Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar

Welcome back to New Think Green. My name is David Barr with me. Good. Frank Greg McBrayer.

How are you doing Greg? Yeah, I got first that time. That's the first. I'll take a minute.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You come with flat footed. I'm great, man. Swools out for summer.

School is out for summer. School is out forever. I've just been hanging out by the pool all day, buying a new luxury sedan. Oh, yeah.

The extra secondary sources on the what we're recording on tonight, just been chilling. And then back to my two coasts who actually have busy work jobs and stuff. They got to do and why can't they get on. What's your shirt say says leave what?

There's a bunch of friends in the mouth. It says leave, leave nobody behind or what does this right? Yeah, it's for the F3. Okay.

So this is part of like the whole store of our faux military sort of thing. That's right. You ever have bodies that are like at risk of being left behind that you need to pick up because it's the vehicle. Alex wouldn't understand the idea of actually having to take care of other people.

I understand taking care of other people. I don't understand this class I mean, I don't know. Maybe you guys are planning to storm the Capitol and so you're gonna have to. Right.

We're talking today about Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, the American scholar. Where? Yeah, I can't find my copy of Waldo. This is a joke that you're just like a Greg joke.

That was terrible. Alex. I do. I feel like when you say Waldo, I was like, I got to get in front of Greg.

He's gonna make a wears a wall. I got to get out in front of it. You're gonna make me Ralph. You're jokes are so terrible.

Here we go. All right. All right. So what are we doing?

Sorry. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yeah. So we can talk a little bit about it.

Well, let's just give the title of the essay. So people want to read it before the show. It's only about 20 or 30 pages. It's titled the American scholar.

It was an oration he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge on the 31st of August 1837. So Emerson is usually given maybe with Whitman as the man of led the American man of letters, like one of our earliest literary statesman. He was born in 1803. He died in 1882.

So this is early writing. He was part of the transcendental movement. Transcendentalism like existentialism like BDSM or confusing things. I always have to ask Alex when it's anything that kind of complicated.

So you just sit by the pond and with the row. I don't understand anything. But when I talk about any of that, because it's just not in our real house. But Greg has a few words.

Can I say? Nietzsche was a huge fan of Emerson's and he called him the most gifted of the Americans. And I can't recall where he talks about Emerson all over the place. He's just scattered throughout his writings.

He said something like if Emerson had had European education, but if he had been more grounded in the classics, what his mind was capable of producing was unlimited. And instead what we get from Emerson are a series of essays on nature, his transcendental writing. He has an interesting group of a collection of essays. I think it's titled representative men.

When you guys get to back me up on that. And those are short biographies of different intellectuals he talks about Plato among others. And I'm a representative of the other things. And that's my story.

I'm sticking to it. You mentioned that he was an essayist. So I just have a couple of, I picked up this volume that I had lying around gaining dust. Emerson's essays with an introduction by Erwin Edmond.

And he just has an interesting thing to say about Emerson that I thought might be worth relating. Like you said, he sort of identifies as an identified as the deeper voice of America. And then he says, this is, I think there's an, maybe someone else yet is in, he says, for disclosures of the nature and signature of things. I prefer on the whole more explicit, more literal and more analytic thinkers.

I read and reread Emerson because he is that almost extinct species. The man, the reflective man of letters, the meditative essayist, the thoughtful writer of a prose which has without any of the more patent devices of verse, the magical effects of poetry. I'm going to go on about the essay for just a moment, but I'll just confess a compliment here for my colleague David. That's how I feel about your writings.

Those four pieces. Like you just have a really good way with, I'm not joking with the essay. Like I think you're maybe a little shorter than essay, but Emerson has a certain way. And so then, that continues what is an essay.

He asks, the essay is an adventure and ideas, an exploration of a theme, a story of reflection. It's not an article. It's not an explication. The essay is an idea reflected through a personal medium.

And I'm just going to pause on my read a little more. But for me like that, when I read this essay that you gave us, I guess, pardon me, it was originally a lecture. That sort of rings like there's not an argument here. It's really a story and exploration of a theme.

It's peppered with the first person singular. Like it's somehow you can sort of see that the power of this is in the delivery and sort of imagine that Emerson must have had an impressive character. That was part of his persuasion. I'll just reel it on and let you pick up on this.

