Analysis of 'Nature' and 'The American Scholar' by Emerson

Transcendentalists: Emerson and Thoreau

Authors like Emerson and Thoreau characterized themselves as “Transcendentalists”: to create a mediation between man & nature, they became the embodiment of the National Spirit & believed in the “power of the word.” One of the slogans during the Independence time was “people”: it has an important aspect in the three points of the Declaration of Independence (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”), inspiring people and authors to develop philosophy and thinking from the religion of nature (the Transcendentalism in a larger sense). There was an abstract and a deep idea. The eye is the key for an artist!

Testo “Nature” (pag. 110)

For Emerson, “Nature” is part of the Creator that can exist of its own work as a superior and transcendental dimension. Observing Nature “involves observing the light” (influence of the Puritan traditions)! Emerson even involves the emotive sphere, accompanied by reason: Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the “NOT ME”, is used by Emerson, who, apparently himself, ever had the capability to perceive. The process, the object is not the end, but the initial of a process: the phenomenon is the world, for him, is equal to “other”; the observation is both religious and intellectual. All “nature’s” chapters are based on 3 keys (Nature is a symbol of spirit, and words are the signs of natural facts).

Testo - “The American Scholar” (pag. 133)

(Connection of the Scholar with each person) The scholar is the one who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. According to Emerson, the American scholar is an intellectual at the maximum of his potentiality, and he can link the Knowledge. The world is nothing; the man is all. Studying Nature can help to know ourselves. Books are important for man, especially for the intellectual, and the capability to read is really assigned to man who is who to create. But when the book is not a book, it becomes books (Emerson ever role to a superior level, who is the “truth level”) literal to the direct experience: Emerson includes that “life is our dictionary”. People must learn more from life than from books. One of the three of the Scholar is the reading accompanied by learning to have confidence in our Power and to ever invite to a new prayer. (In that period, America was in decline, and the writers wanted to lift up and set them again!)