth and virtue. Emerson concludes “Language” by stating
that we understand the full meaning of nature by degrees.
Nature as a discipline a means of arriving at comprehension
forms the subject of Chapter-5, “Discipline”. All of nature serves to educate
man through both the rational, logical “Understanding” and the intuitive,
mystical “Reason”. Through the more rational understanding, we constantly learn
lessons about order, arrangement, progression and combination. The ultimate
result of such lessons is common sense. Emerson offers property and debt as
materially based examples particularly and individuality, through which “We may
know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. Each
object has its own particular use, and through the understanding we know that
it cannot be converted to other uses to which it is not fitted. The wise man recognizes
the innate properties of objects and men, and the differences, gradations and
similarities among the manifold natural expressions. The practical arts and
sciences make use of this wisdom. But as man progressively grasps the basic
physical laws, he comes closer to understanding the laws of creation, and
limiting concepts such as space and time lose their significance in his vision
of the larger picture. Emerson emphases the place of human will- the expression
of human power- in harnessing nature. Nature is made to serve man. We take what
is useful from it in forming a sense of the universe, giving greater or lesser
weight to particular aspects to suit our purpose, even framing nature according
to our own image of it. Emerson goes to discuss how intuitive reason provides
insight into the ethical and spiritual meanings behind nature. All things are
moral,” he proclaims, and therefore, and every aspect of nature conveys “the
laws of right and wrong.”
Nature thus forms the proper basis for religion and ethics.
Moreover, the uses of particular facts of nature as described in “Commodity” do
not exhaust the lessons these aspects can teach, men may progress to perception
of their higher meaning as well. Emerson depicts moral law as lying at the
center of the circle of nature and radiating to the circumstance. He asserts
that man is particularly susceptible to the moral meaning of nature, and
returns to the unity of all of nature’s particulars. Each object is a microcosm
of the universe. Through analogies and resemblances between various expressions
of nature, we perceive “its source in Universal Spirit.” Moreover, we apprehend
universal truths, which are related to all other universal truths. Emerson
builds upon his circle imagery to suggest the all-encompassing quality of
universal truth and the way it may be approached through all of its
particulars. Unity is even more apparent in action than in thought, which is
expressed only imperfectly through language. Action, on the other hand, as “the perfection
and publication of thought,” expresses thought more directly. Because words and
conscious actions are uniquely human attributes, Emerson holds humanity up as
the pinnacle of nature, “incomparably the richest information’s of the power
and order that lie at the heart of things.” Each human example is a point of
access into the universal spirit. As an expression of nature, humanity too has
its educational use in the progression toward understanding higher truth.
At the beginning of Chapter-6, “Idealism,” Emerson questions
whether nature actually exists, whether God may have created it only as a
perception in the human mind. Having stated that the response to this question
makes no difference in the usefulness of nature as an aid to human
comprehension of the universal, Emerson concludes that the answer is ultimately
unknowable. Whether real or not, he perceives ature as an ideal source of
knowledge. Even if nature is not real, natural and universal laws nevertheless
apply. However, the common man’s faith in the permanence of natural laws is
threatened by any hint that nature may not be real. The senses and rational
understanding contribute to the instinctive human tendency to regard nature as
a reality. Men tend to view things as ultimate’s not to look for a higher
reality beyond them. But intuitive reason works against the unquestioned acceptance
of concrete reality as the ultimate reality. Intuition counteracts sensory
knowledge, and highlights our intellectual and spiritual separateness from
nature. As the intuition is increasingly awakened, we begin to perceive nature
differently, to see the whole, the “causes and spirits,” instead of individual
forms.
Emerson explores idealism at length. He first points out that
a change in environment or mechanical alterations (such as viewing a familiar
landscape from a moving railroad car), which heighten the sense of the
difference between man and nature, the observer and the observed. Altered
perspective imparts a feeling that there is something constant within man, even
though the world around him changes, sometimes due to his own action upon it.
Emerson then discusses the way in which the poet communicates his own power
over nature. The poet sees nature as fluid and malleable, as raw material to
shape to his own expressive purposes. Inspired by intuition and imagination, he
enhances and reduces facts of nature according to his creative dictates. He
provides an ideal interpretation of nature that is more real than concrete nature,
as it exists independent of human agency. The poet, in short, asserts “the
predominance of the soul “over matter. Emerson looks to philosophy, science,
religion, and ethics for support of the subordination of matter to spirit. He
does not uniformly approve of the position assigned to nature by each of these
disciplines, but nevertheless finds that they all express an idealistic
approach to one degree to another. He points out that although the poet aims
toward beauty and philosopher toward truth, both subject the order and
relations within nature to human thought in order to find higher absolutes,
laws and spiritual realities. Scientists, too, may elevate the spiritual over
material in going beyond the accumulation of particulars to a single, encompassing,
enlightening formula. And although they distrust nature, traditional religion
and ethics also promote the spiritual and moral over the physical. In
“Idealism,” Emerson again takes up the capacity of all men to grasp the ideal
and universal. Intellectual inquiry casts doubt upon the independent existence
of matter and focuses upon the absolute and ideal as a higher reality. It
encourages approaching nature as “an appendix to the soul” and a means of
access to God. Although these complex ideas are expressed by specialists in
“intellectual science,” they are nevertheless available to all. And when any
man reaches some understanding of divinity, he becomes more divine and renews
himself physically as well as spiritually. Knowledge of the ideal and absolute brings
confidence in our existence, and confers a kind of immortality, which
transcends the limitations of space and time.
