Episode #165 ... Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature and Other Things
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So since the dawn of civilization, human beings in one way or another have been at war with each other. Whether it's a culture war, economic war, all the way down to an actual physical invasion of a country. Whether it's a war of ideas, you know, religions fighting other religions, philosophers who can't stop arguing about the minutiae, even that guy that spends all day screaming at bots on the internet, even he is a warrior in humanity's fight against our robot overlords.

Leave it to us human beings to never run out of creative ways to argue with each other about stuff. And Ralph Waldo Emerson wouldn't feel bad stating the obvious here, that the one thing we definitely don't have a shortage of in this world over the course of history is disunity within our species. But why is that, he would ask? I mean, none of us like being at war with other people. We try our best to prevent fighting between cultures.

But for as long as we've been working on this whole project of getting along with each other, why can it sometimes seem like there's been zero progress made in this area? Why haven't we been able to do more over thousands of years? Like even in World War I, they eventually came out of the trenches, played soccer, ate cheese and crackers, and had an armistice day.

When's our armistice day? When do we get our cheese and crackers? Because if you just listen to what the general consensus is on the matter, people will tell you that everything seems to be getting better in this area. That since the days of roving barbarians pillaging innocent people, the human species apparently has been on a pretty consistent progression upwards here, and all thanks to the underlying strategy we've used to learn more about the universe and constantly make things better.

What do we do? Well, we examine the world around us and we come up with all kinds of complex abstractions to help us make sense of the world. In other words, we come up with narratives. Religious, scientific, philosophical narratives that compete against other narratives in an ongoing discourse of ideas where the hope is after having enough conversations with each other, after enough centuries of talking to each other about stuff, the cream is eventually going to rise to the top.

The ideas that led to these wars and conflicts between people will someday be mostly reasoned away, and we can usher in a new age of peace and justice, where everyone bows on their yoga mat to a giant picture of Carl Sagan in a turtleneck. Why has this not happened yet? Why can it sometimes seem like all we're really doing is arguing about stuff and not making any real progress when it comes to the unity of our species?

Well, one obvious answer to this is that this is just how people are. Conflict is how human beings behave politically. I mean, we got to be willing to accept the possibility that we may always just be pitting one narrative against another, arguing and fighting and going to war over how we want the world to look, at least for the next couple weeks. That our fate as a species is to be in a constant state of war. That's one answer to the question.

But Ralph Waldo Emerson would want to say that maybe that's the case. But maybe the reason, despite our best efforts, we can't ever seem to arrive at any sort of enduring unification of ideas is that since the dawn of civilization, we've been using entirely the wrong strategy. In fact, our strategy, he would say, may even be getting us further away from any sort of unification.

What's he getting at there? Well, people during his time, and no doubt he would say people during our modern time, put far too much importance on what he calls the dry bones of the past. The dry bones being this history of external narratives and abstractions that we use to make sense of the world. We put far too much emphasis on old ideas and not enough emphasis on coming up with new ideas.

What he means is there's no excitement about being the people that are fighting to creatively solve the problems of our age. The only thing we seem to be excited about is memorizing and rattling off the theories that somebody else came up with. Be humble if you want. Take your own intuitions with a grain of salt if you must.

But recognize, Emerson would say, that when you do that, when you yield to the theories and narratives of other people, all you're really doing is replacing your own intuitions with the intuitions of someone else. Why not rely a little bit more on yourself instead of this historical record of the thoughts of other people? And it's no doubt at this point that some of you out there are already a little bit frustrated, so let me try to clear that up. I

I'd imagine some people out there are thinking, okay, look, we get it. We get it. Be self-reliant. I read your self-reliance essay, Emerson. Be intuitive. Don't let other people tell you how to feel. Every part of the universe is connected to every other part, and we should try to connect with this oversoul that permeates all of being. But fair question, how do I actually go about doing that? Should I have a seance? Does the oversoul have an email address I can get at?

