Nature (1836)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION: Nature, Addresses and Lectures. 1836. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904. 1-77.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0001.001/1:9?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

The volume Nature, Addresses and Lectures was first published in 1849. Nature was first published in 1836 and in this text Emerson presents his most systematic account of his philosophy of nature, based on the immanence of God or Spirit.

KEYWORDS: animals, nature, morality, education, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin & Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen):

Emerson begins his famous essay with a scathing indictment of intellectual life at the beginning of the nineteenth century and sets out to provide what he calls "an original relation to the universe"; that is, to inquire into the ethical and spiritual constitution of nature: “[N]ature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?” (4). His first step is to establish that all that is “Not Me” is Nature and the first chapter is devoted to exploring how this state of separation can be overcome.

I: NATURE
To be alone, man should look at the stars and strive to achieve a "spirit of infancy" that resonates with the harmony and beauty of Creation: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (10). In this state, the ideal holism of everything – human and vegetable – becomes tangible. This "occult" relation between the human and the nonhuman plays out on different levels. Emerson subsequently discusses these levels in an ascending order.

II: COMMODITY
Understood in its mere use value, nature  to the human just a commodity. “Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed” (13). Everything in the natural cycles is “for the profit of man” (13).

III: BEAUTY
At a degree of abstraction above the base function of nature as a commodity, its beauty serves a “nobler want” (15). Considered as sensual pleasure, “nature is medicinal” (16) and, through the human senses, nature's “active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind” (17). Higher forms of natural beauty include  the spiritual element that is the second aspect of beauty in nature. “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful” (19): this is the moral aspect of natural beauty. In this moral sense, nature teaches "by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate” (20). The third and highest aspect of beauty in nature concerns its relation to “the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection” (22). Thus, “[b]eauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All” (24). Natural beauty, Emerson argues, is not an end in itself but points to or is an expression of divine beauty.

IV: LANGUAGE
Language is analogous to beauty insofar as “Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit” (25).

Language ultimately comes from material nature but “[i]t is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture” (26). Emerson's thought here is thoroughly anthropocentric. Material nature, nature as appearance, experiential nature revolves around the human as “man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre 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. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life” (27-28).

V: DISCIPLINE
“In view of this significance of nature we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline” (46). All previous levels are sublated in this level of discpipline. Nature caters to both the understanding or empirical knowledge or reason and also Transcendental or absolute knowledge, the knowledge of God. It is in this latter sense that “[a]ll things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature” (40). Hence, everything in nature, from “every globe in the remotest heaven” to “the rudest crystal,” from “the eye of a leaf” to “the tropical forest” (40), has ethical value. For Emerson, the human embodies Spirit to the highest degree: “Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be degradations” (45).

VI: IDEALISM
All the previous levels point to the ideal unity and wholeness of the natural world. From the human point of view, ultimately it is irrelevant whether this ideality of nature is also real; it does not matter whether, for example, the stars actually exist or are simply “painted” on the soul by God. What matters is this ideal holism: “The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same” (47). Philosophers and poets are united by the link between Truth and Beauty: “It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law” (55). Humans only ever live their life to the fullest if they leave the relative world behind and attune themselves to the absolute. Accordingly, Emerson writes: “I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man’s connection with nature.” Education or culture, Emerson continues, thus “inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent which it uses to call real, and that real which it uses to call visionary” (59).

VII: SPIRIT
Emerson answers the question he posed at the outset of Nature: “We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves” (63-64). Emerson thus understands (empirical) nature as an immanent expression of God and a vector through which God is expressed.

VIII: PROSPECTS
There is a danger, however, which is that “[e]mpirical 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” (66). The claim that Transcendental rather than empirical inquiry is needed influenced Emerson's position on a range of contemporary reform movements, most notably in relation to the ethical veganism practised by his friends A. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, Temperance, and Abolition.

 

Last updated on March 2nd, 2024

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