The essay is the form of literature in which the part counts, perhaps more than the whole, and in which that part it counts most is the sentence. Again, I thought Emerson had some really nice sentences. It's the mode of writing in which when the whole does count, it counts most as a tone and atmosphere. Mood and attitude are more important than explicit structure than pedestrian reasoned argument.

The essayist himself is remembered, no less than his subject, even when he's not talking about himself. When Emerson, for instance, calls the particular piece of writing politics, or Plato, or friendship, or compensation, these are all titles of essays by Emerson. There's an Emersonian melody, a spiritual signature, a quality of personality that remains after the subject of the essay's forgotten, and even after the theme remains only vaguely in one's head. I don't know if you want to continue that at all on that theme of just what kind of thing we're doing here.

Yeah, I think that. Thank you very much for reading the year about that by the way. If you haven't read your stuff on Forbes, you can find it just Google David Bar Forbes. You've got excellent pieces on Shakespeare, Zenith and who else have you written on there?

The Homeboy to Conrad. Conrad, right? Which one of you read not that one, but I've written about these other things. Okay.

But thank you. And thank you for bringing up that description of Emerson's approach. I think that people that are importing what we understand is the modern essay, which of course is perverted in all of our English classes in high school, right? It's like the five paragraph essay.

This is an essay from a Python era. And so you have, like you said, first person singular, you have little vignettes that take you all over the place. He does the number of some of the sections in what we're reading today. But the structure and you can, and it's divided into clearly their clear shifts in what he's talking about thematic shifts, but within the themes.

He goes, not all over the place, but they're little like forays. And so people might confuse Emerson from an unserious thinker or something like this. I've not read enough Emerson to pass any judgment, but I did enjoy this essay. I can understand why Nietzsche would find him to be interesting.

Go on out. Yeah. I mean, he's similar to Nietzsche. He has good at turning the phrase, right?

That's great point out the sentences are quite good. I like that remark, Greg, that you read about the whole not being as important as the parts. Like if you outline it, it's very well structured. Yeah.

So he has like an introductory section and then he talks about the scholar in relation to nature, the scholar in relation to books, the scholar in relation to action, the duties of the scholar, and then he makes some remarks on the contemporary situation before concluding it. And you just lay that out. None of that sounds distinctive, right? These sound like perfectly reasonable subjects that you bring up.

But then every paragraph had some sentence or some turn of phrase or some snippet of an argument that seemed well thought out. And you do get the sense of a man who's occupying familiar terrain, but seeing things and articulating them in a way that you might not have otherwise, right? And that's, that's immensely useful. I didn't find myself really disagreeing with it even that much because so much of what he said just seemed to be powerfully stated insights into our observations, into reality.

I'm like, oh, that's a nice way to put myself wanting to quote it a lot, though. Not necessarily knowing what it all really added up to. Yeah. I'm so glad you had that difficulty because I was like, well, I'm gonna have to leave this up to Greg and I was like, but the thing I select was too difficult for me.

Well, the first person business part also makes it something you can't really argue against, right? Like, I had the following. I really enjoyed my cup of coffee yesterday. No, you didn't.

Well, it doesn't make any sense. And it's sort of like, I'm gonna stress this again. I think that the power of this is in the rhetoric and I think that part of the success is in the ethos. Like it's the character of the man speaking that seems to carry.

So, like, I even read this. I kind of got the sense that Emerson seems like a heavy person. If that makes sense. Like, now let's read a flight.

I'll read a sentence from the first from the first paragraph. Right. We do not meet for games of strength or skill for the recitation of history, tragedies and odes like the ancient Greeks. For parliaments of love and posy like the troubadours nor for the advancement of science like contemporaries in the British and European capitals.

And then later he says, our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the seer remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must be sung, that we will sing themselves. Who can doubt?

The poetry will revive and lead in a new age as the star on the constellation harp, which now flames in our zenith. Astronomers announced that one day he'd be the Polestar for a thousand years. He said, and a little earlier on he goes, the slugger intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. It's like he read when was a to fill writing the mocha scene in America.

He's a 35 and 40s one's polish. I think. So there's something I want to talk about to fill a little bit. If you read part two of to me is an interesting part where he really analyzes the cast of the American mind.