Because it seems like everything I am otherwise getting from these religious, scientific, and philosophical abstractions, I'm supposed to be getting from connecting with this Oversoul. How do I do that? The short answer to Emerson is going to be through an intense, individual, intentional relationship with Nature. Now, for the record, this is Nature with a capital N, which to Emerson boils down to anything in the universe that is not me.

Meaning art is a part of nature, language is a part of nature, other people, even your physical body. The reason why he wants to include these things alongside the natural world will make more sense a little later in the episode. But for now, just know that if you wanted to get started on having this intense, intentional relationship with nature, the best way to get to know nature, Emerson thinks, is to go out, get far away from your daily routine and the troubles of your life, and just for a while, try it out.

Try being in nature. Put on your hiking boots. Grab your bear spray. Learn that the hard way. Let's go out into the woods and let's get intentional with our relationship to nature, people. Now, once you're out in nature, what do you do? Because it's not as easy as just showing up in the woods one day. You don't just go out into nature and look at the leaves. There's a special kind of attention you have to pay to nature. A special kind of intention that you have to bring.

To Emerson, the first mistake people make when they get away from the city and they go out into nature is that they're often not really paying that close of attention. They're often distracted by something. They're looking for a pretty picture to post on Instagram. Or they're thinking about how far they've walked, whether they're going to get their step goal for today. Or they're just trying to clear their heads, reveling in the fact that for a while, they don't got to worry about anything. Distracted, Emerson says.

The second mistake people make that Emerson would want to point out is that people often see themselves when they're out in nature in relation to one of those narratives that informs how they already think about nature. For example, if they're a Christian, maybe they see nature as God's kingdom that was put here for their delight during their time here on this planet. That shades every experience that they have in nature.

If they're an environmentalist, maybe they see their hike as a lowland brush area with a fledgling meerkat population. If you're Thomas Hobbes, maybe you see it as a place where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The point is, we always have these narratives that we're projecting onto nature as we're in it.

We understand our relationship to nature only through this filter. And the first step for Emerson of truly being able to connect with nature is going to be to try to remove this archaeological record of layer after layer of the intuitions of others that we built up over the years, and instead try to connect on the bedrock of our own experiences and interpretations.

It becomes possible to view nature through the lens of a childlike curiosity rather than through the lens of a bunch of learned abstractions. And that's exactly what we have to do to Emerson. So once you're able to do that, once you've shed yourself of the dry bones of the past and all the ways you've been told to think about nature, there obviously has to be a place that you start the process of formulating your own opinions about it. And for Emerson, that process is going to begin with a question.

When you're out in the woods observing nature at work, he says try to answer this question: To what end is nature? To what end is nature? Put another way, what does nature mean? Like viewing nature as though it's a unified, holistic landscape of being. From this perspective, what is it that nature even does? These can seem like bizarre questions to ask because most of us can't remember a time when we didn't have a ready-made answer to them.

But Emerson thinks part of coming up with new ideas is going to involve coming up with new answers to old questions. Seeing nature in a new light has the potential to change the way we see absolutely everything in our societies.

And he says, if you take this question seriously, if you look at nature through this sort of God's eye lens, devoid of narratives, what he calls at one point his transparent eyeball, if you can view nature with this level of openness and genuine curiosity, you're bound to notice a lot of things about nature that are otherwise extremely easy to take for granted. First example he gives of this are the stars in the night sky. Chapter one of the book, he says, think of the night sky peppered with constellations and shining lights.

Now imagine if the stars in the night sky only came about once every thousand years. He says, can you imagine the level that people would be losing their minds if that just randomly happened one night? Like, can you imagine the books written? Can you imagine the stories that people would tell about the crazy day that, you know, as he says, the city of God was shown to everyone on earth?

There would be pandemonium in the streets. This would be COVID toilet paper level crazy. Times a thousand. And it got messy there in Costco for a bit, folks, let's be honest. People would lose it. And yet here we are, living in a world where those exact same stars are available to us every single night, and we couldn't care less. And so too with the trees, and the mountains, and all the other aspects of nature around us that sort of fade into the background of our lives because they're just always there.

