The Scholar as a Transcendentalist in Emerson’s The American Scholar

Born in Massachusetts, in 1803, lecturer, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo

Emerson became one of the most outstanding figures of American literature of the 19 th
Century. Being the son of a Unitarian minister and sharing the Anglican background of
her mother’s family, Emerson grew to become an ordained minister and was deeply
involved in the religious practices during his youth. As a grown man, he started to
question the religious teachings and left church in order to attain a more certain
conviction of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted
his own revelation. After travelling widely and reading intensively, he came to grips
with his own philosophy of life that was largely reflected in Nature. This work helped
him get acquainted with group of contemporary thinkers and writers that shared his
ideas; a group that came to be known as the Transcendentalists. In his 1837 speech at
Cambridge—“The American Scholar”—Emerson pinpoints what are the influences that
the new generation of American scholars should respond to, to become “Man
Thinking”—the ideal transcendentalist scholar.

Transcendentalism was a 19th century movement of writers and philosophers in

New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of
thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of
man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the
deepest truths. Under this influence was that Ralph W. Emerson wrote “the American
Scholar.”

Throughout “The American Scholar”, Emerson makes a strong distinction

between being a mere thinker—who is characterized by encyclopaedic erudition—and
being a “Man Thinking.” This comparison is made primarily by analyzing the main
influences in the formative stages of the scholars. The first influence that he signals as
important is that of Nature. In Nature, the scholar should find and understand the
interconnectedness of all creation and realize that everything under the sky comes from
“one root” (Emerson; 2.). Once this takes place, the scholar can understand better
himself by observing Nature and vice versa.

The second influence is that of the past, mainly present in books. Emerson
advocates for critical reading of the works of the past, and a reading only to enlighten
oneself with the ideas of the past, but not to be memorized or even learnt—a clear attack
against encyclopaedism—as he claims that the truths one should strive for are those one
can come to grips by studying nature. In the Past, the scholar can find some kind of
blueprint of his own knowledge, but the actual building of the edifice of his sageness is
a task that the scholar should undertake with new erudition and wisdom.

The last influence is that of Action, which for Emerson is where experience
springs. He goes against the idea that a scholar should lead a secluded life in which
there is no space for action. He admits that action is only second to thinking, but a
primary component for the later to take place. “The mind now thinks; now acts; and
each fit reproduces the other” (7), by stating so, Emerson clearly highlights how
important is action for the building of knowledge; going further he also asserts that
action is the womb from whence experience is born, and the equation of experience plus
meditation equals knowledge is central to the formative process of the “Man Thinking.”

All in all, in his address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, Ralph W.
Emerson clearly put forward how the principles of Transcendentalism should be applied
to the formation of scholars, and how by putting those into action, the traditional
encyclopaedic formation of scholar could be radically modified. This modification sits
on three pillars—the influence of Nature, the Past, and Action— deeply inspired in
Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph W. “The American Scholar”. Digital Version