Some of this, I don't know if Emerson had read to fill, but clearly he understands the same thing like our inheritance he wants to get out from under Europe, but he understands the limits of the American mind. And he's trying to help us break through it to a promise to land. I think it's a good opportunity to talk about to fill, but it reminds me of that moment what you guys are touching on that moment in the Republic in book six. When Socrates is trying to explain to me, and it's why the philosophers that Socrates is talking about look nothing like the philosophers he meets who are vicious and useless.

And Socrates talks about those who come to philosophy from the arts, like the technical arts, like from from mechanical arts as he puts it, as he puts it. And he talks about how they'll just have weird ordinary bastard kind of offspring. I think he sees that there's a risk there. And I wonder whether that has something to do with his heaviness or grave tone or the amount of consequence he puts on it or is this subject I want to get to maybe after Greg goes into toteville.

He's consistent emphasis on genius of a character of genius, which seems so anathema to the spirit of his audience. Well, I'm happy to go talk about it. It's going to be a kind of long road to get there by way of transcendentalism that Barden want to talk about. So if you let me just give me just a little bit of rope.

Do you read it? So again, this is the introduction by Edmund to this essays that I have. Overall, he says of Emerson, one might say is the over soul, which does come up here, I think Emerson is an arch-plate-nessed says Edmund. And then you also get this notion a little later that his essays breathe a sort of Native American air.

So there's this weird way in which Emerson seems to be drawing from, I mean, I mean, a plainism transcendentalism, right? Some kind of, I mean, for lack of a better word, some kind of mysticism. We know he wrote this book called, or this essay, maybe a book, I don't know, on nature. And there's this notion that comes up in this essay a lot that if you really understand things, you got to get outside.

You got to get in touch with air. You've got to breathe. You have to have your feet on the ground, these kinds of things. Kind of like Alex taking his hikes, right?

And there's this idea that seems implicit in here. And I think maybe there's a couple places where I even bubble to the surface that God's everywhere. And then we all have a little bit of God in us. And then we're all there for good.

And that society is bad. And moving us to the city and all these things is all that bad. But that's not being out of nature is good. And you get people, this is fairly common America, right?

Like I get in touch with my spirituality outside. You know, nature somehow puts me in touch with God. And it seems to me that it's flirting, if not outrightly accepting something like pantheism to me. And this idea that we're all that.

And so it's interesting to me because there's this chapter in Democracy in America where Tobille discusses pantheism. And it's funny because I just sort of, I don't want my first step to be like I'm understanding or something better than understands himself. But it does strike me that I wonder if there's something about democratic man that inclines into the kind of things that Emerson seems to be drawn to. So here I'll just read a few passages from this chapter.

This is a volume two, part one, chapter seven of Democracy in America. And the chapter is titled, What Makes the Mind of Democratic People's Lean Toward Pantheism. And this is what I sort of detected here. I'd be interested to hear if you guys agree.

Tobille says, as conditions become more equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others weaker and smaller. One gets used to no longer viewing citizens, so as to consider only the people, one for individuals, so as to think of only the species, scraping down just a little bit. The idea of unity obsesses the mind. It seeks it on all sides, and when it believes and has found it, it willingly wraps it in its bosom and rests with it.

Not only does it come to discover only one creation and only one creator in the world. The first division of things still bothers it. And it willingly seeks to enlarge and simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe with its own power. If I encounter a philosophic system according to which the things material and immaterial visible and invisible that the world includes are considered as no more than diverse parts of an immense being, which alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual change and incessant transformation of all that composes it.

I shall have no trouble concluding but such a system, although it destroys even individuality, or rather because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men who live in democracy among the different systems with the whose aid philosophy seeks to explain the universe. Pantheism appears to be one of the most appropriate to seduce the mind, the human mind, in democratic centuries. All who remain enamored of the genius, of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it. I'll read that last clause again.

All who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it. So, Tovial sees this pantheistic tendency as a problem for the democratic mind. So I guess my first question is, did you guys see anything that that anything Emerson that tended the way that I'm saying or no? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, he does talk. I mean, I see yes, and no, I think. I mean, this will be a good, maybe we can talk about genius as a kind of counterpoint. He's really interested in genius and individuality.

Yeah. He's another one of his famous essays, something on running. It seems no different than a lot of the way that our founders are Ben Franklin sidestep this question of the Christian God, right? He's using similar language to a, I detect a little more impish, so terrorism in Franklin.