Emerson points out that in the quest for the ideal, it does
not serve man to make a demeaning view of nature. He suggests nature’s subservience
merely to define its true position in relation to man, as a tool for spiritual
education and perfection as discussed in “Discipline” and to distinguish the
real (that is the ideal) from the unreal the concretely apparent. He concludes
the chapter by advocating the ideal theory of nature over more popular
materialism because it offers exactly the kind of view of the world that the
human mind craves and intuitively wants to adopt. It subordinates matter to
mind, places the world in the context of God, and allows man to synthesize a
mass of details into a whole.
Emerson deals with nature’s spiritual qualities and purpose
in Chapter-7, “Spirit”. He states that a true theory of nature and man must
allow progressive, dynamic comprehension. In its fidelity to its divine origin
and its constant illumination of spirit and of the absolute, nature allows
satisfaction of this condition. Emerson writes of the difficulty of visualizing
and expressing the divine spirit. The noblest use of nature is to help us by
representing God, by serving as the medium “through which the universal spirit
speaks to the individual, and strives to lead the individual back to it.
Emerson then addresses three questions: What is matter? Where does it come
from? and What is its purpose?
The first question, what is matter? – is answered by
idealism, which holds that matter is a phenomenon in Kantian philosophy,
something that appears to the mind independently of its existence outside the
mind rather than a substance. This theory both underscores the difference
between the incontrovertible evidence of human existence in the intellect and
the questionable existence of nature as a distinct reality outside the mind,
and at the same time allows us to explain nature in terms other than purely physical.
But it is not enough to say that nature does not have independent existence.
The divine spirit and human perception must also part of the equation. Emerson
adds that the very importance of the action of the human mind on nature
distances us from the natural world and leaves us unable to explain our
sympathy with it. He then turns to the questions of where matter comes from,
and to what end. He refers to the “universal essence,” an all-encompassing
creative life force, which God expresses in nature as it is passes through and
invigorates man. Man’s capabilities are unlimited in proportion to his openness
to nature’s revelatory and transforming properties. Nature affords access to
the very mind of God and thus renders man “the creator in the finite.” The
world is thus explained as proceeding from the divine, just as man does.
Emerson describes it as “a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a
projection of God in the unconsciousness.” Nature possesses a serenity and
order that man appreciates. His closeness to God is related to his appreciation
of and sympathy with nature. Emerson closes the chapter by referring to the
difficulty of reconciling the practical uses of nature, as outlined in
“Commodity,” with its spiritual meaning.
In “Prospects,” the eighth and final chapter of Nature,
Emerson promotes intuitive reason as the means of gaining insight into the
order and laws of the universe. Empirical science hinders true perception by
focusing too much on particulars and too little on the broader picture.
Untaught sallies of the spirit” advance the learned naturalist farther than
does preside analysis of detail. A guess or a dream may be more productive than
a fact or scientific experiment. The scientist fails to see the unifying
principles behind the bewildering abundance of natural expressions, to address
the ultimately spiritual purpose of this rich diversity, to recognize man’s
position as “head and heart” of the natural world. Emerson points out those men
now only apply rational understanding to nature, which is consequently
perceived materially. But we do better to trust intuitive reason, which allows
revelation and insight. He cites examples of intuition working in man Jesus
Christ, Swedenborg, and the Shakers among them, which provide evidence of the
power of intuition to transcend time and space. Emerson refers to the knowledge
of God as cognition and morning knowledge. He identifies the imbalance created
by man’s loss of an earlier sense of the spiritual meaning and purpose of
nature. By restoring spirituality to our approach to nature, we will attain
that sense of universal unity currently lacking. If we reunite spirit with
nature, and use all our facilities, we will see the miraculous in common things
and will perceive higher law. Facts will provide other means of answering them.
Emerson concludes Nature optimistically and affirmatively. He asserts that we
will come to look at the world with new eyes. Nature imbued with spirit will be
fluid and dynamic. The world exists for each man, the humble as well as the
great. As we idealize and spiritualize, evil and squalor will disappear, beauty
and nobility will reign. Man will enter the kingdom of his own domination over
nature with wonder.
Chapter -6
Comparative study of
Transcendentalism & new thoughts:
Prayer supposes dualism and not unity in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. An
institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. The
message of Emerson’s self-reliance essay is to become independent in our
thinking as well as in our actions. He favors nonconformity above all. To
achieve independence means to consciously acknowledge that we are part of God. We
are thus in direct connection with God or the divine. It is not possible for us
not to be because we are thus in a direct connection with God or the divine. It
is not possible for us not to be because we would not exist. Everything that
exists comes from this source. Being part of “All That Is” or the creator means
we are the supreme governing power influencing our lives. Therefore, the only
thing we should rely upon is not a prayer we pray to ourselves or some
intermediaries, it is us. It was not the will of God putting on us something
seemingly negative. It is us who cause it. If it is so, we are responsible for
our lives. We are the creators. The new thought puts all responsibility for
life events and circumstances on the individual. It says the only reason why
external circumstances seem to have any power over the individuals is because
they believe that to be the case. As we can see, the New Age tent of “Creating
our own reality” has its roots in New Thought and indirectly in Emerson’s Transcendentalism.
Hanegraff quotes Ralph Waldo Trine, another new thought author who adapted
Emerson for the “masses” as saying: “it is just the degree in which you realize
your oneness with the infinite spirit; you will exchange disease for ease, in
harmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength”. In
this line of Trine, we can recognize two concepts put together. It is Emerson’s
idea of ‘oneness with the infinite Soul’ and New thought focus on prosperity,
health and well-being.
