some thoughts about "Nature"

Note: I haven’t thought these ideas through but in the meantime thought I would provide a sort of sketch-type response. I apologize in advance for the messiness and erratic italicization and bold-ing; I’m using this post as a place to work through some of my thoughts about the essay.

First, probably because the essay itself was so confusing, I find myself going back to the epigraph by Plotinus—similarly perplexing but at least more concise: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know” (1, my emphasis). I’m including the quote because this language of “doing” is important to my first bullet point below.

Anyway, here are some admittedly confusing notes (I feel like Emerson’s writing prompts similarly convoluted responses…)

      1)  I’m interested in the relationship and difference between Emerson’s “Nature” (in all of its various iterations…the “NOT ME,” as Wilson suggests) as that which “only” does (and I’d like to know what that doing is—I was thinking about Erasmus Darwin’s classes of motion in Zoonomia) versus the human’s (and/or citizen and/or American’s) capacity and will for both doing and knowing. I was sensing a very Protestant vibe, particularly with the language of progress and betterment (“must,” “need,” “force,” etc. are words that repeat throughout the text). Emerson’s “naturalist,” as I understood him, seemed to be an “improved” edition of the familiar Capitalist spirit. Relatedly, the essay’s segments are apparently divided according to the different capacities of what “Nature” can do for us—as if Nature, in both its physical and abstract dimensions, exists (and “does”) so that humans might have some experience of self-making, transcendence, divinity, understanding, etc.: “All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation” (9). Later, in the segment “Prospects” (again he persists with a Protestant-progress theme), Emerson writes: “At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted and he is a selfish savage” (31). In applying the remaining half of his “force”—to “ratchet things up,” so to speak—man might “behold the real higher law” (32). I’m not sure if the last couple of pages were a call to a combined sort of scientific-spiritual innovation through the superior understanding of nature and God—“when a faithful thinker [shall] kindle science with the fire of holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation”(32)—but maybe?

      2) Second, I’m curious about Emerson’s use of the language of “impressions” and “surfaces,” particularly in relation to the “transparent eye-ball,” the on-set of photography, and perhaps the new relationships between types of verbal and visual descriptive (and also scientific) representation and documentation. God, for instance, “refuses to be recorded” (26), and Emerson seems more capable of describing a unity of landscape than “minuteness in details” when there is no “archetype” he can hold the cluster of “things and thoughts” against for comparison/parallel (28-29). I also think there’s something interesting he’s doing here with the sublime (the Romantic sublime versus an overwhelming data-overload, anti-sublime of science & industry or something).  

This all might be total misinterpretation and/or cliche, but I felt compelled to post…