nature essay ralph waldo emerson

A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Emerson opens his 1836 edition of his essay “Nature” with an epigraph from the philosopher Plotinus, suggesting that nature is a reflection of humankind. The rest of his essay focuses on the relationship between people and nature.

In the Introduction, Emerson suggests that rather than relying on religion and tradition to understand the world, people should spend time in nature and intuit answers for themselves. But people shouldn’t just observe nature—they should also actively consider “to what end is nature” (that is, what nature means or does). To Emerson, all forms of science try to answer this question and find a “theory of nature.” And though it might sound unscientific, Emerson thinks that seeking “abstract truth” through firsthand experience in nature is the best way to craft such a theory.

Emerson then defines some of the terms that he’ll use throughout the rest of the essay: Nature/nature, the Soul, and art. First, he suggests that the universe is comprised of two parts: Nature and the Soul. He uses Nature (capital “N”) in the philosophical sense to refer to everything that is “NOT ME”—that is, everything that isn’t the Soul. Emerson then breaks down Nature into smaller parts: nature (lowercase “n”), art, other people, and our own physical bodies. The common use of the word nature (lowercase “n”) refers to the natural world—non-manmade things like trees and the wind. But when people combine their human will with elements of the natural world, they create art.

In Chapter 1, Emerson advocates for spending time alone in nature. By looking up at the stars, a person transcends this world and comes in contact with the sublime . Most people take the stars for granted, since they shine nightly. But if a person opens him- or herself up to nature’s influence and adopts an attitude of childlike curiosity, nature will captivate and awe them. Part of seeing nature clearly is realizing that it is one integrated whole. To illustrate this point, Emerson recalls looking out at the land and seeing between 20 and 30 farms. And while each farm is separate from the next, and a different man owns each one, all of the farms form one unified landscape. Most people struggle to view nature holistically like this, but poets, children, and people who love nature all can.

Emerson explains that when he’s in the woods, he turns into a “ transparent eyeball ” that allows him to see everything. In this state, Emerson connects with God and even becomes part of God. Likewise, when people connect with nature, they’re also connecting with themselves, because “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” If a person feels somber, for instance, nature will look and feel somber, too.

In Chapter 2, Emerson focuses on nature as a commodity, or the ways in which nature is useful and valuable to humankind. While nature’s status as a commodity is less important than all of its other qualities (which each successive chapter will cover), Emerson nevertheless underscores that all of nature’s various forms (e.g., fire, stones, vegetables, animals) work together to support human life.

In Chapter 3, Emerson turns to beauty—the idea that something can produce delight in the viewer in and of itself, and not for the usefulness it can provide. Living and working in society can sap people of their vitality, so being immersed in nature’s beauty invigorates the soul. Emerson points out that every season has its own unique kind of beauty—even the depths of winter are beautiful in their own way. Part of what makes nature so beautiful, though, is that it’s imbued with the divine. Beauty also stimulates the intellect and generates creativity. The creation of beauty is called art, and all art is either the product of nature or the expression of it.

Emerson explores how nature shapes language in Chapter 4. All words represent natural objects, which in turn represent spiritual truths. (For example, “a cunning man is a fox, […] a learned man is a torch.”) Emerson argues that people who have been corrupted by their various desires use corrupted language. But a person with good character, who’s grown up close to nature, has a skillful grasp of language and is more creative.

In Chapter 5, Emerson suggests that nature is a discipline: every aspect of it teaches us moral, spiritual, and intellectual truths. But Emerson points out that nature is also meant to serve humankind. In this chapter, he also underscores nature’s unity: even though nature takes many forms, they’re all interconnected.

Chapter 6 is about idealism. Here, Emerson contemplates how it’s impossible to prove that anything is real. But to Emerson, it doesn’t really matter whether there is an external reality or whether everything we perceive to be real is just an illusion. He suggests that most people consider themselves as permanent, while nature is in flux, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Through words and particularly through symbols, the poet is the one who is able help the reader see the world from new angles and perspectives. In contrast, both religion and ethics disregard, demonize, or undervalue nature.

In Chapter 7, Emerson suggests that nature is a manifestation of God’s Spirit, or the Supreme Being, and that nature is the means through which God connects with people. Emerson then questions what kind of matter nature is made out of, where this matter came from, and why. In this section, Emerson suggests that people are simultaneously separate from nature and part of it.

The essay’s final chapter centers around how to best study nature. Different branches of science (e.g., geology) use observations, measurements, and calculations to study nature, and they also isolate different elements of nature (like rocks and minerals) to study instead of considering those parts within the larger whole of nature. Emerson advocates for a more holistic, intuitive approach to studying nature. But he suggests that there is value in the kind of observation that scientists use (he calls this observation “Understanding”), because people need to understand, or observe, the world before they can use their intuition to interpret those observations (he calls intuition “Reason”).

Closing his essay, Emerson suggests that we once lived in a utopian society where humankind and nature lived in harmonious unity. But over time, we stopped paying attention to the spiritual truths that nature teaches, and we grew distant from nature. To remedy this, people must spend time in nature and use their intuition to understand it—this will unify humankind with nature again.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Nature is a short essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson published anonymously in 1836. It is in this essay that the foundation of transcendentalism is put forth, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Recent advances in zoology, botany, and geology confirmed Emerson's intuitions about the intricate relationships of Nature at large. The publication of Nature is usually taken to be the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Henry David Thoreau had read "Nature" as a senior at Harvard College and took it to heart. It eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau's later writings, including his seminal Walden. (Summary excerpted from Wikipedia by Neeru Iyer)

Genre(s): *Non-fiction, Nature, Philosophy

Language: English

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Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction

• Nature: Addresses⁄Lectures ›
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From Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we 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? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. 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. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. 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. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. 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. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature , in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson the Original Transcendentalist

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on the 25th of May, in 1803.