Chapter-7
Findings:
As he returned from Europe in 1833, Emerson had already begun
to think about the book that would eventually be published under the title Nature. In writing nature, Emerson drew upon material from his journals, sermons, and
lectures. The lengthy essay was first published in Boston by James Munroe and
Company in September of 1836. A new edition also published by Munroe, with
Emerson paying the printing costs, his usual arrangement with Munroe appeared
in December of 1849. The second edition of this collection was published in
Boston in 1856 by Phillips, Sampson, under the title Miscellanies, Embracing
Nature, Addresses and Lectures. Nature was published in London in 1844 in
Nature, an Essay and Lectures on the Times by H.G. Clarke. A German edition was
issued in 1868. It was included in 1876 in the first volume (Miscellanies) of
the Little Classic Edition of Emerson’s writings in 1883 in the first volume of
nature. In the first volume Nature, Addresses, and Lectures of the Collected
Works published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nature has
been printed in numerous collections of Emerson’s writings since its first
publication, among them the 1940 Modern Library The Complete Essays and other
writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Brooks Atkinson, the 1965 Signet
Classic Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by William H. Gilman,
and the 1983 Library of America Essays & Lectures selected and annotated by
Joel Porte. Emerson prefaced the prose text of the 1836 first edition of Nature
with a passage from the Neo platonic philosopher Plotinus. The 1849 second
edition included a poem by Emerson himself. Both present times that are
developed in the essay. The passage from Plotinus suggests the primacy of
spirit and of human understanding over nature. Emerson’s poem emphasizes the
unity of manifestations of nature, nature’s symbolism, and the perpetual
development of all of nature’s forms toward the highest expression as embodied
in man.
Nature is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. In
the Introduction, Emerson laments the current tendency to accept the knowledge
and traditions of the past instead of experiencing God and nature directly, in
the present. He asserts that all our questions about the order of the universe,
about the relationships between Gods, man and nature may be answered by our
experience of life and by the world around us. Each individual is a
manifestation of creation and as such holds the key to unlocking the mysteries
of the universe. Nature, too, is both an expression of divine and a means of
understanding it. The goal of science is to provide a theory of nature, but man
has not yet attained a truth broad enough to comprehend all of the nature’s
forms and phenomenon. Emerson identifies nature and spirit as the components of
the universe. He defines nature “Not Me” as everything separate from the inner
individual – nature, art, other men, our bodies. In common usage, nature refers
to the material world unchanged by man. Art is nature in combination with the
will of man. Emerson explains that he will use the word “Nature” in both its
common and its philosophical meanings in the essay.
At the beginning of Chapter-1, Emerson describes true
solitude as going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying
activities as well as society. When a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware
of his own separateness from the material world. The stars were made to allow
him to perceive the “perpetual presence of the sublime.” Visible every night,
they demonstrate that God is ever-present. They never lose their power to move
us. We retain our original sense of wonder even when viewing familiar aspects
of nature anew. Emerson discusses the poetical approach to nature, the
perception of the encompassing whole made up of many individual components. Our
delight in the landscape, which is made up of many particular forms, provides
an example of this integrated vision. Unlike children, most adults have lost
the ability to see the world in this way. In order to experience awe in the
presence of nature, we need to approach it with a balance between our inner and
outer senses. Nature so approached is a part of man, and even when bleak and
stormy is capable of elevating his mood. All aspects of nature correspond to
some state of mind. The visionary man may lose himself in it, may become a
receptive “transparent eyeball” through which the “Universal Being” transmits
itself into his consciousness and makes him sense his oneness with God. In
nature, which is also a part of God, man finds qualities parallel to his own.
There is a special relationship, sympathy, between man and nature. But by
itself, nature does not provide the pleasure that comes of perceiving this
relationship. Such satisfaction is a product of a harmony between man’s inner
processes and the outer world. The way we react to nature depends upon our
state of mind in approaching it.
Emerson discusses the ways in which man employs nature ultimately
to achieve insight into the workings of the universe. In Chapter-2,
“Commodity,” he treats the most basic uses of nature- for heat, food, water,
shelter and transportation. Although he ranks these as low uses and states that
they are only applications that most men have for nature, they are perfect and
appropriate in their own way. Moreover, man harnesses nature through the
practical arts thereby enhancing its usefulness through his own wit. Emerson
quickly finishes with nature as a commodity, stating that “A man is fed, not
that he may be fed, but that he may work,’ and turns to higher uses.
Emerson examines nature’s satisfaction of a nobler human
requirement, the desire for beauty. The perception of nature’s beauty lies
partly in the structure of the eye itself, and in the laws of light. The two
together offer a unified vision of many separate objects as a pleasing whole-“
a well-colored and shaded globe,” a landscape “round and symmetrical.” Every
object in nature has its own beauty, which is magnified when perspective allows
comprehensive vision of the whole.
Emerson presents three properties of natural beauty. First,
nature restores and gives simple pleasure to a man. It reinvigorates the
overworked, and imparts a sense of well-being and of communication with the
universe. Nature pleases even in its harsher moments. The same landscape viewed
in different weather and seasons in seen as if for the first tie. But we cannot
capture natural beauty if we too actively and consciously seek it. We must rather
submit ourselves to it, allowing it to react to us spontaneously, as we go
about our lives.
Secondly, nature works together with the spiritual element in
man to enhance the nobility of virtuous and heroic human actions. There is a
particular affinity between the process of nature and the capabilities of man.
Nature provides a suitably large and impressive background against which man’s
higher actions are dramatically outlined.