Almost like a close friend or family member that you take for granted. You assume that they're never going to leave you, so it becomes possible for you to discount their existence and only think of yourself until you need something from them. Not a perfect metaphor though, because to Emerson, you always need something from nature. There is never a point where you are self-sufficient in regards to nature. Just for fun though, let's continue this metaphor and consider for a second how good a friend nature has been for you all throughout your life.

Think of all that nature does for you that is so easy for you to take for granted, you worthless scum. Nature is first and foremost a provider. It provides you with the food and water that makes your life even possible. It provides you with the raw materials you use to build your condo, the gasoline or electricity that transports you throughout your life. Nature is a landlord that has given you a home to stay in and a lifetime lease at that.

Nature is both a boss and an employee. It gives you tasks that you need to get done, it gives you purpose, but it also sometimes works for you and the things you need. Nature is a 24-hour gym. Try walking up one of those mountains sometime. Nature is a doctor, not only because it provides you with the medicinal ingredients for any number of problems you may have physically, but nature is a psychotherapist as well.

How many people have you heard say that the problems of city life are stressful and draining to them? And that when they can take a couple hours and be by themselves in nature, they feel recharged. They feel a renewed sense of vitality. Nature has the ability to transport us into an entirely new headspace.

On that same note, to Emerson, nature puts the problems of day-to-day life into their proper perspective. That almost all of them are not that big. Certainly not big in comparison to the ongoing unified process of the natural world. By studying the macrocosm of nature, we start to better understand the microcosm of ourselves within it. Emerson writes in one of his essays, quote, the ancient precept of know thyself and

And the modern precept, study nature, become at last one maxim. By connecting more with nature, we end up connecting more with ourselves.

What else is nature, though? Nature is a role model. We talked about consistency in our episode on self-reliance that we just did. And Emerson says, don't worry about being the picture of absolute consistency that society sometimes expects of people, because your human nature alone has a certain level of consistency written into it that corresponds with the rest of nature. He says, look at a mountain range or a tree or a bird. Every one of these looks chaotic and inconsistent from one perspective.

But take a few steps back and look at the mountain range in its entirety, and these seemingly jagged and chaotic rock formations start to make more sense and appear consistent. We can learn how to live better from nature, and there are thousands of examples like this to Emerson. Nature is an entertainer. It provides you with beautiful sunsets, landscapes, all the way down to the petals of a flower.

And make no mistake, Emerson says, beauty is an absolutely crucial human need as well. It's a need that we all indulge in for the sake of our mental health. And whether it's Netflix or the Grand Canyon, you can ultimately thank nature for all the beauty that's out there.

See, to our buddy Ralph here, the reason beauty is something so universally loved by people is because our minds naturally seek order. And the things we find beautiful are ultimately manifestations of the order that permeates all of nature. Call it God's spirit, call it the oversoul, call it whatever you want. But to Ralph, it's this order that we're connecting with when we connect with beautiful things. In other words, beauty is derived from nature in a way.

On a related note, nature is a linguist. Even something like language, which can seem entirely separate from nature, is in fact to Emerson in part derived from the natural world. He says physical objects in nature sometimes represent ways that we express things in language. For example, we describe people's personalities in relation to a snake or a fox. A torch, he says, represents someone who is really bright, that sort of thing.

Now, probably a good moment to pause here and give some clarifications, especially about these last two that I just talked about. Never want to give Emerson too much rope to work with. No doubt a lot of people out there are saying, "Well, no. Emerson's wrong about language. That's absolutely not how language works."

Structural linguistics alone refutes what he just said, let alone more contemporary linguistic theory. And beauty. Who is he to say that what makes something beautiful is that it represents the order imbued in nature? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's entirely subjective. These two points may be correct, but they remind me a bit of the person at the beginning of last episode that says that everything is subjective and you can never really know anything for certain.

Trust me on this: Emerson's point here is not to provide an exhaustive explanation for linguistic theory or a final take on beauty. If it was, he definitely would have spent more than a couple short chapters explaining it hidden inside of a book that is more generally about nature. The point he's making is less about the literal face value of what he's saying and more about the symbolism of viewing nature as a holistic process where each constituent part is connected to every other part in some way.

The point he's making is that everything that we consider to be an important part of human life is derived from the process of nature. And yes, that's right, Emerson is a process philosopher. To Emerson, we are not distinct as human beings from this unified process of nature. We are a part of that unity. And yet, isn't it ironic, he would say, that the story we often tell ourselves is that the crowning achievement of humankind has been that we freed ourselves from the shackles of nature.

Look at all the cool stuff we can do. Look at how we manipulate the natural world to do whatever we want it to do. Look at how technology cordons me off from the natural world to the extent that I barely even have to acknowledge that it's there. We want to believe that we've somehow conquered nature and now live outside of it. And we use these narratives and abstractions to help us prove our case to ourselves.

But what if every narrative that we add on top of the narratives of the past just creates yet another layer in this archaeological record that gets us further and further away from the truth? This is the sentiment that Ralph Waldo Emerson is trying to get at. Got a few emails after last episode, so just a real quick clarification here.

He is not saying don't listen to other interpretations of reality or to not have respect for the feelings of anyone else and their take on the world. He's saying don't let their interpretations get in the way of you creating your own. This actually applies a lot to anyone that's passionate about creating in general. You know, you see professional musicians or performers, people who are masters of their craft.

And they'll often talk about how for the first 10, 15 years of their career, all they were doing in retrospect was an impression of the people that inspired them the most. No bad intent there. They just had people who influenced them. But what they'll also say is that at a certain point, they had to shed the pieces of other creators that were inspiring them and reimagine themselves through a purely individual act of creative expression.

This is precisely the sort of thing Ralph Waldo Emerson is talking about. Have respect for the thoughts of other people. Take inspiration, but don't ever have too much respect where you start worshiping at their altar, dressing like them, eating like them, working out like them. No, once again, trust thyself above everyone else.

And when you do, he says, what you might find, what he found, his answer to the question to what end is nature, is that nature contains within it a divine wisdom that is beyond our capacity to understand through normal modes of inquiry. There was a life force that permeates all of the natural world, ourselves included. And intuitively paying close attention to nature becomes our way of receiving the moral truths that are contained within this life force.

Nature, then, above all else that it does for us that we often take for granted, nature is a teacher. It is an intermediary. It's a communication medium between us and the force that guarantees the order and continuity of the universe, of what some people call God or the Oversoul.

Then again, to describe nature as a medium implies some sort of separation, when in fact to Emerson, God is always present in us and we are always present in God. This is why it's so easy to see ourselves in nature and to find wisdom in the way that it operates. Maybe the mistake to Emerson is trying to describe all this through conventional language. And maybe that's also part of why these narratives and abstractions only seem to get us arguing with each other more about what the truth is, not getting us closer to it.

Bottom line is, when you change your answer to the question, "To what end is nature?" Your whole worldview will change. Once you recognize the holistic unity of all things, Emerson thinks what inevitably starts to emerge is a worldview where you have compassion for other people. You start to realize that we're all in this together. Equal parts of the same unity. Hurting someone else only really serves to hurt yourself.

Egalitarianism, democracy, these become the sort of lanes that you start to fall into. And most of the differences that you see between cultures start to seem petty. Interestingly enough for Emerson, the differences often come down to the exact same divine creative spark that lies at the heart of all human action, animated by this oversoul. But that creative spark interacts with different external circumstances given the specifics of the culture.

This accounts for many of the apparent cultural differences that we spend our time arguing about. See, there was a time long ago, Emerson thinks, when human beings were more connected with nature. And for us to get back to that place, it's going to take people individually making a conscious effort to get out there and reconnect with the natural world. That if you're passionate about healing the disunity of humanity...

