Emerson Encounter: Nature (1836) 1
Nature (Introduction) (Opening paragraphs)
Our age is retrospective….Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?…. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? [W]hy should we grope among the dry bones of the past[?]
The sun shines today also.
(Well, isn’t that a lovely aphorism to respect the now!)
This is all very invigorating. I can see how, in early 19th-century New England, you would want to separate yourself from the tropes of Europe and its deep history, and claim the energy and relative newness of (partial) democracy without feeling inadequate and uncouth because you don’t have all the tropes, etc.
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Like my reaction to Scottish heritage fandom—I got a mild kick out of it until Black Lives Matter and Me Too hit my awareness. But it’s hard to create a more inclusive present or future by celebrating a noninclusive past (where guys get to wear all the cool clothes). You can’t create a new world by revolving around the old one.
At the same time, the past can, in fact, be learned from and generally, to some extent, is. “Baby, bathwater, begone!” is a fine flourish on RWE’s part, but empty.
Also, RWE is leaning heavily on Quakerism:
You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? (George Fox via Margaret Fell)
This I knew experimentally. (George Fox)
Quakerism: founded on the idea that (spiritual) life should be experienced first hand and not on anyone else’s authority. Given its influence in New England at the time, I would be deeply surprised if Emerson wasn’t familiar with these ideas and texts.
(Or Romanticism? Or ??? He’s leaning and borrowing, at any rate—these ideas aren’t original to him.)
If you’re advocating original relation to the universe and decrying the influence of the Old World past, acknowledging your ideas’ indebtedness to a 17th-century Englishman will certainly weaken your argument. Sleight of hand doesn’t exactly strengthen it, though.
I’m loving the prose. Fiery, zingy, rousing. But I begin to suspect that our Ralph Waldo is a rhetorician, willing to use all a rhetorician’s tricks to make his point.