Okay. But that's the time. So, to your point Greg, the, there's all this stuff about how every man has this capability to think that that rests on a kind of equality, though not to say equality of outcome because obviously people are tethered to their stations, right? Like, becomes his plan.

Right. What's that? That's bad. Right.

Society did that to us. Yeah. It's, well, I mean, it seems like it's a necessity almost. Like society is sort of constrained to do that.

But, but on the other hand, he has this notion of genius, but his notion of genius, maybe like any concept of genius, at least coming out of the sort of German tradition, but his notion of genius is very, right? Like you, you're your, and he talks about how derivative the ordinary person is and how they just want to follow. And it has a kind of aristocratic quality, and maybe it is aristocratic, but you don't get the sense of like a fundamental divide. It's almost like this, this genius is articulating the common world, right?

Like you wouldn't have to go back to your point about esotericism. You wouldn't imagine genius to be esoteric. It's somehow the genius violence fulfillment through the common man and the common man through the genius and their world is one and the same. He just says it better.

And that's, that's right. If not egalitarian, at least centers everything around the common man. Well, that's very good. Shall we delve into a little more?

Is that everybody feel pretty good? Yeah, I mean, we can let's start at the beginning with how he comprehends man as a whole. He talks about there being one man, which is kind of the architectonic being that he later subdivisions, and one of the subdivisions is thinking or man thinking is what he calls them. And then, and then so what he does is he uses the subdivisions to finally get to the American scholar.

And so I didn't, I didn't know if you had any thoughts on why he begins like this. But I think he uses the man thinking to explore not simply how man thinks, because he doesn't get into that, but how the American, the American mind. So he says, man thinking is really the American man thinking and how we absorb, not how we absorb knowledge, but what passes for knowledge, I guess, in the American man thinking, right? We derive it from nature.

We derive it from old books in history and it gets very, very specific. And he gets kind of snide at times. He's like, well, books are written on it by thinkers, but not by man thinking. By men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted documents not of their own side of principles.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing in their duty to accept which Cicero, which Locke would bake and have given them. Forgetful that Cicero Locke and bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. Well, that's kind of mean, but fair enough. Well, I think that that train of thought that you've gone through there.

I do think that there's some strange way that he seems to subordinate thought to action. Maybe this gets to Alex's point about him being moral. So I'll go back to that for just a moment though. On the one hand, I don't know if there's a tension in the argument there, but it's not very good.

If it's a tension that's sort of real and therefore worth exploring. But he seems on the one hand to imply that the American mind, the American scholar, is sort of out in wilderness. And he's almost like a man was original in America. And then he became a foreign, he divides in all these ways.

On the one hand, on the other hand, he seems to say that the American mind is completely occupied with European ideas. That we don't have a mind of our own, right? All of our, all of our, it was the second paragraph. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the seer remains of foreign harvest.

I don't know if I pronounced that word seer, right? But that's an imagery there that he's using, but the image is like all of our intellect, like Shakespeare. That's what's formed the American mind. He's saying, we can't do that forever.

We have to have our own scholars who produce things that form the American mind. On the one hand, on the other hand, it seems like, but on the other hand, it's also this very going out and conquering Westward expansion, doing things, and that somehow is going to make the American mind or something like this. It'll make the American mind truer, because I can't even have the language for this. Yeah.

If we don't proceed in this fashion, he says we become mere scholars, which reminded me of Nietzsche. So she's like, we want the American scholar, which is the bow ideal of the scholar. But if we stay in our libraries and everything is set and we become just these mere scholars, like piddling away, if something becomes some true kind of wisdom or the best kind of wisdom is inaccessible through that mode. Yeah.

I guess if there's anything ironic or self-referential in what Emerson is doing is that he's right. So I took the man thinking to the American scholar, that sort of connection to say, okay, this is where you would expect to find man thinking is as scholar, but that's not what we find. There's certain obstacles. And here he is speaking before an academic quote unquote, this is a very different kind of academic audience than we would think of, but he's speaking before an institution of learned men and young students, and he's trying to, and the exceptional among them, and he's trying to articulate for them their task.

And so I took Emerson to almost be assuming the role of almost like a philosopher king sort of, right? Here he is, the genius speaking before they learned it so that they understand the weight of their task. But I don't understand how you can interpret this essay, not you, but one. One can interpret this essay without thinking of that Emerson must see, you know, what were the circumstances?

