6 - Nature

Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Penguin, 1981
668 pages (43)
Date Completed: September 9, 2009

I'm kind of notorious for a loathing of Emerson. However, the more I read by him, the more I come to a sense of tolerance toward him. Nature is one of the essays that converted me.

There are many ideas he presents throughout the essay that I really liked:

1. Nature should be prized: you should go out into the world and experience the world. It's impossible to experience the world through books alone.

2. Don't closet yourself in a library reading about people in the past and studying their work. Go forth into the world and create your own ideas. Allow some ideas to inspire you, but question everything. Don't just read for the sake of adopting someone else's ideas.

3. The individual is godlike.

4. There is potential in the future. We rely on the thoughts and ideas of the past (see #2), but we should instead be making our own thoughts and ideas. We've become too bound to our past.

5. Nature is everything outside yourself. Remain open-minded about those things that aren't you.

6. Being obsessed with material commodities corrupts you and keeps you away from the spiritual.

7. There is a great sense of individuality in the essay. You can't just get together in a group and say "ok, let's go transcend!" Transcendentalism is an individual quest.

8. It relates a lot to Plato's allegory of the cave.

9. You have to survive and live in the world, but transcend and break away sometimes. Living in the world doesn't mean you're of that world.


Some aspects of Nature seem pretty idealistic, and there's always the annoying fact that Emerson's works are basically compilations of quotes, but I can buy some of what he says.