Ralph Waldo Emerson · Philosophy
Emerson’s 1837 call for American intellectual independence - the vision of the true scholar as ‘Man Thinking’ rather than a bookworm parroting the past, educated by nature, books, and action, and charged with the duty of self-trust.
In August 1837, Emerson stood before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard and delivered an address that Oliver Wendell Holmes would later call America’s ‘intellectual Declaration of Independence.’ The young nation, Emerson observed, had won its political freedom from Europe but remained mentally colonized - importing its ideas, its books, its taste, and its sense of what counted as learning from across the Atlantic, and forever apologizing for its own rawness. ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.’ The moment had come, he announced, for America to trust its own mind and produce its own thought. But to do that, Americans first had to understand what a scholar truly is and truly is for - and here Emerson offered a definition that overturned the entire genteel, bookish idea of the learned man. The scholar, rightly understood, is not a specialist among specialists but the representative of the whole thinking human being.
How is Man Thinking formed? Emerson names three great influences, and the order and balance among them is the heart of his argument. The first and most important is nature - the scholar must go to the natural world directly, read its laws, feel its beauty, and discover there the same spirit that lives in their own mind. The second is the past, chiefly as embodied in books - the recorded thought of those who came before. And the third, which the bookish tradition scandalously neglects, is action - real engagement with life, work, and the world, without which thought grows bloodless and abstract. ‘Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.’ The complete scholar is not the pale recluse of the library but a whole person, rooted in nature, informed by the past, and seasoned by action - thinking with the entire self, not merely the head.
Emerson drives the point home with a witty and liberating observation. We treat the great books as sacred and their authors as superhuman authorities before whom we must bow - but every one of those authors was once just a person, thinking. ‘Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.’ The classics we revere were, in their own day, acts of fresh, first-hand thinking by people no different in kind from us - people who trusted their own perception rather than merely deferring to their predecessors. To worship their results while refusing to imitate their method - independent thought - is to get exactly the wrong lesson from them. The right homage to a great thinker is not to repeat their conclusions but to do as they did: to think for yourself, freshly, from the source.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Emerson’s scholar in his true state is ‘Man Thinking’ (not a mere thinker or the ‘parrot of other men’s thinking’), educated by nature, books, and action; that ‘books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst’; and that the scholar’s first duty is self-trust. Explain these ideas in yo…
Leads to Michel de Montaigne.
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