The American Scholar

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1837

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Symbols & Motifs

Physical Labor

Emerson emphasizes the importance of a scholar who is engaged and active in the world, believing as he does that action informs the intellect. Even when he is not discussing actual labor and trades, he frequently employs labor metaphors when writing about intellection. Discussing the idea of a democratization of culture—by which means he believes that a true “revolution” will be founded—he declares: “The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground” (Paragraph 35). Elsewhere, praising what he sees as a new societal tendency to focus on “the near, the low, the common,” Emerson states: “That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts” (Paragraph 40).

Both of these statements serve to make the abstract tactile and vigorous; they also serve to dramatize the difficulty involved in thought. The first statement compares the project of man’s self-reliance to the building of a house; the second statement compares man’s search for lofty intellectual goals to “long journeys” for which they must “provision themselves.” Such metaphors, in addition to making the life of the mind seem both exciting and difficult, also emphasize Emerson’s central idea of a “whole man” who has developed all sides of his natures.

One Man

In his introduction to his lecture, Emerson invokes a fable of gods who divide one single man into several parts—the acting part, the thinking part, and so on—so “that he might be more helpful to himself” (Paragraph 3). Emerson suggests that this fragmentation has gone too far, and that man has become nothing but the particular role to which he has been assigned: “Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things” (Paragraph 5). His project is to turn this fable on its head; he wishes that every man, whatever his role in society, should discover the One Man in himself.

Emerson’s particular focus is on American intellectuals, whom he sees as having become overly abstracted and cut off from the larger world: “There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian—as unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a penknife for an axe” (Paragraph 21). He rejects this idea of the scholar as backwards-looking recluse, and instead calls for a more engaged and vigorous model of intellection. He believes that an active life is not only compatible with a thinking life, but that action serves to form thought: “The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (Paragraph 21).

Emerson’s invoking of the “One Man” myth is the embodiment of his central idea of a single soul uniting us all: “It is one soul which animates all men” (Paragraph 35). This is an idea that might seem abstract or hard to grasp on its own; the image of a man who has been split into parts, and who needs to connect with his origins, serves to make the abstract immediate and concrete.

The Cycle of Life

When writing about the process of thought, Emerson frequently uses analogies drawn from the natural world. Discussing the mysterious way that worldly experience informs thought, he employs an analogy of silkworms chewing leaves: “A strange process too, this by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours” (Paragraph 22). Elsewhere, he compares this same process to a ripening fruit and an evolving butterfly; his aim is to emphasize that it is an underground, intuitive process, and one that cannot be rushed: “Observe too the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom” (Paragraph 23).

What these different natural world analogies have in common is that they all describe a process of ripening, or becoming. Elsewhere, in discussing evolving and changing literary traditions, Emerson invokes the phases of a man’s life:

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age […] I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek, the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective (Paragraph 37).

One of Emerson’s aims in this lecture is to insist on man’s connection to nature, even or especially in regard to his intellectual ambitions. In using these different natural world analogies—all of which allude to cycles of life—he aims to anchor thought in the real world.