Concerning Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature
Concerning Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature
March 27 to April 3, 1999
In his collected essays titled Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson advocates for direct intimate involvement with nature, believing that the poetic experience of nature is far superior to any knowledge gained by scientific experiments performed on nature. For Emerson, nature is symbolic of the spiritual and through a poetic approach to nature one will directly experience the spiritual. One must, however, start by experiencing nature directly. Emerson wrote:
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. [...]
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. […]
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. [...]
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Emerson’s words and poetic vision of nature inspired the younger Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to take to the woods, walking and writing about their experiences in nature. Thus began what became the American nature writing tradition. This tradition is founded on the poetic rather than the scientific. Emerson writes:
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. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
Emerson further explains the difference between the poet and the non-poet. He states it is the poet who,
[…] unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.
Emerson goes even further to clarify the difference between Reason and Spirit. “That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself.”
Emerson believes that there is a spiritual natural world intimately connected to the material world of nature. He believes the spiritual transcends the material. He sees the spiritual as being transparent and elusive, difficult to discover. For Emerson, the spiritual can be found and experienced by taking a poetic approach directly through nature. Emerson seems to suggest that by seeking the spiritual in this way one will find openings through nature that take one above societal concerns and beyond nature itself, leading to an encounter with the Creator Spirit and the immortal.
In his introduction to Nature, first published in 1836, Emerson writes:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? […] The sun shines to-day also.
So enough of Emerson, history, and tradition. It’s time to go walking in the wilderness!