Emerson, "Nature"

Travis will guide us into the text, but since a few of you have reported difficulties with Emerson's style, I thought I'd offer a few reading tips.  It's also useful to bear in mind where we ended up in our discussion of Audubon:  indoors, with the death of a captured bird in a cage, killed solely for the sake of art.  Audubon killed his eagle in Boston in 1833;  Emerson offered his definition of "nature" in Boston in 1836.   Here is an image of the title page of the first edition of Nature; on Wednesday I will show you a first edition in the collections of the Lilly, with Emerson's own handwritten annotations.


1. Consider the structure of Emerson’s essay. The essay develops from the “Introduction” to “Nature” (a kind of definitional statement with the description of an exemplary experience at the end--the “transparent eyeball” passage) to “Commodity” (which talks about the uses of nature; the access we have on the level of the senses) to “Beauty” (which discusses the “higher” uses of nature, as something that satisfies the soul and the intellect and leads to the creation of art) to “Language” (where Emerson claims that all of nature is a “metaphor for the human mind”) to “Discipline” (where Emerson details the “lessons” nature teaches us, “the moral influence of nature”) to “Idealism” (dedicated to the question “whether nature outwardly exists”) to “Spirit” (which sort of provides an answer to the previous section--namely that “the Supreme Being does not build up Nature around us”) to, finally, “Prospects,” where Emerson refers to Bronson Alcott, twice, as his “Orphic Poet” and suggests--critically, of course--that “Man” presently applies to nature “but half his force.”

2. The hidden theme of Emerson’s “Nature” is “man.” Why?  What other possible conceptions of the relationship between “man” and “nature” can you imagine? Look, for example, at the following passage: “The instincts of the ant are very unimportant considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits become sublime.” (Charles Darwin believed that the brain of the ant was a much more amazing instrument than that of humans).

3. Can you relate Emerson’s theory of language to his own writing style? Are there different levels of discourse in the essay? Where does he bring himself and his own experience of nature in (if at all)?