'''The American Scholar'''

'''Bold text'''[[Image:RWEmerson.jpg|thumb|Ralph Waldo Emerson]]
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:''For the publication of Phi Beta Kappa, see [[The American Scholar (magazine)]]''

'''The American Scholar''' was a speech given by [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]] in 1837 to the [[Phi Beta Kappa Society]] in [[Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge]], [[Massachusetts]]. He was invited to speak as a result of his ground breaking work ''[[Nature (Emerson)|Nature]]'', published a year earlier in which he established a new way for America's historically-young society to look at the world. The American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe 60 years after declaring independence, and Emerson was, for the first time in the country's history, providing a roadmap on how to escape from underneath that veil and build a new, American identity.

==Summary==
Emerson uses [[Transcendentalism|Transcendentalist]] and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:
* "One Man" is the unity of all society working together to help each other, with one body part being no more important than the next.
** People need to see themselves as a part of the whole, as necessary and essential to all of society. He states, "Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all."
* The "American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking" within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden our understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."
** The scholar's education consists of three pursuits.
**# Investigate and understand nature, which includes the scholar's own mind and person.
**# Study "the mind of the Past" to gain new perspective and to try to "get at the truth."
**# Take action -- interact with the world; do not become the recluse thinker commenting from afar.
** The scholar's duty or "office" is to "cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances."

==Importance==
[[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.]] declared this speech to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence."
Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay ''[[Nature (Emerson)|Nature]]'', this speech solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold through out the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's [[The American Scholar (magazine)|literary quarterly]] was named after the speech. However he was not immediately accepted after giving the speech. Emerson was actually banned from Harvard for 30 years because some of his ideas went directly in the faces of his piers beliefs.

The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson In the essay the American Scholar, Emerson portrays the scholar as a person who learns from three main things. These things by which a scholar is educated are by nature, by books (the past) and by action. Emerson uses nature as a comparison to the human mind where he states, “There is never a beginning, there is never an end to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.”(296) The human mind is an object that is boundless and can be full of so much beauty and intellect such as nature can be. Emerson continues to explain how classification begins among the young minds. “To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. Emerson presents this idea as a negative effect on the scholar because they seem to continue to break things down trying to find simple answers to complex questions. Man is then convinced “that he and it (nature) proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower.”(296) This thinking of man is the opposite from the truth of the relationship between nature and himself. “He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul…. Its laws are the laws of his own mind.”(296) According to Emerson, the next influence on the scholar is the mind of the past, where he uses books to convey his ideas. “Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst.”(297) Books were originally intended for good. “The scholar of the first age, received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again.”(297) According to Emerson, books can have a negative effect on the way the scholar should think. “Instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.”(297) Emerson feels that the scholar should learn things for themselves and not easily accept the views and opinions presented by a writer in their books. He further on continues to state how books “They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hind head.”(298) Emerson thus believes that all men have the capacity of being a genius. “Man hopes. Genius creates.”(298) But, Emerson does not encourage people to be genius because the “Genius is always the sufficiently enemy of the genius by over-influence.”(298) Emerson believes that “books are for the scholar’s idle times”(298) and the only subjects that he should learn from reading are history and exact science. The action of the scholar is important to Emerson. “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man… inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.”(299) Emerson wants the scholar to learn but question everything. “The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.”(300) Emerson also places a value on action. “The final value of action…is, that it is a resource.”(301) Through action man has transformed himself into Man Thinking. “The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other…he has always the resource to live.”(301)

Books and Man Thinking: Edification or False Idolatry?
A Caution in Emerson's "The American Scholar"

by Nancy Haines


Commencement speeches are customarily routine, pedantic, platitude filled, mildly inspiring lectures. This description, however, was never applied to Ralph Waldo Emerson's oration, "The American Scholar," delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837. Oliver Wendell Holmes called this speech America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence." In addition to being a call for literary independence from Europe and past traditions, the speech was a blueprint for how humans should live their lives. Emerson believed that the way to reunite with the Over-Soul was to become "The American Scholar." He would do this by observing nature, by studying the past through books, and by taking action. To become a scholar, humans also needed to develop self trust, espouse freedom and bravery, and value the individual over the masses.
Because this speech is so pregnant with discussion topics, an intrinsic part of the blueprint may not catch the reader's attention or receive the analysis it deserves. It delivers a message that contemporary humans still need to receive. The startling, heretical admonition not to worship or make false idols of books and other objects of art, given in Emerson's "The American Scholar," demonstrates his belief in the vital necessity for self-reliance and active, creative reading and writing. When he exhorts us to live as a scholar, as "Man Thinking," rather than "a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking" (1530), he is cautioning us against the false idolatry of book or Bible worship.
When Emerson introduces the second great influence on the spirit of the scholar, he at first praises books. He expounds on "the mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past" (1532). Emerson is saying that books are the best vehicle available to the scholar for studying the ideas and accomplishments of past men and ages. But after affirming that "the theory of books is noble" (1532) and presenting an idealized way of reading and reusing books from past ages by which "business" and "dead facts" come out as "poetry" and "quick thought" when read and rewritten in a new age, Emerson
begins to show doubts that reuse is possible and states that "Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this" (1532).
The preceding quotation could be used in 1837 and still today to attack the teachers and professors in secondary schools and universities who woship the literary canon. Although few, if any, of the Harvard Phi Beta Kappas realized it at the time of hearing, Emerson's "The American Scholar" also delivers a powerful upper-cut to unaware, Bible worshipping idolaters. In addition to the Christian Bible, his caution against idolizing books from other ages would include all the sacred books from the world's religions such as the Jewish Torah, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Islamic Koran and the Veda of India. Emerson delineates how man replaces a real event or action with its image or record which then becomes an object to be worshipped and defended against attacks from heretics:
The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation,--the act of thought,--is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles . . . . (1532)
People in organized religion who blindly accept books from the past as sacred dogma not to be questioned will not entertain the idea that the writers were only men, asking questions and seeking union with the Over-Soul just as "Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries" (1532) when they wrote their books.
Bible worshippers or even modern worshippers of technology are not self-reliant. As Emerson suggests, by making idols of tools, they have become "subdued by their instruments" (1533). They do not think for themselves or read creatively. They are not making "life their dictionary" (1535). They have been "warped by its attraction clean out of their own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system" (1532-33). By relying on the idol they have stopped searching for their own truth. No new canons are accepted. This is what Emerson was cautioning against when he said, "Books are the best of things, well used; abused among the worst" (1532).
In spite of his doubts and foreboding about The American Scholar's misuses of books, Emerson loved books and considered them to be a great resource. He said, "It is remarkable the pleasure we derive from the best books" (1533) and admitted that "there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading" (1534). But he still thought that "books are for the scholar's idle time" and "when the intervals of darkness come" (1533). Emerson demonstrates his belief that when he can, the scholar should be seeking action and studying nature, thus making "life his dictionary": "When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings" (1533).
Transcendentalists asked the questions "What is authority?" and "What defines truth?" In "The American Scholar," Emerson cautions Man Thinking to be careful, to not let any book be the authority but to read, think and decide for himself. There is a fine line between study, appreciation and assimilation of books and ideas from the past and idolizing these books and ideas. We must examine, rewrite, create, learn from the old but write our own books from our own time and experience.

Work Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. 2nd. ed. Vol I. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 1529-1541.