Thirdly, Emerson points out the capacity of natural beauty to
stimulate the human intellect, which uses nature to grasp the divine order of
the universe. Because action follows upon reflection, nature’s beauty is
visualized in the mind, and expressed through creative action. The love of
beauty constitutes taste, its creative expression and art. A work of art “the
result or expression of nature” in miniature demonstrates man’s particular
powers. Man apprehends wholeness in the multiplicity of natural forms and
conveys these forms in their totality. The poet, painter, sculpture, musician
and architect are all inspired by natural beauty and offer a unified vision in
their work. Art thus represents nature as distilled by man. Unlike the uses of
nature described in “Commodity” the role of nature in satisfying men desire for
beauty is an end in itself. Beauty, like truth and goodness is an expression of
God. Yet natural beauty is an ultimate only inasmuch as it works as a catalyst
upon the inner processes of man.
In Chapter-5, Language, Emerson explores nature’s service to
man as a vehicle for thought. He first states that words represent particular
facts in nature, which exists in part to give us language to express ourselves.
He suggests that all words, even those conveying intellectual and moral
meaning, can be etymologically traced back to roots traced back to roots
originally attached to material objects or their qualities. Although this
theory would not be supported by the modern study of linguistics, Emerson was
not alone among his contemporaries in subscribing to it. Over time, we have
lost a sense of the particular connection of the first language to the natural
world, but children and primitive people retain it to some extent. Not only are
words are symbolic of particular spiritual states. Human intellectual processes
are of necessity expressed through language, which in its primal form was
integrally connected to nature. Emerson asserts that there is universal
understanding of the relationship between natural imagery and human thought. An
all-encompassing universal soul underlies individual life. Reason affords
access to the universal soul through the natural symbols of spirit provided by
language. In language, God is in a very real sense, accessible to all men. In his
unique capacity to perceive the connectedness of everything in the universe,
man enjoys a central position. Man cannot be understood without nature, or
nature without man. In its origin, language was pure poetry and clearly
conveyed the relationship between material symbol and spiritual meaning.
Emerson states that the same symbols form the original elements of all
languages. And the moving power of idiomatic language and of the strong speech
of simple men reminds us of the first dependence of language upon nature.
Modern man’s ability to express himself effectively requires simplicity, love
of truth, and desire to communicate efficiently. But because we have lost the
sense of its origins, language has been corrupted. The man who speaks with
passion or in images – like the poet or orator who maintains a vital connection
with nature – expresses the workings of God.
Finally, Emerson develops the idea that the whole of nature –
not just its particulate verbal expressions- symbolizes spiritual reality and
offers insight into the universal. He writes of all nature as a metaphor for
the human mind, and asserts that there is a one-to-one correspondence between
moral and material laws. All men have access to understanding this
correspondence and consequently, to comprehending the laws of the universe.
Emerson employs the image of the circle much –used in Nature in stating that
the visible world is the “terminus or circumference of the invisible world.
Visible nature innately possesses a moral and spiritual aspect. Man may grasp
the underlying meaning of the physical world by living harmoniously with
nature, and by loving truth and virtue. Emerson concludes “Language” by stating
that we understand the full meaning of nature by degrees.
Nature as a discipline- a means of arriving at comprehension
forms the subject of Chapter-5, “Discipline.” All of the nature serves to
educate man through both rational logical understanding and the intuitive
reason. Through the more rational understanding, we constantly learn lessons
about the similarities and differences between objects about reality and
unreality about order, arrangement, progression and combination. The ultimate
result of such lessons is common sense. Emerson offers property and debt as materially
based examples that teach necessary lessons through the understanding, and
space and time as demonstrations of particularity and individuality, through
which we may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and
individual. Each object has its own particular use, and through the
understanding we know that it cannot be converted to other uses to which it is
not fitted. The wise mans recognizes the innate properties of objects and men
and the differences, graduations and similarities among the manifold natural
expressions. The practical arts and sciences make use of this wisdom. But as
man progressively grasps the basic physical laws, he comes closer to
understanding the laws of creation, and limiting concepts such as space and
time lose their significance in his vision of the larger picture. Emerson
emphases the place of human will, the expression of human power in harnessing
nature. Nature is made to serve man. We take what is useful from it in forming
a sense of the universe, giving greater or lesser weight to particular aspects
to suit our purposes, even framing nature according to our own image of it.
Emerson goes on to discuss how intuitive reason provides insight into the
ethical and spiritual meaning behind nature. All things are moral, he
proclaims, and therefore every aspect of nature conveys “the laws of right and
wrong.”
Nature thus forms the proper basis for religion and ethics.
Moreover, thus uses of particular facets of nature as described in “Commodity”
do not exhaust the lessons these aspects can teach, men may progress to
perception of their higher meaning as well. Emerson depicts moral law as lying
at the center of the circle of nature and radiating to the circumstance. He
asserts that man is particularly susceptible to the moral meaning of nature and
returns to the unity of all of nature’s particulars. Each object is a microcosm
of the universe. Through analogies and resemblances between various expressions
of nature, we perceive its source in universal Spirit. Moreover, we apprehend
universal order through thought –through our grasp of the relationship between
particular universal truths, which are related to all other universal truth and
the way it may be approached through all of its particulars. Unity is even more
apparent in action than in thought, which is expressed only imperfectly through
language. Action, on the other hand, as the perfection of thought expresses
thought more directly. Because words and conscious actions are uniquely human
attributes, Emerson holds humanity up as the pinnacle of nature incomparably
the richest information of the power and order that lie at the heart of things.