I try to note it every year as it arrives.

Emerson was a central founder of Unitarian Transcendentalism. For most of America, Transcendentalism was a literary movement. However, in fact it was a theological and spiritual revolution within American Unitarianism and only incidentally a literary phenomenon. I often think of how Zen’s rise touched art and literature in China, Japan, and Korea while actually being about something else. Connected. But ultimately like for Zen, Transcendentalism’s primary focus the understanding of human hearts and the urge for meaning and direction in this mysterious world.

As it is with movements of various sorts there are any number of moments that could be named the “beginning” of Transcendentalism. The 1836 publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature is probably the most common. It marks a wonderful shift in focus for Western spirituality. Moving the locus of wisdom from texts to nature itself. With that book Emerson articulated the beginnings of a nondual approach to spirituality that would end up shaping the liberal religious impulse of two American protestant denominations, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. It would also provide a tap root for what would eventually become the New Thought movement.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father William was a Unitarian minister. He was the second of five sons who would live into adulthood. William died before Ralph turned eight. His mother was joined by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson and other women in the family who provided the boys with a solid home. He attended Boston Latin and then, as was how it went in those days, at fourteen he entered Harvard.

In his senior year he decided to use his middle name Waldo. At eighteen he graduated and began a career as a school teacher. Plagued by poor health he lived for a time in South Carolina and then in Florida. In Florida Waldo had his first experience of slavery. He also made an intellectual friend in a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince Achille Murat. The two had deep conversations about life and poetry and philosophy. In later years he would credit the prince for launching his intellectual life.

In 1824 Waldo returned to Harvard for the course in divinity. Completing the program he accepted the invitation to serve as junior pastor of the Second Church in Boston. He was also chaplain to the Massachusetts legislature. He married, but his wife, Ellen died within two years.

Perhaps triggered by his wife’s death Emerson began to question his usefulness as a parish minister. A disagreement over presiding at communion led him to submit his resignation in 1832. Whatever the depth of his disagreements about the eucharist and its public celebration, it has been noted it was as good a reason to leave the parish as any.

Emerson then toured Europe, where he met many of the leading intellectual lights of the day. He returned to the United States in 1833, living for a time in Newton with his mother before settling in Concord. From there he launched a career as an author and public lecturer. He proved wildly successful.

In 1835 he married for a second time, to Lydia Jackson. Jackson was a formidable figure in her own right, An abolitionist, feminist, activist for Native American rights, and the welfare of animals. They would have four children together.

In 1836,  at the same time as he published Nature , in response to a letter from Frederick Henry Hedge to Emerson calling for the creation of a “symposium” that could allow for a “free discussion of theological and moral subjects,” he joined Hedge and George Putnam at Sophia and George Ripley’s home. This would come to be called the Transcendental Club. They soon moved their meeting to the bookstore owned by Elizabeth Peabody.

Among the members besides those already listed were Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd, and Jones Very. Each of these remarkable figures deserves a full biography of their own. Several have them.

In addition to being heirs to the greatness of European thought and particularly the new thinking coming out of Germany, they were the first Americans to have access to translations of major religious writings from the East, including Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist texts. They made full use of this gathered wisdom in their deliberations.

For Transcendentalism as an organized religious expression we can look again to Emerson. On July 15th, 1838, he was invited back to his old school to give the graduation address. He did.It is remembered as the Divinity School Address. And it proclaimed what some called the “new infidelity.” Within it we see what would eventually evolve into the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here the nondual impulse framed within Western culture would offer up a new, eclectic, and syncretistic alternative to Protestant Christianity.

With the conventions of Unitarianism, he reasserted the humanity of the good and great teacher Jesus. The first wave of Unitarianism in the previous generation remained deeply rooted in biblical Christianity. Indeed the rejection of trinity was mainly because there was, beyond a Medieval interpolation, no explicit statement of a trinitarian doctrine in the scriptures. The first wave of American Unitarianism was deeply biblical. And they continued to assert the miracles reported within the text as an internal proof of their validity.

Emerson made sure to underscore his Unitarianism was not a form of Arianism, where Jesus is lifted to a “demigod” status. His term. Emerson’s Divinity School Address dismissed the idea that the reports of miracles in the scriptures were proof of the truth of the teachings to be found within them, and with that explicitly rejecting the necessity of scripture as divine revelation.

Instead he declared that the intuition of the individual was sufficient to find one’s way.

This created a firestorm within Unitarianism. A fire that has not yet burned itself out.

Emerson gradually moved from a broadly but not particularly engaged anti-slavery feeling to active abolitionist. An early supporter of Abraham Lincoln, he had a mixed feelings about the president, eventually settling that Lincoln was perhaps the only person who could have guided the country through those horrendous times.

He was for a time one of the leading public intellectuals in North America.

In 1862 Henry Thoreau died. He was 44. Emerson delivered his eulogy. Two years later he served as a pallbearrer for Nathaniel Hawthorne. By 1867 his own health began to fail. By the dawn of 1872 he began to show evidence of dementia. Although he still traveled, notably a trip to England with his daughter Ellen. He withdrew from all public activity in 1879.

Emerson died on the 27th of April, 1882, in Concord. His body would be interred at Author’s Ridge in the Concord graveyard.

While there would be a variety of views held among the Transcendentalists, personally I’m much more influenced by Henry Thoreau’s “thing in itself” than Emerson’s platonism, one thing was certain. In this crowd of New England Unitarians, something incredibly important was happening. And Ralph Waldo Emerson was very much at the center of it.

Something emerged that would profoundly influence, for good and for ill, and I will happily assert vastly more to the good, as a rising spirituality in America.

So, blessings upon you, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

You did good…

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