Transcendentalism and the American Scholar:

Transcendentalism and the American Scholar: Considering Emerson's Influence

When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa speech "The American Scholar" to Harvard in 1837, an earthquake ran throughout the American intellectual community. In it, he called on American thinkers to grow out of their adolescence and mature into their full stature as adults, to be included among the serious academic influences constituting the world's philosophical and literary elite. That admonition was important to hear for the nation which was still in its youth intellectually, and uncertain of the direction its intellectual life would take. However, the speech was also important because Emerson not only called scholars to reach their potential, he outlined in the speech a set of ideas to use in order to achieve this. The framework which Emerson suggested, found in this speech and in his essays, has come to be known in the history of ideas as Transcendentalism. Characterized by a spiritual (if not necessarily religious) respect for nature, a quality of mind that is both rational and practical in almost equal parts, and an appreciation of individualized experience coupled with reliance upon the self, Transcendentalism neatly captured the spirit of the times and fired the imaginations of American thinkers. While the power of the movement it inspired eventually waned slightly as America grew into its adulthood, with the very intellectual activity that Emerson urged eventually moving on to the development of new ideas, Emerson's Transcendentalism was primarily responsible for awakening American philosophical and literary thought, and it achieved this merely by reminding the American scholar of what the American people already had become and asking the scholar to develop his own potential in a way that was worthy of the young nation.

In this brief paper, Transcendentalism, as developed philosophically in the work of Emerson and as exemplified in practice by one of his most important disciple, Henry David Thoreau, will be discussed in order to show how it highlights major ideas that have been important in the history of the American literary and historical experience, and particularly how those ideas impacted upon the development of American thought in its early stages.

Emerson writes in the American scholar that the first and most important influence on the mind of a man is nature. In coming to understand nature we come to understand ourselves, he says, and our place in the world. In the essay "Nature" he goes a step farther, arguing that "Only so far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the heights of magnificence" (Essays, 384). Stating this, Emerson was no doubt reminding the scholarly community that America was a nation built upon a relationship to the wilderness. From its very earliest stages, America had been built by people who lived close to the land. The early settlers had conquered the wilderness to squeeze out a survival existence and the nation grew into a youthful industrial power by exploiting abundant natural resources. Even more importantly, the type of lifestyle required to dwell in the wild had eveolved an American culture which was both reverent of and challenging to the natural landscape. Emerson was calling writers and thinkers to come to a greater understanding and appreciation of their relationship to the natural world and the spirit of universality that ran through it. He injected an element of spirituality into the appreciation of nature and turned that into an intellectual discipline. It is no great coincidence, therefore, that Emerson's young disciple, Henry David Thoreau made a return to nature in writing his book On Walden's Pond, and gave the nation one of its first true literary masterpieces. Thoreau writes, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (Chapter II). These lines link, in exactly the way Emerson prescribed, the desire to experience life and understand nature and know oneself with the act of intellectual creation.

The second major influence on scholars, Emerson claims, is the past. The history of ideas, the development of science, the influence of philosophy -- these are the forces that shape one's thinking about thought. However, Emerson claims there is a difference between thinking, and reading with a mind to accept someone else's thought at full value. In the essay "Self-Reliance" he clarifies this thought when he writes that "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" (Essays, 31) . This idea is closely linked to the earlier discussion of nature, in that the past serves to inform, but nature itself serves to inspire. Why should Americans take their thought second-hand from the European continent or elsewhere, when they have as ready access to the stuff of nature as any other people, Emerson asked. This is not to say that scholars should reject study of the past; as Thoreau writes in Walden, "We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old." (Chapter III). It is just to point out that history shapes the scholar but it should not bind him or her.