“Each human example is a point of access into the universal spirit. As an
expression of nature humanity too has its educational use in the progression
toward understanding higher truth.
At the beginning of Chapter -4, “Idealism” Emerson questions
whether nature actually exists, whether God may have created it only as a
perception in the human mind. Having stated that the response to this question
makes no difference in the usefulness of nature as an aid to human comprehension
of the universal, Emerson concludes that the answer is ultimately unknowable.
Whether real or not, he perceives nature as an ideal source of information.
Even if nature is not real, natural laws nevertheless apply. However, the
common man’s faith in the permanence of natural laws is threatened by any hint
that nature may not be real. The senses and rational understanding contribute
to the instinctive human tendency to regard nature as a reality. Men tend to
view things as ultimate, not to look for a higher reality beyond them. But
intuitive reason works against the unquestioned acceptance of concrete reality
as the ultimate reality. Intuition counteracts sensory knowledge, and
highlights our intellectual and spiritual separateness from nature. As the
intuition is increasingly awakened, we begin to perceive nature differently, to
see the whole the cause and spirits instead of individual forms.
Emerson explores idealism at length. He first points out that
a change in perspective is caused by changes in environment or mechanical
alterations, such as viewing a familiar landscape from a moving railroad car,
which heighten the sense of the difference between man and nature, the observer
and the observed. Altered perspective imparts a feeling that there is something
constant within man, even though the world around him changes, sometimes due to
his own action over nature. The poet sees nature as fluid and malleable, as raw
material to shape to his own expressive purposes. Inspired by intuition and
imagination, he enhances and reduces facets of nature according to his creative
dictates. He provides an ideal interpretation of nature that is more real than concrete
nature, as it exists independent of human agency. The poet, in short, asserts
the predominance of the soul over matter to spirit. He does not uniformly
approve of the position assigned to nature by each of these disciplines, but
nevertheless finds that they all express an idealistic approach to one degree
or another. He points out that although the poet aims toward beauty and the
philosopher toward truth, both subject the order and relations within nature to
human thought in order to find higher absolutes, laws, and spiritual realities.
Scientists, too, may elevate the spiritual over the material in going beyond
the accumulation of particulars to a single, encompassing, enlightening
formula. And although they distrust nature, traditional religion and ethics
also promote the spiritual and moral over the physical. In “Idealism,” Emerson
again takes up the capacity of all men to grasp the ideal and universal.
Intellectual inquiry casts doubt upon the independent existence of matter and
focuses upon the absolute and ideal as a higher reality. It encourages
approaching nature as ‘an appendix do the soul’ and a means of access to God.
Although these complex ideas are expressed by specialists in “intellectual
science” they are nevertheless available to all. And when any man reaches some
understanding of divinity, he becomes more divine and renews himself physically
as well as spiritually. Knowledge of the ideal and absolute brings confidence
in our existence, and confers a kind of immortality, which transcends the
limitations of space and time.
Emerson points out that in the quest for the ideal, it does
not serve man to take a demanding view of nature. He suggests nature’s
subservience merely to define its true position in relation to man, as a tool
for spiritual education and perfection and to distinguish the real (that is,
the ideal) from the unreal (the concretely apparent). He concludes the chapter
by advocating the ideal theory of nature over more popular materialism because
it offers exactly the kind of view of the world that the human mind craves and
intuitively wants to adopt. It subordinates matter to mind, places the world in
the context of God, and allows man to
synthesize a mass of details into a whole.
Emerson deals with nature’s spiritual qualities and purpose
in Chapter -7, “Spirit”. He states that a true theory of nature and man must
allow progressive, dynamic comprehension. In its fidelity to its divine origin
and its constant illumination of spirit and of the absolute, nature allows
satisfaction of this condition. Emerson writes of the difficulty of visualizing
and expressing the divine spirit. The noblest use of nature is to help us by
representing God, by serving as the medium “through which the universal spirit
speaks to the individual, and strives as the medium “through which the
universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead the individual
back to it. Emerson then addresses three questions: What is matter? Where does
it come from? What is its purpose?
The first question – What is matter? – is answered by
idealism, which holds that matter is a phenomenon (in Kantian philosophy,
something that appears to the mind independently of its existence outside the
mind) rather than a substance. This theory both underscores the difference
between the incontrovertible evidence of human existence in the intellect and
the questionable existence of nature in terms other than purely physical. But
it is not enough to say that nature does not have independent existence. The
divine spirit and human perception must also form part of the equation. Emerson
adds that the very importance of the action of the human mind on nature
distances us from the natural world and leaves us unable to explain our
sympathy with it. He then turns to the questions of where matter comes from,
and to what end. He refers to the “universal essence,” an all-encompassing
creative life force, which God expresses in proportion to his openness to
nature’s revelatory and transforming properties. Nature affords access to the
very mind of God and thus renders man “the creator in the fine”. The world is
thus explained as proceeding from the divine, just as man does. Emerson
describes it as “remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God
in the unconscious.’ Nature possesses a serenity and order than man
appreciates. His closeness to God is related to his appreciation of and
sympathy with nature. Emerson closes the chapter by referring to the difficulty
of reconciling the practical uses of nature, as outlined in “Commodity,” with
its higher spiritual meaning.
In “Prospects,” the eighth and final chapter of Nature,
Emerson promotes intuitive reason as the means of gaining insight into the
order and laws of the universe. Empirical science hinders true perception by
focusing too much on particulars and too little on the border picture.
