Nature is not nature. At least, not in the way the Emerson wishes to view it. His take on nature is as naive as the rest of his romantic ideas, and is emblematic of the way a wealthy, well educate city man like himself and his contemporaries would view it.
The essay Nature is an over-intellectualized, babbling bit of words that attempts to apply a Harvard education to a very primal arena. By insisting that nature is an "apparition" through which one can come face to face with god Emerson is virtually belittling both the natural world and human intelligence.
It is clear to me that Emerson has confused several key pieces of a health human mind. He has, through his scholarly eyes, ignored the differences between reality, and perception. Emerson would claim that his perception of nature is one of a holistic forum with which human can answer their innermost questions. He would claim that my ideas are simply that of a different perception. This is where his weakness lies.
Perception does not display to someone an apparition. This is a hallucination. Perception is, in fact, one man or womans take on the reality infront of them, that is, their best attempt at creating reason and control with the facts presented to them. Emmersons "perception" is not based on any kind of fact. If nature could, as he claims, answer ones innermost questions then should he not be lecturing on to what is in fact the meaning of life? Not how people, if they wish to enter his dream world, can do so themselves.
In this Essay Ralph Waldo Emerson has attempted to squeeze the already humorous idea of "nature" as a single object into his romantic view of the world. He does not realise that the Earth does not endow us with romantic and deistic ideas. We create them. Earth does not give us answers. We deduce them.
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Max,
ReplyDeleteGood post! I admire the way you take an oppositional stance here toward Emerson's views on Nature, but don't let minor inaccuracies undermine the case you are trying to make (Emerson, living in ,mid 19th century Concord, is hardly a "city man" is he? Is he "virtually" or literally belittling his subject?). And while I was intrigued by your account of Emerson's misapprehension of perception (one cannot 'perceive and apparition'), I wonder if you're right. Keep in mind that Emerson, as a classic Platonist, believes in just the sort of "Universals" (the consistent reality underlying the apparition") that you are free to dismiss, but not before you make a stab at understanding more accurately. I'm interested to see if your views on his naivete will change at all after reading the "Divinity School Address."