Was he asked to do this? I don't know. But he sees himself perhaps in seeking before this group as having a massive task that this was endowed with significance, and he was going to take it very seriously. That might have to do with the weight of it and the moral tone, but there is a kind of, he has assumed the role of genius, I think.

As you know, I agree with that. But what seems lacking in this essay and maybe it's taken up in his other writings in nature, which may be supplemental to this. I can't call the order of publication, but this is a not exactly a blueprint on how to proceed. He's just it's all by directive.

He's like, this is what you guys have to do. We're like, Oh, okay. I try to immerse myself in nature. And my creative Greek flag will fly.

But it's not exactly clear how one goes about doing this and sitting in your wet ass and a pond. Yeah. Sorry, that is what, isn't that what the road did? I mean, that wasn't the like throws teacher.

And then he died throw died first, I think, but he was like throws senior. And so I think that's where I just don't know the history. Well, that's right. But we said on the podcast, so now it's probably record.

So someone can cite it and it will be not true. All right, let's stick on this American scholar business for a moment. How we need actual American thinkers. So America geniuses.

Do we actually have I mean, like, I can't help but think here it is 2024. And okay, fine America. There's no doubt in my mind that America has led the way for years now decades, if not longer, in scientific innovation. Right.

And so you think about the greatest luminaries in science, many of them are American, but then a lot of the 20th century around, we're to many of them are actually German emigrates. Right. And so then he's okay. So fine.

So it's fine. Let's just grant fine. We're awesome in science. It's clear that that's not what Emerson's talking about.

He's talking about literary kind of genius or philosophical genius or something like this. And there I have to say, sorry, I don't see it. I mean, the great, I mean, who are the great authors? I mean, okay, maybe Twain, maybe Melville.

But then in philosophy with all due respect, I don't think anybody audience would be offended because no philosophers listen to us, but who are the great American philosophers. I mean, John Rawls, you know, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, I never think he has in mind literary figures more than. Yeah, it's how many philosophers have there really been 30? Right.

Sounds optimistic to me. The proper book or hide your great official count. That's the official count. There's some of their mark.

30 40. I don't know. But not much higher. We've been around for not so long as a country.

But I have to be right. I guess that's the first time it's years ago, years or so going to I guess. We haven't had a Homer Shakespeare like to take to a visit. We just haven't had or play.

Neither is the rest of the world. So those those those are really hard. Those are ones that have one that just appeared on earth. I mean, I don't know how to control for that.

But the Spanish have won the Germans have won the Italians have won. Yeah, but the Spanish are both things. And you know, there's another strange fact is that shortly after Emerson's writing, the United States University College system gets changed on the German research. And that, you know, if you want to talk about one of the sort of seismic influences that under the weight of other influences had a pretty negative effect.

That's got to be one of them. I mean, imagine if you still have these small ID colleges, right? Like, a karma college, which is very speaking, right? Like, imagine if you had, and it was it was still concentrated on literature.

I mean, since then it's become just technical specialized center. That's not to say it hasn't done great things don't get me wrong, but that definitely see that shapes the future of these institutions. And so what is American literature now? It's completely wrapped wrapped up in critical theory and and ideology as a result.

Like it doesn't and it's catering to the critical and academic class rather than to the common man, which is exactly the opposite. What ever is it? Yeah, there has been greater American literature. I would say that there has been greater American floss.

Sure. Like I mentioned and and Twain, but then even like the southern folks like Faulkner and those guys. I mean, that's good stuff and will probably be read for some time. I think there's probably more.

Bellows, El Bello, I mean, I guess maybe Canada wants to count him instead of us, but fine. Stephen King. Walker Percy, Tom Clancy. James Madison, what's the same?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, what about his disparagement of books? He has some great reflections that remind me of the last section of Nietzsche where he talks about his painted thoughts.

One thing I'll say about Emerson that really struck me is every time I found myself disagree with him, I was like, but what about this? And then an ex-paraphy would get into it. Like he beautifully provoked objection and then addressed them so that I think it was almost a rhetorical tool to sort of bring you along and sort of make you trust in Emerson's sort of knowledge of the lay of land. But so this stuff he said about books and he had this one remark about how, you know, there are moments when you're sort of able to be attuned to nature directly.