“Untaught sallies of the spirit” advance the learned naturalist farther than
does precise analysis of detail. A guess or a dream may be more productive than
a fact or a scientific experiment. The scientist fails to see the unifying
principles behind the bewildering abundance of natural expressions, to address
the ultimately spiritual purpose of this diversity, to recognize man’s position
as “head and heart” of the natural world. Emerson points out that men now only
apply rational understanding to nature, which is consequently perceived
materially. But we would do better to trust in intuitive reason, which allows
revelation and insight. He cites examples of intuition working in man (Jesus
Christ, Swedenborg, and the Shakers among them), which provide evidence of the
power of intuition to transcend time and space. Emerson refers to the knowledge
of God as matutina cognitio – morning
knowledge. He identifies the imbalance created by man’s loss of an earlier
sense of the spiritual meaning and purpose of nature. By restoring spirituality
to our approach to nature, and use all our faculties, we will see the
miraculous in common things and will perceive higher law. Facts will be
transformed into true poetry. While we ponder abstract questions
intellectually, nature will be fluid and dynamic. The world exists for each
man, the humble as well as the great. As we idealize and spiritualize, evil and
squalor will disappear, beauty and nobility will reign. Man will enter the
kingdom of his own dominion over with wonder.
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in the potential within every
individual to achieve enlightened state of being and awareness through a close
observation of the world and an introspective look at him. Infused in his work
are the influence of the transcendentalism and his life as a Unitarian pastor.
James D. Hart, when discussing the spirit of transcendentalism, stare, man may
fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rap mystical state, in which
the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into the human in the
over-soul. This occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible
world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws “This
concept is the embodiment of Emerson’s sermons and essays, and any one of his
works fulfills or inspires a divine potential, Self-Reliance” published in 1841,
Self-Reliance” is one of Emerson’s most influential essays, and its title
address a central concept of American Transcendentalism. The essay promotes
self-trust and independence of the individual, and this is express in the final
lines, nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace
but triumph of the principal”. The principal he refers to is a moral truth that
can only be developed in one’s own mind. As man lives in search of this truth
he achieves human divinity. There is a time in every man’s education when he
arrives art the conviction that envy in ignorance that imitation is suicide.
Chapter – 8
Conclusion:
The previous thoughts were quite strong. I would only add
that Transcendentalism seems to be the Americanized version of the European
Romantic movement with its emphasis on subjectivity and emotions. The
transcendentalist thinkers really strove to place a primacy on the subjective
experience as being distinct from all else. When Whitman writes “Song of
Myself,” it is transcendental, in part, because he is not kidding around. He
literally believes that the subjective experience is something that has
universal application. Through the subjective, one can understand the
objective. This emphasis on the emotional frame of reference to consciousness
was powerful given the rapid growth of industrialization and the growing
collective conformity that accompanied it in early America. The meaning of
Transcendentalism in such a context brings to light how the modern definition
of America was set against opposing polarities that sought to bring form and
meaning to a nation that was nebulous and responsive to different forces of
change. Transcendentalism was a style of writing that emerged from the Romantic
style of writing around 1840. Just like music has different styles that are
popular at different times, writing too has different styles throughout
history. In America, the transcendentalists were motivated and inspired or went
beyond our mortal existences and a focus on the dignity of manual labor and
personal introspection. In their writing, they focused on identifying truths of
human nature, and finding great joy and wisdom in those truths, revering them
as sacred and spiritual. They delighted in nature, and often found nature
itself to be very spiritual and a conveyor of truth and beauty. They also
focused on how every person should trust themselves and should rejoice in all
of their own beauty, instead of relying on others or the world to form their
opinions or ideas.
The most famous transcendentalists are Ralph Waldo Emerson
who wrote numerous essays and the most well-known being “Self-Reliance” where
he preached the importance of relying on yourself as a source of truth and
wisdom. Then, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden, a book on how he went to live by himself on Walden Pond,
reaping truth and satisfaction from the work of his own hands, became one of
the transcendentalists to strengthen the spirit in Emerson.
As I have already mentioned the Transcendentalists liked to
view themselves as individualistic thinkers rather than members of some group.
Therefore, as far as the basic tenets of Transcendentalism are concerned it is
better to talk about prevailing tendencies instead of fixed beliefs and
attitudes. However, according to Reuben there are certain points of general
agreement. He mentions the following ones: Transcendentalists do not reject
God. Instead, they prefer to explain the world in terms of an individual. There
is a shift of focus. An individual is seen as a center of the universe.
History, nature and the whole universe can be understood through an individual,
he represents the key. If we know ourselves then we can understand the
universe, because the structure of the universe matches that of the individual.
Even Aristotle advised us to “know thyself”. Also, Hermes Trismegistus Emerald
Tablet tells us as below so above Nature is full of signs, it is symbolic. 32
meaning based on science 76. The self-transcending tendency, the desire to
become one with the world is a transcendental thought. (Reuben) The tendency of
Transcendentalism is to overcome our uniqueness, the ego and to become one with
the whole, which is at the same time the tendency of nearly all New Age
teachings. As far as New Age is concerned the views on the concept of ego range
from total suppressing to acknowledgement of its vital function in terms of
self-preservation and other beneficial aspects which result from our perception
of uniqueness. However, the overall tendency within New Age is to suppress the
ego. The Transcendentalists do not talk openly about such a need. Instead, they
stress the importance of a higher perspective, which can be accessed via our
connection with the self. Reuben also observes that Transcendentalists see
nature as neutral. Its beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What matters is
everyone’s thoughts and feelings at any given moment. Through these, we impose
a certain quality on nature. In other words, our emotional set-up affects the
way we perceive the environment. Rebuen thus concludes that for the
Transcendentalists “knowing yourself” and studying nature” was the same
activity (Ruben). New Agers and possibly even Emerson could expand in this idea
by saying that we create our reality through our thoughts and feelings, which
we can control in any given moment, and of course, the same environment at the
same time can be amazingly beautiful for one and terribly full of allergens for
the other, to give an example. It depends on what we focus our attention. Let
us now have a look at the transcendental idea that the structure of the
universe matches the structure of the individual or the other way around.
