2.6.08 | Emerson (day 1)

1
2.6.08 Emerson (day 1)

• Business
• Introduction
• To what end nature?
• Nature
• The transparent eyeball
• eye the best artist
• HW
• Finish Nature. We are focusing on the Language
  chapter tomorrow. You will hear Saussure, I am
  guessing.
• Papers due Friday by 5.

2
Why write this essay? Why is it necessary to
revisit this most basic question?

• Our age is retrospective. It builds the
  sepulchers 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 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?
  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.

3
What is the goal of this essay?

• 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.
  Everymans 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 nature?

4
To what end is nature?

• We have talked a good deal lately about
  projections on to reality. People reading their
  sin in a brook, the colorless all-color of
  atheism in a whale, the portents of transgression
  in one's manner, etc. Emerson is going to try
  to lay figure all this out. What is our
  relationship to NATURE? Is it a symbol for our
  lives? Is it mere carbon on which we project
  human desires? "To what end is nature?" 60

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Nature

• Before we get into to what end nature we have
  to know what we are talking about when we say
  Nature.
• So, what is "NATURE," by Emerson's definition?
• Pg 55 anything that is not me.
• Pg 55 essenses unchanged by man, space, air,
  river, leaf. Anything that isnt man made.
• Pg 55 Intangible thing?
• Pg 55 adults cant see it.
• What is ART?
• Pg 55 anything man messes with.

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What happens in nature?

• perfect exhilaration
• Glad to the brink of fear
• A man casts of his years
• Is always a child
• Is perpetual youth
• Decorum and sanctity reign
• Return to reason and faith
• There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,
  no disgrace, -- no calamity, (leaving me my
  eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on
  the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe
  air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all
  mean egotism vanishes.

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Transparent Eyeball

• When in the woods..."I become the transparent
  eyeball I am nothing I see all the currents of
  the Universal Being circulate through me I am
  part or particle of God." (56)This is one of
  Emerson's most famous lines. What does he
  mean?With a partner, unpack this metaphor of
  the 'transparent eyeball.'

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Transparent Eyeball?

• Sees the world, involved in the world. Watches
  the universe while involved in the universe. Not
  separate.
• Metaphor for the soul? Particle of god is soul in
  him.
• Fusion of individual and oversoul. Pantheistic.
• He has no definite substance, hes a part of
  everything.
• He is NATURE. transparent design of the
  atmosphere. In nature he is god.

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But

• To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.
  Most persons do not see the sun. At least they
  have a very superficial seeing. The sun
  illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines
  into the eye and the heart of the child. The
  lover of nature is he whose inward and outward
  sense are still truly adjusted to each other who
  has retained the spirit of infancy even into the
  era of manhood.

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Furthermore

• A nobler want of man is served by nature,
  namely, the love of Beauty. The ancient Greeks
  called the world Kosmos beauty. Such is the
  constitution of all things, or such the plastic
  power of the human eye, that the primary forms,
  as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal,
  give us a delight IN AND FOR THEMSELVES a
  pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and
  grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye
  itself. The eye is the best of artists.

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How do we reconcile?

• Options
• Emerson is stupid or inconsistent.
• If so, that makes reading him impossible.
• If so, again we have to ask if it is worth
  reading.
• Emerson knows what he is saying, it has a
  purpose, and/or it can cohere.
• This option gives us a chance of finding some
  worthwhile articulation. It is at least necessary
  to follow this premise to come to the other
  conclusions.
• So lets go with number 2 and see if we can make
  sense of this.
• How can we think both nature has meaning and we
  project meaning at the same time? How can we
  think the transparent eyeball that is the best of
  artists?

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A harmony of both?

• "Yet it is certain that the power to produce this
  delight, does not reside in nature, but in man,
  or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use
  these pleasures with great temperance. For,
  nature is not always tricked in holiday attire,
  but the same scene which yesterday breathed
  perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the
  nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today.
  Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To
  a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his
  own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a
  kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who
  has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is
  less grand as it shuts down over less worth in
  the population

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And

• The stars awaken a certain reverence, because
  through always present they are inaccessible but
  all natural object make a kindred impression,
  when the mind is open to their influence. Nature
  never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the
  wisest man extort her secret, and lose he
  curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
  Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The
  flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected
  the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had
  delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When
  we speak of nature in this manner, we have a
  distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We
  mean the integrity of impressions made by
  manifold natural objects. It is this which
  distinguishes the stick of timber of the
  wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet