The American Scholar

"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

For the publication of Phi Beta Kappa, see The American Scholar (magazine).
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summary

Emerson introduces Transcendentalist and Romantic views to explain an American scholar's relationship to nature. A few key points he makes include:

  • We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself.
  • An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind.
  • To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent".
  • "The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional and historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."
  • The scholar's education consists of three influences:
    • I. Nature as the most important influence on the mind
    • II. The Past manifest in books
    • III. Action and its relation to experience
  • The last, unnumbered part of the text is devoted to Emerson's view on the "Duties" of the American Scholar who has become the "Man Thinking."
  • " The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind"

Importance

Emerson was, in part, reflecting on his personal vocational crisis after leaving his role as a minister.[1] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be "the declaration of independence of American intellectual life."[2] Building on the growing attention he received from the essay Nature, The American Scholar solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold throughout the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's literary quarterly magazine, The American Scholar, was named after the speech.[3]

This success stands in contrast with the harsh reaction to another of his speeches, "Divinity School Address", given eleven months later.

gollark: Really, relying on these arbitrary divisions in the first place is stupid.
gollark: No, I mean it could give one or the other a non-population-related advantage due to differences in the geometry of some kind.
gollark: I guess it's possible that even one which doesn't know about parties might accidentally be biased due to (hypothetically, I don't know if this is true) one party being popular in low-density areas and the other in high-density, or really any other difference in locations.
gollark: You don't actually need simple shapes very badly as long as you have an algorithm which is not likely to be biased.
gollark: Okay, rearrange the states so they're square.

See also

References
  1. Cayton, Mary Kupiec (1989). Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 145. ISBN 0-8078-4392-X
  2. Cheever, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 80. ISBN 0-7862-9521-X
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-01-29. Retrieved 2012-02-01.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

Further reading
  • Kenneth Sacks: Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle For Self-Reliance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003. 199 pages.
  • John Hansen: “The New American Scholar.” The Pluralist 9.1 (2014): 97-103.
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