Nature

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1836

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Nature, the Promising Individual, and Corrupt Society

A key component of Emerson’s Transcendentalism is his belief that the individual is full of potential for virtue and creativity but that these traits are hampered by the corrupting influence of society. Emerson’s notion of society is broad, encompassing all the social structures that act as intermediaries between man, his intuition, and nature. These include human settlements such as cities, organized religion, and academic institutions that promote the classics over a contemporary approach to life.

Nature is the counterforce to society’s corruption and restores man to the fullness of his intuitive powers. Alone in nature, Emerson’s narrator becomes a depersonalized “transparent eye-ball” who is so receptive to God and his creation that he becomes a “particle of God” (18). Compared to the sublimeness of such a distinction, the man’s societal relations are rendered minimal and irrelevant, as “to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance” (18). The disturbance refers to the fact that societal relations and hierarchies can get in the way of spiritual enlightenment and a direct relationship with God. Indeed, Emerson shows how nature reverses traditional hierarchies, as the child, with their lack of preconceptions about the world, stands to become more enlightened from nature than the learned philosopher. To be restored through nature, the sage has to leave behind the societal attributes and knowledge he has accumulated and become childlike enough to “look at the world with new eyes” (58). This attitude complements Emerson’s critique of organized systems of knowledge and religion. Only in Nature, the direct text of God, can man behold scenes that are as “beautiful as his own nature” (19), a statement that refers to the Christian belief that man is made in the image of God. Thus, the man who seeks enlightenment should study nature, the direct work of God, rather than cultural artefacts that have been mediated through generations of men.

The Influence of Poetry

James Elliot Cabot, in his 1883 memoir of Emerson, reports that The Christian Examiner a Unitarian periodical treated “Nature” “rather indulgently as a poetical rhapsody containing much beautiful writing and not devoid of sound philosophy, but, on the whole, producing the impression of a disordered dream.” (Cabot, James Elliott. A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Riverside Press, 1887.) This early critique draws attention to the poetic nature of Emerson’s essay, which often diverts into lavish descriptions of natural phenomena and quotes lengthily from other poets. Indeed, “Nature” ends with a long passage quoting Alcott, the man Emerson terms his Orphic poet, that is profuse in metaphors equating the advancement of nature with that of the spirit. For example: “when the summer comes from the south; the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along the path, and carry with it the beauty it visits” (58). This passage, which uses springtime imagery as a metaphor for spiritual renewal and growth, is an example of a poet using natural matter as a symbol of his thoughts. In his writing, the poet “impresses his being” on nature (43), thus advocating the idea of a creative act that is a miniature version of God’s. Thus, the poet is superior to the sensualist, who is delighted by beautiful natural phenomena “in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping” (22). While in the late 19th century proponents of the Aesthetic movement adopted an appreciation of nature’s beauty that was separate from a moral agenda, Emerson still holds fast to the idea of beauty’s spiritual and intellectual objectives.

Throughout the essay, Emerson adopts the Romantic opposition of poetry to the “unpoetic” phenomenon of empirical science, which tries to understand nature part by part and so becomes the opposite of the divine maker’s sensibility that is at the heart of poetry and creation (53). He argues that “empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole” (53). Here, Emerson considers that the acquisition of piecemeal factual knowledge about nature paradoxically distances man from the phenomenon that was delivered to him whole by God.

Man’s Centrality in Nature and the Possibility of Progress

A striking feature of Emerson’s treatise on nature is his emphasis on man’s centrality in it. This view stems in part from his Christian belief that man is made in the image of God, and that God created nature for man’s purpose. Emerson considers that the “high and divine” natural beauty “that can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will” (25). While a sensual delight in nature is, according to Emerson, the province of women and “savages” who are unfamiliar with the intellectual achievements of civilization, it is up to the White, Christian man to master and learn from it (25). This opinion is evident in his description of Columbus’s arrival in America as a triumphant opportunity for the uncultivated “natural beauty” of “the New World” to “steal in like air, and envelope great actions” (26). Here, Emerson sees America through the colonizer Columbus’s eyes as a new, unpopulated Eden of vast natural resources and not as the longstanding home of the people who were already living there. The idea of America as a naturally rich, uninhabited land is crucial to Emerson’s vision of a young, vital generation that has broken away from past precedents and is steeped in its own intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Emerson’s idea of nature as man’s resource is also expressed in his unquestioning optimism regarding man’s ability to exploit it for his own advancement. He writes enthusiastically about how man “no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus’s bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat” (20). Here, Emerson juxtaposes the classical allusion of the Greek wind god Aeolus with his contemporaries’ ability to make a boat move with a technology that vastly overpowers the wind. He also implies that just as the notion of a pagan wind god is quaint and outdated, so is the philosophy of the classical age, which ought to be replaced by something more fitting for the innovations of the present moment.

However, though man can use his intellect to imitate and then outperform the functions of nature, Emerson warns that merely utilizing natural resources as commodities has led to an impoverished relationship with nature, as man considers it part by utilitarian part, rather than as a whole. This means that man masters nature by “a penny-wisdom and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage” (56). To avoid the fate of having a mundane, unremarkable relationship with nature, man must learn to see it as more than a commodity and experience it as the wonder of creation.