Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Emerson suggests man’s soul is composed of three faculties: theintellect, the feeling perception of beauty, and the will—the first and last inpotent polarity.If man is threefold, what is nature? “Strictly speaking … all whichPhilosophy distinguishes as the Not Me, that is, both nature and art, allother men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature.” ButEmerson is no philosopher strictly distinguishing; he never fixedly defineseither Man or Nature. As “nothing is quite beautiful alone,” neither is anythingquite true alone, but only in relation to other partial truths. The closesthe comes to early definitions is that “the world is emblematic … the wholeof nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” By mind he means the wholehuman soul. Nature is macrocosm, man microcosm. The objects of naturecannot be understood without man, nor can man be understood withoutthe objects of nature. “The beauty in nature … is the herald of inward andeternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good,” for it is butthe embodiment of what once existed in the intellect as pure law. As the lastissue of spirit, nature’s “every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty ofsoul.”How did Emerson experience the human being’s relation to naturethrough his own will? His journal reveals himself at the early age of twentyoneto feel overwhelmed by some force, not me. “I am the servant morethan the master of my fate. I shape my fortunes, as it seems to me, not atall. For in all my life I obey a strong necessity.” Eight years later, in 1832, hehas begun a glowing though cautious commitment to the terrible freedomof his own inner life. Yet in 1835 he still struggles for words to describe theforce prohibiting him from shaping his life at his own will.We only row, we’re steered by fate. The involuntary action is all. Seehow we are mastered. … With desire of poetic reputation, we stillprose. We would be Teachers, but in spite of us we are kept out of thepulpit, and thrust into the pew. Who doth it? No man: only Lethe,only Time; only negatives; indisposition; delay; nothing.To the public, however, in Nature in 1836, at the age of thirty-three,he wrestles to portray a world of possibility, without limitation. Nature canbe the unfallen bride of man, uniting with him. There is no “not me” whichis not potentially me. Nature is the virginal ally of religion. “Prophet andpriest, David, Isaiah, Jesus have drawn deeply from this source. This ethicalcharacter so penetrates the bone and marrow, as to seem the end for which161