Comments on Emerson's Nature (Ann Woodlief)

The primary impact this work had on me (in the long ago) was to start me thinking about "seeing" nature, and finding all kinds of truths embedded in its facts and processes. I felt as if I would never quite SEE the same again, and in fact I haven't.

For Emerson everything in nature is a kind of microcosm, or little world which contains the whole world, in some way. Theoretically, if you could truly SEE the essence of anything in nature (and that includes knowing a great deal about it--which could lead you deeply into science) you could see through to all kinds of truths. I've spent much of my life exploring how that might work (thus my obsession with rivers in both their physical, intellectual, and spiritual--but always symbolic-- dimensions).

This is the insight that seemed to have changed Thoreau's life also--and there you will see much in Emerson in action (although he would have vehemently denied it, and it's true--he is a very original soul). I don't really expect you to "get" all of this book; and if you did get to the point of "boiling" it down into something you could manage, you would have reduced its complexity terribly. He spent ten years reading, writing, and thinking about these ideas before he wrote this book, and it has just about all of his ideas in it, the ones that he would continue to write on over and over in many different ways and contexts. Kenneth Cameron collected much of this in a huge book called Young Emerson's Transcendental Vision and he concludes that in Nature Emerson brought together all the themes he would consider in his writing: "self-reliance, know thyself, trust thyself, man the microcosm, God within, the eternal in the present, like can only know like, what we are within that only can we see without, follow your own instincts, build your own world, be genuine, the world exists for you." Well, that's his list. My list would say much more about nature!

Pay special attention to the final paragraphs, where Emerson creates a myth to present a vision which cannot be said well in words, when he says that once man was pure spirit, but now he is a "god in ruins" and the "dwarf of himself." He concludes that the problems lie not in nature but in man: "The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself...." The answer? One is that "the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." We must come to see that "Nature is not fixed but fluid." This is precisely what the physicists are saying today (they are far more Emersonian than they realize). In Emerson's grand conclusion he says, "Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." In other words, the burden is upon us individually to imagine the harmonic world that we wish to live in, and then we will have it. No wonder Emerson has to make up an imaginary "Orphic poet" to say such things!

As exhilarating as it might be to think that you can remake the world by rethinking it and yourself, it is also a terrible and isolating burden. "Build therefore your own world, but it is, after all, ONLY your little world." This is the flip side of Emerson's exuberant faith in self-reliance, and he will see its darker implications in "Experience" and "Fate" (yes, we'll read those too). The Romantic idea that the basis of reality is one's own mind, interpreting nature one-on-one, can liberate and imprison at the same time, for our minds are severely limited by what we little we can experience, what we know, how we are brought up, etc. [ok, I can only truly speak for myself on this, but I can assume that it applies to other people too! )

Consider Nature the base of this section of the course, more for its questions than its answers. What can we learn from nature? How should we live in nature? How can we "see" truth by relating to nature? How can we see ourselves in its mirror? How do we see God as reflected through nature (assuming that God is Emerson's Spirit)? Nature is not necessarily nice! In fact, it can roll on quite indifferently to much that we cherish, including our physical existence. If this is God somehow, then what kind of a God would want to destroy us with an earthquake? On the other hand, why are we so eager to destroy parts of the very nature that sustains us? [this is probably a more modern question than Emerson thought of--though Melville did]

Perhaps the main thing that Nature does is to propose that the connection between self and nature--and God, or Spirit--is a crucial one, and one that must be explored closely. Study nature, know thyself. Nature can teach us much; nature is primarily a projection of our own minds. Now there's a massive contradiction for you--or perhaps it's a paradox, where both ideas are true in some sense. Paradox and efforts to reconcile opposites are at the heart of Romanticism, as well as the questions about the relationship between man/woman and Nature.

So as we read these works, let's keep coming back to these questions. By the way, good writers don't have final answers, just different perspectives on the questions and why they might be important to explore!