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Emerson's Theory and Use of Language Ralph Waldo Emerson was a profound writer and speaker of the 19 th century. As a poet and an essayist he was able to invoke new ideas and thoughts that soon made him the central figure in the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson created a revolution that influenced other great writers such as Thoreau, and Whitman, thus making Ralph Waldo Emerson one of the most important writers in American literature. Emerson was a visionary, and because of this, he resisted social conformity. Breaking beyond these boundaries gave him the ability to make his own assumptions on how the world worked. This newfound awareness led to his first major achievement.
The essay Nature was an extensive subject for Emerson, thus creating the basis for his whole transcendental spirituality. Through the poetic and evocative ideas within Emerson's language, he speaks of the 7 facets of the relationship between humans and nature: Commodity, beauty, language, discipline, idealism, spirit and prospects. His belief is that the spirit is there to encompass nature, and by understanding self-transcendence nature can reveal spirituality to us. As part of nature, Emerson believes we are born into this original relationship between one another. However, because of the ongoing strive for power in everyday life we are disconnected and individualized from it. Because most of us look at nature only with our own desires in mind, we do not really see nature.
At least not how Emerson would like us to see it. He wants us to look at nature as if we were little children. Adults are generally corrupt; children are innocent and able to have a direct relation with God's design. "The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. " Emerson poses a way to find a personal connection to the beauty and spirituality throughout nature. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Emerson states, emphasizing the word also.
He continues with, 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? Emerson wants to recover the immediate relationship that our ancestors once had with the world. He believes we need to find the answers to the questions of how we should live. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of use, namely that a thing is good only so far as it serves.
By interacting with Nature people learn not only what is practical but also what is good. "The moral law lies at the center of nature and radiates to the circumference... The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!" For Emerson, the soul and nature are perfectly complementary. In a famous, and difficult opening statement he summarizes his position.
Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in a simple, double, and Threefold degree. Words are signs of natural facts. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is the symbol of spirit. The first point is a theory of language, which makes the distinction that words are not things, but signs standing for things. Emerson believes words are signifier's; things are what are being signified.
The important distinction is between the two words, signifier and signified. It sounds basic until he further explains that even those words, which express a moral or intellectual fact, will be found. If traced back far enough he believes there will be some material or physical appearance in representation. He implies that when we use metaphors directly related in nature, they are more powerful because our language is grounded in relation to something. Loosing grounded imagery can makes us speak for an effect instead of a meaning. So, as the generations go on words manipulate and change.
Now he gets extreme. First, he claims that people are able to intellectually understand the moral-spiritual analogy. "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. " Second, he claims that people are able to practically utilize the moral-spiritual analogy, "the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost. " Emerson goes on to believe that everything in nature had its correlative in mind, that nature is the externalization of the soul. In chapter five Emerson moves onto the thought of discipline, believing Science is the sensual-intellectual discipline. He thinks this because science forces our minds to believe in the order of nature. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. " He then proceeds to talk about the sensual-intellectual discipline.
He feels that it is not absolute, like pure poetry. However, thoughts of reason even in primitive culture can prove that nature is ordered rationally. So, with the understanding of discipline within nature, one could hear God's words in nature, and could learn to respond to them. Emerson writes about the inner reality of nature and spirit. Religiously, nature "is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it. " Religion is able to give reason when there is something rather than nothing.
For example, the ultimate question; why we are here. "Spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us. " Accordingly, nature is produced in the human mind by the action of self or God. So, spiritual awareness would theoretically provide you with divinity. Out of all that Nature had to offer I feel that Emerson's insistence on the close links between nature and language has important relationship to present time. Our verbal language is based on nature, language will always become separate from nature. I agree with Emerson's thoughts on language. That the strong, natural, material roots of words will be forgotten, and lesser writers will go on imitating and repeating words they do not really understand. "Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation. "Who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously upon the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. " So the function of the intellect, or of the true poet, is to master the language.
The poet is he who can reconnect the word supercilious with the raised eyebrow, who can make us see again, but freshly, that the word "consider" means study the stars [con side]. "The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. " Thus Emerson's conception of language as based in nature leads him to outline the task of the poet as the renewal of language, the reattachment of language to nature, of words to things. In that sense nature is in itself a language, giving the writer or poet the job of explaining what nature has to say. Being an artist, this has helped me to realize certain truths about myself, which I believe Emerson intended at the least. Overall Nature is Emerson's testament to his belief that ideas, forms, and laws (what Emerson sums up as spirit) are more important than physical, phenomenal, material things (what Emerson calls nature). Both exist, of course, but spirit or mind exists prior to nature, and the natural world is, for Emerson, a product of spirit. "It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azotes [nitrogen]; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect, not to be mistaken as the final truth or reality.
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