Expanding Bendix's Use of Emerson's Nature by Stephen Pallas

Ralph Waldo Emerson's prose exemplifies, as Regina Bendix suggests, the tradition of folklore a significant focus of cultural intrigue in an America struggling with conflated and conflicted elements of early African-Americans and Native Americans, biblical (and also Hindu) epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics and the promotion of culture inherent within same, and the effects of European Romanticism, all amid an expanse of wilderness, the likes of which had never been experienced by Europeans in the past.  For her purposes Bendix does a tremendous job summarizing Emerson's commentary on the American project with regard to the greater field of folklore as an experience of the individual self rather than a nationalist or state-ist authenticity.  Emerson borrows, therefore, from a more existential tradition.  I would like, here, to dig a bit deeper into the language of Nature and illuminate some of Bendix's contentions.

In borrowing from Romanticist traditions from Europe, Emerson and his Transcendentalist compatriots emphasized spirituality and intuition above the scientific method.  Emerson begins Nature by illustrating his general theory of individual authenticity when he writes, "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE."  The self is immediately removed from all parts of the world besides its own spirituality, wherein the self obtains the ability to fulfill its own identity as an eternal work in progress toward the sublime.  Emerson further describes the nature and function of beauty as "First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight...[that the] presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection...[and] still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect."  This process emphasizes Emerson's philosophical connection with beauty, as representative of the sublime, which is meant to serve as a conduit to transcendence.  But the path is inherent within the human condition, as "The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty."  As so much of Bendix's project illustrates the various methods and systems by which scholars have utilized language to parallel their philosophical theories, so too did Emerson enlist a chapter of Nature to incorporate the ways language intersperse the mode of transcendentalism. 

Emerson seems to enjoy patterns of three (perhaps to symbolize the presence of the Holy Trinity within his body of work).  As with beauty, language transforms the spirit in a three step theoretical process--"Words are signs of natural facts...Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts...Nature is the symbol of spirit."  Or, as Lowell declares, "words must cut deep-down to something real and living...to a human and not a class experience."  The overlaying American tradition of authentic representation is, again, an existential and not a class, race, or nationalistic standard.  And perhaps Emerson's words, "That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge,—a new weapon in the magazine of power," act as an undiscovered precursor to that which Foucault means by "the end of man" as a "return to the beginning of philosophy" in The Order of Things.  Man, by transcendentalist standards, has no essential grace or purpose but to reach toward the sublime.  Perhaps with his reluctance to forgo belief in God, Emerson never reached that particular plateau, but it's certainly worth a look or two.