Emerson on Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on nature begins thus:

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres 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 not we 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.

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. Every man's 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 is nature?"

You can read the whole text here.

There is a paradox in quoting those famous words at this distance. If I take them to heart, if I ask you to take them to heart, then I am violating the counsel they offer. For why is Emerson not to be regarded by now as one of those sepulchred fathers he was telling us to ignore?

Still, the flow of thought is lovely, and the confidence is inspiring. "Undoubtedly, we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable." Who is it who does not at times doubt that undoubtable point?

The passage reminds me that Emerson was a frequent guest in the James home when William and Henry were boys there. Indeed, Emerson was William James' godfather. If we are going to see that connection as philosophically significant, we might look to these words: The everyman "acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I recently encountered online a fascinating discussion of one aspect of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I will simply offer the link, to Jeff Carreira's essay.

Carreira quotes Emerson thus: "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him."

If you wish to read that in context, you can of course go here and use Amazon's marvellous "click to look inside" feature.

Right after the two sentences that interest Carreira, Emerson gets more visual and metaphorical. But I leave that to your investigation.

There is a certain sort of thinker who begs to be known by three names. Even if the folks who knew him just called him "Waldo Emerson," it would seem to us in the 21st century wrong to just call him by two names. Plain wrong....

The Scandalously Wimpy New York Times

All the news that might not give offense.

Here's a correction The New York Times ran yesterday:

A front-page headline on Wednesday with an article about Warren E. Buffett's plan to invest $5 billion in the Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs described that company as "ailing." While its stock has been battered and it has agreed to tighter government regulation and wants to raise more capital from investors, "embattled" would have been a more accurate headline description of Goldman's state than "ailing."

What kind of letter did a Goldman lawyer have to write to get that "correction"?

Anyone who thinks that "ailing" is an unfair term to apply to Goldman Sachs just isn't paying any friggin' attention!

It seems clear to me that TNYT wants to occupy the niche of utter gutlessness.

They should, as my older brother likes to say, "man up," at least to the minimal extent of calling an ailing bank ... an ailing bank! without apologizing for it. This is so classically "wimpy" one expects the editors to head out to a cheeseburger joint, offering to pay Tuesday for a cheeseburger today.

Pedantic note. "Embattled" is an odd word. Nowadays it is often used as the author of that wimpy correction seems to mean to use it, to mean "battered by battles."

But there was a time when it meant -- and it sometimes still means -- "prepared for battle".

Remember the poem Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the minutemen at Concord in April 1775?

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

He is describing the farmer/soldiers just as the battle was to start. So "embattled" doesn't mean battered. It means "ready to take what battering may come in the impending battle."

The shot heard round the world refers to the FIRST shot of that battle, logically. And they were already "embattled." So the term has the meaning of "in readiness."

As always, when I make these semantic points, I do so to serve a substantive point. The Times is complciit in hiding the fact that the bankers of Wall Street today aren't "embattled" in the right sense, the Emersonian sense. They aren't ready to do battle like proper entrepreneurs with a risky world.

A wimpy press of this sort is proper for a monarchy, not for the descendants of the farmer who fired that shot at Concord in defiance of a monarch.

That's a scandal.