Emerson and the Mind-Body Split: Nature (1836) 2
Reading/reaction journal, spring/summer 2026: Nature (Introduction), closing paragraphs
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.
ALWAYS distrust a claim that begins with “Undoubtedly.”
We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.
Last spring—reading Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens. Per Damasio, consciousness is the feeling of being changed when you interact with the world. In that sense, Emerson’s curiosity about the order of things is consciousness at work.
E’s starting point is a knowable, meaningful universe with a rational, meaning-making creator.
Still, I appreciate the microcosm idea in E’s thinking, and I don’t know that he’s wrong about it—but I don’t have scientific chops, or an “undoubted” theory of the universe. (Among the many differences between E and me, the biggest is doubt.) And the physical world is as good a starting point as any to try to make sense of the universe. (Camus would have disagreed, because at the limits of that knowledge we still take things on spec. Hence lived experience and lucidity.)
He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
Does this sentence actually mean anything? I mean, I get what he’s saying, I just don’t think the sentence corresponds so sweepingly to reality. Yes, we can learn a lot of truth from studying the conditions of our lives, or from life in action. But our actions can be at odds with what we think is true without our recognizing it. We also learn things wrongly. Often the biggest truths we apprehend are the ones where we shed years of lived experience, e.g., in trauma recovery.
Or maybe I do get it, if I think of Damasio again: our consciousness is how we know what affects our ability to stay alive. Our personalities and thought processes reflect the habitual ways we’ve learned to do that. Apprehending a big, new, life-changing truth means we are also becoming conscious of inhabiting a different physical reality than we used to. (?)
In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us.
Ah. E is writing before the whole “Nature, red in tooth and claw” thing. The Romantic/picturesque view of nature is so lovely and optimistic, even if it does ignore all the reality that disagrees with it. (Hello, wildfire season.) (Q: I wonder how much reality I ignore because of an unquestioned worldview? I’ll probably never know.)
Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.
Wait. Everything that isn’t your sense of self = Nature, but your sense of self—and yours only, in all the world—is not Nature??? Someone else’s selfhood = Nature, but not yours? Can someone else consider your selfhood to be Nature? Your body = Nature, because it’s separate from you???
The whole mind-body split thing—I do not get it. I mean, I do, because Western philosophy, etc. In many ways I still think of “me” as somehow different than “my body.” But still, that tidy divide seems so alien after decades of illness. It seems to belong to people who can take their bodies for granted. And to people who have NEVER PAID ATTENTION to how their thinking changes when they’re hungry, tired, ill, dehydrated, or on .05 mg of a medication that doesn’t agree with them, or who have somehow been able to separate that hungry, tired, etc. self from their “real” self as if their hungry, etc., self was just imaginary or a visitor or something.
I currently don’t believe there is a real self. A habitual self, sure. Even a die-hard habitual self. But habits are still contingent on circumstances.
Also, E seems to acknowledge only one possible subject position.
But [humanity’s] operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing...”
Wow. That pretty much dismisses daily life (most of it feminine) as a subject of importance.
Ralph Waldo, I suspect you and I are going to have a reckoning.