Those moments are too much wasted on thinking about books. And I had to say, like he could express great gratitude. Like, you know, when you read a book and you feel like you're just you're reading a book that's 2000 years old or something like that, you feel like, wow, this author understands like the situation I'm in or, you know, the human condition so well that I feel like I'm speaking to a brother rather than to somebody far removed in time and place. Beautiful.

Stand is like that. But I think he is right. He has that beautiful remark about, you know, wasting moments of like insight and reflection on books and becoming too dependent on them. And this sense that eventually the book should like, in live in or fire up the mind and when you see the sun, like directly shining on the land, you have to look, right?

Like you have to sort of sort of put it behind. I feel like that's definitely a pitfall of the academic guy. I feel that myself where I feel so dependent on the books. Yeah, but do I mean, so who's he really talking to?

This is fairly. I mean, if that's the case, Alex, this is rarefied air. Right. See talking to two or three other Americans in the literary, you know, literary, cultural world capable of this kind of breakthrough.

I mean, this would make an audience of five people for every generation. Right. I mean, if we're going to take it seriously, most people, in fact, but the greatest thinkers are depending on books or take books is there. So that's part I didn't understand.

It's like you take in some books, you cast them aside and then you go into nature, start going. Yeah, I mean, I think you'd agree. You're dependent, but not fully dependent. He says that it's easy.

I think he would want to say that the book can really show you a common humanity, but ultimately it's a sort of provocation to thought and thought eventually has to meet with the world. Not to a book. Yeah. So I have a question for the two of you political philosophers.

It's too bad. We don't know more of Emerson's thought, but is is untrammeled nature sitting by the pond? Does it instruct one in politics or books necessary for this kind of thing? I don't know if the transcendentalist had a solution to politics or if they'd probably treated the theme, but I do wonder if nature by itself, the nature of the kind that he's talking about, if it kind of reveals a political teaching that would at all be useful, or is this a whole number since thought.

I've never seen transcendentalism on a, not never, that's not true. You rarely see transcendentalism on so by and political thought, because it's not very political. It almost seems just like this escaped nature. It seems like a withdrawal from politics.

I mean, even to the extent that it is taught, it's taught as a withdrawal from politics, like Walden, right? He's like, I'm out civil disobedience. Like I'm going to not do politics. That's what that's the little teaching here.

But yeah, I do have a response to your question five points ago, raise my hand if I don't have a good house. I just want to respond and ask you a question and follow a question on that. Do you think it's conventional? Like it seems stereotypically American in that sense because American individualism, American liberation, and sort of the removal of the government, that's what allows you to sit by a lake in other countries where you don't have vast expanses of nature or you have a really totalizing government.

You don't have that leisure. Yeah, that is part of what I was getting at with the talk, though, that like you want to, like I was reluctant to do this, but I'm reading this. I say, and I enjoyed it. And I think it's really interesting and very thoughtful.

But I was wondering, okay, is, and I'll take this in one two directions, but like is, as I pivot maybe to return to this question about books, is it too easy? Is he too easy going of a thinker? Oh, he's got to go sit out by the pond and then enlightenment will come to you. It's like, well, I've said a lot of ponds and a lot of just getting a skill bites.

They don't actually learn anything about things. And I was, you know, I think too often we think even like the key to the kratic philosophical thing is discussion or conversation with others. And it strikes me that that that's also not quite right, that as I've alluded to several times on the podcast, is that a hundred accounts that actually Socrates read books with his friends and that that was some of the most meaningful stuff that he ever did. And so let me try this in a slightly different way.

I'll bring this background to this question of terrorism. You don't need books if it's if you have simple access to the things or immediate access that the every man has access to it. But if it's difficult to get to the truth of thing, if that's somehow the preservative of a few, then you do need books and books are difficult. Amazon wrote essays.

I don't know that he write anything that required the kind of intellectual focus and attention that a Plato or a Zenefan or someone did, right? Or you actually have to sit down and figure out what's going on because there's more to the story. And so then again, like you do wonder if David's your point about is he interested in politics. We're also probably going to record an episode on Plato's lovers just after this.

And there's a way in which I think Socrates helps us to see that people who are focused on nature actually miss nature. It's really sort of paradoxical, but like because you're not paying sufficient attention to the human longings that you bring to the table and what you think is simply a reflection on nature, if that makes sense. And I don't know if it probably not, but. Yeah, there's like a longing for, we'll definitely talk about this when we get to Plato's lovers, but there's like a longing for purity and perfection in the turn to nature that is not not simply that motivation has is not necessarily intrinsic to the activity of.

