Transcendental Ideas
Philosophy of Nature
Primary Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Primary Texts: Henry David Thoreau
Related links:
Student Notes on the Transcendentalist Perspective of Nature
Man learns that Nature is awe-inspiring,
all-powerful and full of dangerous beauty. Man is limited by nature's fences;
there are some places in Nature that man is incapable of traversing—-be
it too daunting emotionally, as it was for Thoreau in Ktaadn, or simply
a physical impossibility. Thoreau in "Walking" observes, "For my part I
feel that with regard to Nature I live sort of a border life, on the confines
of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only. . . ." Man
is so insignificant in the face of nature, our existence is untenable:
Thoreau's "House-Warming" . . . ."Nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate
how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their
threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating
from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater
snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe."
As treacherous and cruel that Nature's justice
can be, Mother Nature simultaneously rejuvenates the soul, and both
Emerson and Thoreau believed that emotional and spiritual rebirth was an
important tool of Nature's glory. In his journal, Emerson writes (in absolutely
beautiful prose reminiscent of Whitman): "In the instant you leave far
behind all human relations, wife, mother and child, and live only with
the savages—-water, air, light, carbon, lime, and granite. Nature grows
over me. Frogs pipe; waters far off tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends
and rustles, and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a
strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and existence.
I sow the sun and moon for seeds." Similarly in "Walking", Thoreau writes,
"If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and
wife and child and friends, and never see them again, --if you have paid
your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a
free man, then you are ready for a walk." Dying in nature is automatic
rebirth, a recycling. "Walking": "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till
one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall
perchance shine into our minds and hearts. And light up our whole lives
with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside
in autumn."
Recaptured innocence is another aspect
of man's relationship with nature, which coincides with truth. Emerson's
"The Method of Nature", states:
"Shall we not quit our companions, and
betake. . . .some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency
and recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers
of a more sacred idea." He continues: "Let us worship the mighty and transcendent
Soul. . . . Truth is always holy, holiness is wise. . . . Tenderly, tenderly they woo
and court us from every object in nature, from every fact in life, from
every thought in the mind. The one condition coupled to the gift of truth
is its use. . . .Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it was opened to him, that
the spirits who knew truth in this life, but did it not, at death shall
lose their knowledge."
Emerson and Thoreau realized that Nature
is elusive, an infinite circle that man would never really quite grasp.
But for both of these men, there was thrill in the chase—-a stimulating
enigma and mind-bending chase for answers that remained just outside of
the periphery. In Thoreau's "Where I Lived and what I Lived For": "Men esteem
truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star,
before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something
true and sublime."
Emerson in "Circles" : "There is no end
in nature, but every ending is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. This fact,
as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying
Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet. . . ." To Emerson, the
fluidness of his surroundings meant Nature is a continuous expression of
the spirit. Thoreau continues the same idea in "The Pond in Winter": "After
a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had
been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep,
as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures
live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and
no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question to nature and
daylight." The answer was there is no answer--just open your eyes to see
what Nature reveals to you day after day! He continues this idea of not
really wanting to know all of nature's laws: "Our notions of law and harmony
are commonly confined to those instances we detect; but the harmony results
from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring,
laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful."
Shannon Riley
Insofar as American thought is concerned,
there seem to be two distinct lines of thought concerning Nature. One,
which had among its proponents the bulk of colonial Americans, is that
Nature—-the wilderness, more accurately—-is a foreign, rather fearful entity
that must be dealt with by taming it. It is not uncommon for the wilderness
to be referred to as a "desert" in early American writing. We must remember
the writers were most often speaking of the lush green wildness of the
mid-Atlantic and New England states when they used this term! Nature was
unpredictable, irrational, and vaguely feminine and bad. According to this
view, the main purpose of Nature is how it may serve mankind; it has little
value in itself if left in a "natural" state. Evolving from this fearful
outlook is the attitude contained in the word "frontier," which translates
as opportunity; the frontier is a tabula rasa commodity, a blank slate
available to anyone with the guts, willpower, and means to inscribe his
name. Again, it has little or no value in itself but only in its potential
offering to the prospective owner. Once owned, it is of course no longer
"frontier" but merely "property."
The second line of thought—-which most Americans
espouse today in theory, at least, if not in actual practice—-is that Nature
is a good entity and valuable on its own unique terms, as itself, without
regard to the purposes of mankind. However, it's very difficult to escape
our Puritan/Yankee heritage. (Yankee is used in a pre-Civil War sense here).
We still ask of Nature: what good is it? Even that we want left strictly
alone in its pristine wild beauty is unmolested because we've already taken
what we wanted: the idea of a place still with clean air, water, animals.
This desire was the driving force behind the creation of the National Parks:
we want to preserve not Nature, exactly, but the loveliness of it. While
one surely cannot argue with the positive result of such a desire, nonetheless
it goes right back to "What good is it?" To value Nature strictly as itself
without any regard to profit, financial, spiritual, or otherwise, seems
an impossible task.
Meg Brulatour
What strikes me the most in each of the
readings, not only in Emerson's Nature is the intense connection made
between spirituality and nature. It is certainly present in Thoreau's
texts; Walden and "Walking" are probably the best examples.
The entirety of "Walking" seems to be an extended metaphor for pushing
forward, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.
Without nature, we wouldn't survive in any manner: physically, emotionally,
mentally or most of all spiritually. Thoreau seems to endorse a constant
communion with nature. Obviously, he devotes his life to it, in what
we learn from Walden.
Emerson, while endorsing a similar type
of philosophy of nature, seems more stringent in his ideas of nature and
less stringent in his actual communion with nature. Of course, this
could be false. It might be his writing style and authoritative tone
that seem to preach more than practice. Emerson gives few personal
examples, so readers really don't know if he lives in the way that he suggests
readers or listeners live. Emerson seems to focus a great deal on the ties
between nature and the spirit. He tells readers what the connections
are. Thoreau, on the other hand, often shows us the connections,
but leaves it up to us to make them in our own minds.
Ellen Moore
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Walden
(1854)