Edification or False Idolatry in Emersons The American Scholar :: Emerson American Scholar Essays

Edification or False Idolatry in Emersons The American Scholar Commencement speeches argon customarily r placeine, pedantic, platitude filled, mildly inspiring lectures. This description, however, was never applied to Ralph Waldo Emersons oration, The American Scholar, de bravered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837. Oliver Wendell Holmes called this speech Americas Intellectual closure of Independence. In addition to being a call for literary freedom from Europe and prehistorical traditions, the speech was a blueprint for how humans should live their lives. Emerson believed that the look to reunite with the Over-Soul was to become The American Scholar. He would do this by observing nature, by studying the past through newss, and by victorious action. To become a scholar, humans also needed to develop ego 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 readers attention or receive the analysis it deserves. It delivers a inwardness that contemporary humans still need to receive. The startling, heretical admonition not to worship or make false idols of books and new(prenominal) objects of art, given in Emersons The American Scholar, demonstrates his belief in the vital necessity for self-reliance and active, inventive 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 mens thinking (1530), he is cautioning us against the false idolatry of book or Bible worship. When Emerson introduces the second great influence on the aim of the scholar, he at first praises books. He expounds on the mind of the Past,--in any(prenominal) 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 motto 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 create verbally its own books or rather each generation for the next succeeding.