All things. I'm trying to find the passage again, but when we talk about sitting out in the pond and doing this and the woods, that's the only real place to go. I'm like, yeah, that's a bear. It's you.

Like, why are we forgetting about the fact that nature is actually awful? You'll die out there. Right? Like, I mean, how many American stories are some guy going out to Alaska or something like that to get away from?

And then like the story is like they got eaten by bear, right? Like, I don't know. It's also the notion that nature is simply good. And by the way, he says, this is in paragraph 19, books here for the scholars, I'll tell you.

When you can read God directly, why go to books? So the idea is he thinks you can actually discuss the pantheism business that I was coming up earlier. You can experience God by just being out of nature. And that's fine if you're sitting by a pond that's sort of tranquil and there aren't bears.

Bears. So really, what we're saying here, boys, maybe this is a no-tentum. We can do a short episode once you had more. Is that Emerson is actually instead of one of the finest Americans, one of the most awful Americans, because he's enjoying a group of young men at Harvard to cast away their otherwise productive lives and sit in a pond and do nothing, maybe, to copulate with a bear.

I don't know. Listen, listen, get out of the woods, get into the air conditioned room and fire up the social media. Forget this nature business, right? There's no wisdom in the tree.

I mean, to add to that, his description of this community with nature, this film, it's not the activity, takes the form of classification, right? Yes. But the classification is not done with an eye to sort of the good of the thing or its usefulness to you, et cetera. You classify things and what you're supposed to get out of that is an appreciation of how ordered things are and how the mind is able to order them.

And that, in fact, the order of the mind and the order of the world are one of the same and that therefore there's a creator. And you can only ever get a glimpse of what the creator has done in this order, et cetera. And so it culminates in a kind of religious epiphany or mystical or mysterious experience that strikes me as, well, one, I'm not sure why you would, like, one could go to nature and say, oh, this is a dog and this is a wolf. They've made it.

What the hell is that thing? Okay, there's a dog in a horse they made. Now you've got a mule. What's that?

Greg, Greg F*** the pig and now you've got someone's straws and he named Teddy, but no, I'm kidding. But you, you, uh, wife, man. I'm just saying maybe she's the wet nurse. I'm not saying your wife's the pig.

I'm saying maybe not. That's a really nice little clarification. I think that back. He does have a tail though, doesn't he?

Your boy? Wow. Sorry. Anyway, but like, the nature also presents itself with anonymous, atypical like beings that don't admit of easy cross-opically.

Exactly. And it's just now, I feel like we're just beating the hell out of Emerson. But at the end of paragraph 42, he said, this time, like, all times is a very good one. So it's just like this naive.

Everything is good. Everything's hopeful. And it's like, it's like the civil war is about to happen, dude. Like, it's about to be a very, very bad time for this country.

And it just, it seems like there's no, I don't know. I mean, good times are difficult to come by and they're the product of, you know, this is the absence of politics. It was like a statesman who are responsible for good times in so many ways that are available. Anyway, he seems naive in that regard.

Like, nature is good. Like, nothing happens. It's just the undulation of nature. You go out, there's like this gentle debris comes and goes and the sun comes and goes, it's like, yeah, and the bear comes and eats you.

Yeah, also, also, you know, Rome burns, like, off in a distance and you're completely ignorant of that. Yeah, that's, I think I wonder whether he, maybe it's gonna be a good follow-up so that we can give Emerson a chance to redeem himself because we started shitting on him. Right. Right.

But I like to, too, but there's so many good lines. Go read it. But, man, the world today are bug-man and spawn. That's Emerson.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Those lines are, yeah. Sorry, I'm the bug-man. That's like, it was, yeah.

Just, I don't know, maybe, let me try to defend him a little bit. Now we're talking. He's articulating the moral imperative of the scholar who's supposed to observe nature and nature is meant to appreciate the unity of all things. But insofar as there's a moral imperative that raises human beings and Americans in particular, above their sort of their work a day lives, right?

