Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” is essentially about him realizing a few of the major flaws in society. Some of these were that no one was thinking for themselves anymore and that not many people were really in touch with nature, as the title of the piece gives away. Emerson starts off the very beginning of his piece with an introduction explaining how everything that anyone does nowadays is simply based off of what has already been thought or discovered. He states that “OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism … Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? … There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” Here he is making a critique of how there is so much left to discover and think up yet as the world progresses, free thinking has come to a halt. Later on in his introduction, Emerson further discusses how he believes that the people have become out of touch because there is not much new, original thinking going on or ideas being generated. Being the “poet”, as he goes on to defend as the only true owners of the land, Emerson seems to think of himself quite highly in the sense that he feels that he is above the rest who do not connect with nature or create and try to think for themselves like he strives to.
Emerson also begins to focus on the idea of your soul being the only thing that is truly you. He states that “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God”. By comparing himself to a transparent eyeball he is saying that he has become one with nature and is truly at a point of connection to it that he sees no separation between him and his surroundings. He sees all things transparently for what they are and can look past any mundane focuses in order to bask in the greatness of the natural world, something that many individuals in his time had forgotten how to do. This capability and privilege he has to do so and to be able to separate his mind from his body are two things he seems to blindly suggest everyone try to achieve. That is, without taking into account that not everyone at the time, whether it be due to race, class, gender, or any other difference they have to remain aware of, is in a position to be able to separate their body and soul like Emerson can, being a white man in the mid 1800s. Although well meaning, that is a major factor that has to be taken into account in order to better understand why many people are, in his opinion, so detached from nature and not developing new concepts or ideas.