Within New Age Science there is a theory developed by physicist David Bohm and
neurologist Karl Pribram, who is known as “holographic paradigm. A basic
characteristic of a hologram is the fact that “each fragment of intermediate
frequency pattern contains the information about the complete structure of our
whole object. This theory suggests that every atom of our body contains
information about the complete structure of our whole body. In other words in
the tiniest part is a reflection of the world. So, if our bodies would be taken
as those tiny parts of the universe, because we are part of the universe, we
can assume that within each and every cell of our body we carry the information
about the structure of the universe, according to Bohm’s and Pribram’s theory
and presumably according to the Transcendentalists as well. Judging by
Emerson’s remark in his essay Comprehension where he mentions that “the entire
system of things gets represented in every particle we can see that he
described the same idea which was later on formulated in scientific terms by
Program and Bohm. Then there is a group of ideas, according to Reuben, which
are not generally agreed upon, but are shared by many Transcendentalist
transcends the rational and focuses on the spiritual. The human soul is part of
the Over soul a special term used by Emerson, source is everywhere, permeates
everything. Therefore, it is not necessary to travel to sacred places. Jesus
was divine as everyone else is. He was only exceptionally capable of living
transcendental life, using powers that reside in every individual. The biblical
miracles are seen as dubious. All that we can see around us are miracles. Our
present life is more important than the afterlife. Death is not to be feared.
Our soul only goes back where it came from. Evil, negative or dark side is only
seen as a counterpart to the positive one. They do not believe in the existence
in the existence of Satan as an active force. Positive side is more powerful
because light penetrates dark. Power is obtained through self-reliance. They
defy fate and predestination. They propose to disregarded consistency in one’s
behavior. People are constantly changing as they are evolving so what they
believed yesterday does not need to apply today. The only imperative is to
trust oneself. There is unity between life and universe and there is a
relationship between all things. The truth can be assessed only through our
intuition, no church or creed can convey it. Reformed can be achieved only when
we start to act from within (Reuben). For the purpose of a direct comparison,
let us now have a look at the basic tenets of New Age teachings that are
commonly agreed upon. Heelas quotes William Bloom’s formulation of these ideas:
All life is the manifestation of spirit (the supreme consciousness). The
purpose of life is to develop Love, Wisdom and Enlightenment. All religious
express at their core the same reality. The life as we perceive it is only “the
outer veil of an invisible inner reality”. Human beings are two folded. They
have an outer temporary personality (nature) and then the higher self (soul or
“multi-dimensional inner being”. The higher self is love. Our task is to bring
these two parts of ourselves into harmony, to become love. All souls have free
will to choose whatever path they want. All life is interconnected energy”. Our
thoughts, feelings and actions are also forms of energy. By producing energy
this way, we are undergoing a change of mass consciousness. Therefore, we talk
about a New Age. Heelas then adds few more ideas formulated by Jeremy Tarcher:
Our higher self can be awakened, if it is achieved, it becomes central to our
everyday life. Awakening of the higher self is the purpose of our life. Hammer
proposes the following characteristics of the New Age sense lato: The cosmos is
“an unbroken whole”. Idealism presented in a form of holism. Our inner set up
influences our circumstances. Prima materia of the cosmos is energy. We are
body, mind and spirit. All problems need to be addressed with respect to all
these parts. Environmental issues are not separate from the spiritual ones. By
heeling ourselves, we have an individual mission, a purpose to life, which can
be discovered through mediation. Rational thinking does not provide all the
answers. We can gain insight by following different paths. All of them are
valid. A wide diversity of options is thus acknowledged. Finally, I will say
that the main idea of this thesis was to draw parallels between Emerson’s
American Transcendentalism of the 19th century and the New Age
movement whose roots can be traced back to the late 18th and the
first decades of the 19th century with its maturity a completed
process of secularization achieved in the 1970s. Transcendentalism was
certainly much more homogenous than New Age. However, Transcendentalists
stressed in importance of individuality and were not happy being referred to
just as “Transcendentalists” because every label implies unification which was
not desirable. I have studied mainly the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
therefore, while drawing parallels I refer almost exclusively to his work which
is reflected in the title of the thesis. Looking at the basic principles of
both philosophers expounded not only in this final overview but throughout the
whole thesis, as I was gradually presenting them, we could single out several
easily identifiable parallels. These confluences are simply inevitable, as
Transcendentalism represented one of the forming philosophies that in the
nineteenth century contributed to the emergence of New Thought, which was in
turn a shaping philosophy for New Age in the 1960s and 1970s. This process was
of course gradual. There is a tendency to draw parallels between
Transcendentalism and New Age based on the influence of Romanticism, which goes
hand in hand with Idealism. I have also come across a synonym for
Transcendentalism; it is sometimes called “American Romanticism”. As such, it
connotes the tendency to detach, to escape, to go to the basics, to be free
spirited, to live in harmony with nature, to rebel. All of that is true for
Transcendentalism, even if the meaning could be slightly shifted. Romantics
perceived the nature more in the physical sense, the feelings and thoughts to
which they were inspired came from their interaction with the real physical
environment. However, Transcendentalists thought of nature more in a
theoretical sense in the context of the universe, as they were trying to
transcend the ordinary perceptions and to go beyond. Emerson says parts of
speech are metaphors, because the whole nature is a metaphor of the human
mind”. Philosophy of idealism is important factor linking these two
philosophies together. I have mentioned Schelling, Hegel and especially focused
on the influence of Immanuel Kant and his idea of Copernican revolution.