There maybe there is a kind of political objective here. And maybe you could say that somebody like a Lincoln, a great order who is able to sort of articulate a new birth of freedom, right? And give America a new task and revive the principles of the Declaration in modified sort of application or form or however you want to put it. Maybe there is something about that, about Lincoln that would, Emerson might look at that and say, yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I don't know. I think Emerson met Lincoln. And this lecture is given in 1837 and Lincoln gives his very most, one of his earliest most famous speeches. I think it's in 1838, the perpetuation of our political institutions.

So that might be, it might be an interesting sort of juxtaposition to do these two speeches alongside one of their, like this sort of optimism of Emerson with what Lincoln says, what, there's an ill omen in this country, like it's just completely different takes on where the country stands in the middle of 1830s. And your notion of the Declaration of Independence reminds me that I guess when I was doing a little bit of, I don't know if it was Wikipedia or in this essay's book, I have it, apparently all over Wendell Holmes referred to this lecture as America's intellectual declaration of independence. No, I read that too. You know, also somebody should remind Emerson that the leisure that he has to pen this essay, is, you know, on the backs of like fellow, and I'm just not talking about slavery here, but on fellow, you know, that's true, but just on its fellow Americans laboring.

So there could be a Harvard and a Yale to deliver these kinds of things. But so there's a great thing that the mechanical arts, like the mechanical arts are needed to get started. And then you have wonderful minds like Franklin, right? That established our public library system.

Right. Is this like an inventor of a magnitude of his genius is incredible. You should see these beautiful paintings in France that have him touching the finger of God. He has not the painting of the fingers with friends.

I was thinking you were talking about. No, no, but. So can I read a remark by? I just want to say that Emerson is LARPing.

He's a LARP-er. That's what I mean. Yeah. What are you saying, Buckman?

So apparently Emerson met Lincoln on two occasions and he survived him and he says, and even lectured on the emancipation proclamation and the address was published. That's something maybe people can go read, but upon his death, he delivered a eulogy in April, my teeth of 1865. He said, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this is caused or will cause on his announcement, a plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter.

He did not offend by superiority. He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed Goodwill. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey.

He was the most active and hopeful of men. And his work had not perished. But acclimations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down. I think this confirms a number of things we've talked about, right, about, especially the part about not offending by superiority, and being filled with duty and Goodwill, but also sort of creating admiration.

So maybe that is the kind of man he had in mind. I don't know. It's really good. Just as a brief aside on that point, if you haven't read it, Melville wrote a poem after Lincoln's death called The Martyr.

Oh, yeah. Really good and very short. So that's definitely worth the look. That's about all I got.

You got anything else, David? I think we don't waste another damn dirty second on the dumb. I'll tell you what, my junior high school was Ralph Waldo Emerson junior high school. It was the only school I ever started and finished, like in terms of like I started and yeah, like I transferred to elementary schools like five times.

I transferred colleges, I transferred Brad. I guess my name and PhD, but usually people do Brad at all one place. But yeah, I got. I was going to say we started with a stolen valor and then ended with stolen academic credentials.

I thought you were. I actually I was suspended twice in junior high school. What did you do, Greg? True story.

Once for fighting and once for indecent exposure. But I said you'd like had to pee in gym class or something. No, I pulled my pants down and showed a girl my butt because she was bothering me. You guys have to spend it for that?

That's in the city. I know. Yep. It was pretty bad.

I thought maybe you were going to say you were like, Emerson says contemplate the rock and hit a kid with a stone or something. Yeah, Emerson junior high school. Yep. Yeah.

Fun times. Right. Well, well, thanks guys. I'm sorry.

Listen, I'm sure there's some people who who know Emerson better than us out there. I mean, it doesn't take much. But if you have any recommended readings for us. Oh, yeah.

I think we should do another stuff for lions. Other stuff by Emerson or other stuff in his traditions through some other sort of American transcendentalist or American literary figures, quasi philosopher thinker types, whatever, geniuses. Just shoot us an email or tweet at us or whatever. Or can they find us at the new thinkery on X.

You can email us at the newthinkery at gmail.com. You can DM Greg your butt picks since he's apparently fond of showing his butt to others. And we will have a swag thing opening up soon or probably already by this time. I mean, you tell me, man, I'm ready to pull the trigger.

Yeah, yeah, we're almost there. But just if anybody sends Greg a picture of their butch. No, no, no, no, no. I will personally send them a TNT sticker.

Just. I'm right. And I see you a sticker. All right.

Is that everything? Like, rate, subscribe, donate, send pics, the Greg.