B. P. Rinehart's Reviews > The American Scholar

I think I can make a rare generalization here; anyone who goes through kindergarten to 12th grade education (which is the last year of secondary school before university, for my non-U.S. friends) in the U.S. will have had to read this essay and Self-Reliance. I have read Emerson in school on multiple occasions and have recently re-visited him. The reason why I have waited so long to add him to Goodreads is because he is, for all intents, BORING!

I do not mean he is not revolutionary or a controversial figure who you can have a good conversation about. Emerson's ideas were and still are revolutionary in a lot of ways; the way he went about communicating his ideas was very problematic. It is horrifyingly dry prose that never fails to make me start daydreaming--and that is a shame because what he is talking about is very important and inspiring. His views launched the American Transcendentalist movement and without him we would not have people like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson. Given that, those three were infinitely better at communicating transcendentalism than Emerson in my opinion. With all that said, let's talk about the essay.

This essay was delivered at Harvard and it was meant as a rallying cry to young American...scholars and academic-types to forge their own views and scholarly pursuits independent of Europe. He puts it down to the difference between one who invents and sells something and one who merely works in a factory reproducing somebody else's work to be sold. The American scholar must be the inventor and that means throwing out the traditions of the "Old World" in favor of creating the "New."

Now the prime way of doing this is to look to yourself and the natural world around you (i.e. in this case the American frontier or just America). Transcendentalism was itself just the American manifestation of the European Romantic movement (never-mind the existence of Edgar Allan Poe) so there is your irony. He does not advocate abandoning the way you pursue knowledge like book-reading and etc. a la Rousseau, but suggest that you add the glory of nature to your learning style:

"The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life."

"It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."

This was very revolutionary stuff in ante-bellum America and you still find these ideas having an impact on undergraduates before student-loan debts pull them back to Earth. I just wish he could have kept his essays on a more charismatic, interesting tone because as much as I have read historians and philosophers who many consider extremely dull, something about how Emerson writes prose just does not move me like I know it should. Be that as it may, if you want to see the foundation of American exceptionalism in academia, this essay is ground-zero for me.