By Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The American Scholar” has been called our literary declaration of independence, but does it deserve the equivalent educational accoutrements afforded our historic pronouncement of 1776?
Before I render my opinion, I must say that my edition (ISBN 9780343858292) gets FIVE BIG STARS for the footnotes. Wow, what a treasure! They are full of backstory and bring clarity to words lost to us today. Additionally, the fifteen-page introduction that precedes The American Scholar essay is a fine overview, thorough in its brevity.
About the author:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was poet, essayist, and philosopher. Born in Boston, Emerson entered Harvard at 14. He graduated Harvard, and later Cambridge Divinity School, to become a Unitarian minister. By thirty, Emerson had left the ministry to devote his life to poetry, writing, and lecturing.
What is his stature among poets, essayists, and philosophers. Opinions vary. As to respect, one said, “The judgments formed of him are as various as the habits of thought in the critics.” 13
The book in a sentence (or two):
The master of the essay, this edition adds the works “Self-Reliance” and “Compensation” to the Emerson Classic, “The American Scholar.” Emerson was just 35 when he delivered this essay before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a society composed of 25 men (yes, male only in 1837) from each graduating class. (21) This essay has won great acclaim as the American literary declaration of independence.
My quick take on The American Scholar
There is much to appreciate in the Emerson treatise. Most particularly, Emerson urges people to think for themselves, rather than being slaves to the thoughts of others.
Overview and Analysis::
Emerson highlights the influence of Nature, the Past, and Action.
Nature causes one to dig deep. “‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.”
The Past provides helpful learning, but one must work not become a slave to the thoughts of others.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”
Yes, receive the thoughts of others, but not without taking time for quiet reflection and pushback. “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius of overinfluence.” “Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.” These are good words. Finally, Emerson discusses action.
Action. In short, scholarship and the ivory tower were NOT made for each other. Yes indeed! I appreciated these words:
So much only of life as I know by experience . . . . I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power” (31), “Life is our dictionary” (32), “Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary” (33), and “Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives” (34).
Emerson promotes scholarly work as that which “plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation” (35). As one will see further on, it seems to me that Emerson places undue confidence in man in general and scholarly man in particular. That said, he is advocating thinking—doing the hard work of living, observing, and cataloging even though that cake takes a long time to bake.
I appreciate this but Emerson goes too far in his reliance on the self. Living life “under the sun” as the writer of Ecclesiastes notes, never satisfies and always ends in vanity. One must look past man to God who becomes to us wisdom and righteousness (1 Corinthians 1:30).
Emerson difficulties with Christianity are well-documented. A believer in God (I think), he seems most at home in nature, but as the introduction noted so well:
It is not always easy to understand Emerson; his sentences are full of hidden meaning which cannot be detected at a glance; they must be read and re-read to perceive the full drift of the thought; but the through in its fullness will repays us for the trouble. 15
As the introduction declares, “He is the champion of mental freedom, and continually urges others to free themselves from the fetters of conventionality” (17). There is some wisdom here, but Emerson seems to travel the path of the morning star, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will rise my throne above the stars of God . . . I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14 NIV).
Emerson's devotion to the individual self is IMO a proud pile of poppycock that should be poop-scooped off Harvard yard, deposited in a doggie bag, and tossed in the trash. Such soaring rhetoric, built on a foundation of marshmallows:
The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. . . . this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. . . . and thousands of young men as hopeful now . . . do not see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitable on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Really? Can someone tell that to the Democratic and Republican parties?
Emerson follows suit in Self-Reliance: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.” And “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashed across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages” (49). Later he writes, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature . . . the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”
Emerson and his self-relying ilk have not given us the moon they promised, but they have birthed a movement of the individualized self as the measure of all and the arbitrator of all. Look at the flimsy foundation propping up gender fluid preadolescent teens demanding hormone therapy without affirmation of doctor or parent, and there you will find Emerson, sweating profusely to keep aloft such confident assertions.
My Takeaways:
1. Do the hard work to read and re-read: About reading Emerson, the introductory commentator wisely said, It is not always easy to understand Emerson; his sentences are full of hidden meaning which cannot be detected at a glance; they must be read and re-read to perceive the full drift of the thought; but the thought in its fullness well repays us for the trouble. 15 OMW
2. Knowledge puffs up: Emerson feels like Arrogance with pen in hand. “Discontent is the want of self-reliance.” “Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man” (72), “All men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect” (73), “That a true man belongs to no other time and place, but is the center of things” (60) is philosophical bad math. Two “true men” who differ cannot both be right or the center of things except in the center of their own collapsing universes.
The author piqued my curiosity about these authors and books:
1. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Novum Organum (New Method)
2. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Merchant of Venice and Hamlet
3. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Principia
4. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), The Vicar of Wakefield.
5. Edmund Burke (1729-97), "Speech on American Conciliation" and Reflections on the French Revolution
Words to ponder:
1. On reading and not thinking: Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 27
2. On reading and writing: One must be an inventor to read well. As the [Spanish] proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. 29
3. On study AND action: Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives.
4. On combining scholarly thinking with action: Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. 34
5. On thinking: Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable o the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. 36
6. On focused work: The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aim. . . . This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. 39, 42
Conclusion:
“The American Scholar” has been called our literary declaration of independence, but does it deserve the equivalent educational accoutrements afforded our historic pronouncement of 1776? Not to me. Emerson’s breadth of knowledge seems as wide as the mouth of the Amazon. At times he is brilliant, but his confidence, a shimmering rambling rhetoric, is anchored to an outsized self that declares “The man is all” (“Compensation” 104). On one hand he says, “A great man is always willing to be little” (Compensation, 102), but there is little “little” in one who declares "the man is all" and boasts of “the omnipotence of the will” (Compensation, 86).
Reading Emerson, I would play Festus to his loquacious monologues and shout: “You are out of your mind . . . . Your great learning is driving you insane.” Emerson does shine in his insight at times. In Compensation he writes, “There is a crack in everything God has made.” (95) True, but the crack is man-made (Romans 3:23), and the healing only comes when the self-reliant man becomes a man dependent on God and his mediator Christ (John 3:16).
Bibliographical Data:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1893. The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, Compensation. New York: American Book Company. Reprinted by Franklin Classics. ISBN 9780343858292
Additional contextual insights from the brief introduction to The American Scholar in the Audible recording (speech only).