Another shaping factor for both was Emanuel Swedenborg. Emerson even included
him among the six men having their own essays written about them in his series
Representative Men. With respect to the concrete common concepts, I would
highlight the following. The idea of Holism: with regard to New Age, holism is
its core belief. The phrase body-Mind-Spirit, being used even as a label for a
literature genre, is well-known. For Transcendentalists were not less
important. Transcendentalists did not honor the dualistic nature of a human
being where the body is taken care of by the secular representatives and the
spirit is in the hands of the church. Their idea was therefore a holistic
interconnection of both through our faculty of the intuition, which is a
manifestation of the spirit, as our best source of knowledge and guidance.
Moreover, Emerson, in his essay Compensation, mentions the same idea I have
described by Bohm’s and Program’s theory of holographic universe adopted by New
Age. The idea of Higher Self: Emerson calls it the over-soul. Again, it implies
that we do not only have a soul but that this soul is part of something
greater, a source or God. The Creator-creation relationship: Emerson as well as
New Age sees the man as the ultimate source of creation due to the belief that
we are all parts of God and thus we are the creators. All that is, is therefore
a joined manifestation of all forms of life, not the sole person called God. We
constitute that which is called God and he/she is in the constant process of
evolving through our creation. Adoption of Oriental Ideas: Both traditions
incorporated only those parts that could easily fit into the western framework.
The idea of Gnosis: Hanegraaff describes gnosis as “the truth which can only be
found inner revelation, insight or enlightenment. Truth can only be personally
experienced. There is no other authority than personal inner experience”. He
says that the concept comes from Western Esotericism and was transferred to New
Age. Therefore, there are various seminars and retreats that seek to enable the
participants to re-connect with their inner (wiser) self. Hanegraaff’s gnosis
is precisely what Emerson explains in his essay Self-Reliance. Self-reliance
means to guide oneself with the help of one’s spirit or the higher self. It
would be certainly interesting to explore more deeply the connection
Swedenborg-Emerson-New Age. It seems to me, which is nowadays a common
technique of acquiring the information in the New Age movement. Farther
research of Emerson’s views on Swedenborg’s work, especially in terms of map of
the spirit world; angelic realm for instance, could provide more information
about possible parallels between Emerson’s ideas about angels or spirit guides,
which are now, as far as New Age is concerned, taken for granted. I have not
explored Theosophy more thoroughly, main because I found it not directly
relevant to the depiction of Transcendentalism –New age link. The connective
element in question represents the New thoughts movement were I placed my
attention. To conclude, let me quote Emerson once more. Each man has his own
vocation. The talent is the call.., What attracts my attention shall have it,
as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons, as
worthy, go by it, to whom I give no regard.
A few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents,
have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent
significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to
your gift. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always
right. Joseph Cambell, whose phrase ‘Follow Your Bliss’ was quoted in the New
Age movie The Secret, explains what Emerson contemplated in the quotation
above. Bliss is the driving force and motivation for all our desires. It is
something that stems from the core of our being. It is our passion, the thing
we enjoy doing the most and if we discover it and decide to follow it, our life
would be, due to an influx of favorable circumstances, truly miraculous. We
need to search within to find our true self and then to do only that which
resonates with what we have found. Rely upon yourself, the only authority you
ever need is you. When you follow your bliss, the universe cannot help itself
but to deliver everything that matches your bliss. It is how it works. Joseph
Campbell says: We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion
render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it.
No one can tell you what is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your
own depth. All the time, it is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has
grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time- namely, that
if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been
there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living
is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who
are in the field of your bliss, as they open the doors to you. I say, follow
your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they
were going to be Connell. Emerson knew that back in the nineteenth century,
Campbell repeated and stressed its importance in the twentieth century and the
contemporary channeled messages within the New Age community verity its
significance. The message is still same.
References:
·
Philip
F. Gura “A History of Transcendentalism” (2008) Farrar, Strous and Giroux.
·
Ivory Amstrong Richards “Literary Criticism” (1990)
Virginia Commonwealth University.
·
Woodlief
Ann “Biography of selected criticism on Emerson” (1972) Virginia Commonwealth
University.
·
Hurley
Ed. Jennifer “American Romanticism” (2001) A. San Diego: Gteenheaven Press.
·
Amundson,
Ron. “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon.” N.d. Web. (10th March, 2010)
Anpere.net.anpere.
·
Hammer
Olav. “Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age “(2003) Leiden,
NLD: Brill, N.H.E.J., N.V. Koninklijke, Boethandelen drukkerij, Katalog Evangelicke
teologicke fakulty UK.
·
Oppenheimer
Mark. “The queen of the New Age” (14 Apr. 2009) The new York Times.
·
Porte
Joel “Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays & Lectures. Nature; Address, and
Lectures. Essays: First and Second Series. Representative Man. English Traits.
The Conduct of life” (1983) New York: The Library of America.
·
Metaphysics
Research “The Transcendentalism” (24th Jun. 2008-8 Apr. 2010) Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Lab, CSLI, Stanford University.
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