Start first by healing the disunity you find within yourself and then work your way out from there. Once again, this is a turn inward to find wisdom rather than outward.

Also, it's going to be important for our buddy Ralph here to make people aware of some common mistakes people make when moving forward trying to balance their understanding of nature. In the later chapters of the book, Emerson sets his sights on marking an important distinction that he sees between two very different ways of studying nature. On the one hand, there is a purely scientific, material understanding of nature,

And on the other hand, there is that intuition that gives you access to the transcendent immaterial aspects of the universe that flow through the material.

Both of which, by the way, are extremely important to Emerson. He says verbatim that for anyone that's going to be a true scholar in this world, there's going to be a certain baseline of knowledge that you're going to need to have. You're going to need to learn about history. You're going to need to learn about science. But Emerson would say, understand that with any interpretive method, including science, there are inherent limitations written into it. And you're only doing yourself a disservice if you choose to ignore those limitations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says that science is great at providing a certain type of understanding about the natural world. He says that scientists are really good at breaking things down into their component parts. Among other things, they weigh things, measure things, they isolate substances, and they can tell you all about the properties of those substances. All this is great, but there's certain things that science can't do.

You can't weigh and measure your way into a moral or spiritual lesson given to you by nature. That can only come through a deliberate personal connection that you create with nature. You can't isolate substances and dissect something down to its finest detail while also understanding how it fits into a more holistic, unified process of nature. That can only come through intuition.

It's not science's job to say why things are the way they are. They ask questions more like, what is this thing doing? How is it doing it? That's part of what makes science great, is that it doesn't bother itself with stuff like that. And Emerson would agree.

but he'd critique the person living during his time. And no doubt the person listening today who talks a big game about how much they're interested in nature, they read books about the natural world, they listen to 12 podcasts describing the natural world, and yet spend next to zero time actually in the natural world listening and paying attention to what it has to teach them outside of a classroom setting.

If humanity is out of alignment and seems stuck in this place of disunity, this has to be a contributing factor to Emerson. People are so over-indexed on gathering scientific information from nature that they completely ignore the moral and spiritual information that's available through actually having an experience in nature. In his essay titled "The American Scholar," Emerson makes the case that there are three things a person needs to ensure a proper education. They need nature, books, and action.

Hopefully it's obvious why nature is important to him at this point. And action is the only way thoughts in your head ever become something real in nature that you can learn from. But it's the books, and the nature, books, and action education, to Emerson books pose a unique threat to anyone that wants to be a thinking person. Because despite how much undeniable good they may do, books can also be a dangerous trap for someone to fall into.

Now keep in mind, when he says books, that means any type of educational content in our modern times. It could be videos, podcasts, documentaries, blogs, even just endlessly going to school. Because there is never a set end point when it comes to learning about things. An easy trap to fall into for Emerson is to just endlessly learn and then never actually create anything with the knowledge that you've acquired. Endless education can be a lifelong filibuster so that you never really have to ever think for yourself.

He makes an interesting point towards the end of self-reliance, and I'm paraphrasing here. But he says, you know, you ask the average person, what is it that you want to do after you retire? Once you're done with work, what do you want to do? And a really common response people will give you is, oh, I want to travel. I want to see the world and experience other cultures. What percentage of people say that when asked that question? And as modern tolerant people that value other cultures, we nod our head in agreement and we never really question them about it.

I mean, who doesn't want to get into a flying metal cylinder for 18 hours? But Emerson would say how interesting that the way we choose to spend our time once it's only ours to spend is to travel far and wide and marvel at the cultural contributions of other people rather than creating something ourselves that might contribute to the culture that we're a part of.

He says it may come from the way we educate people. You know, from grade school onwards, we tell kids to sit still in a classroom and memorize facts, memorize the contributions that other great people have made in the past. It's no wonder people carry on with this general strategy as they move into adulthood and then on into retirement.

The proper way to read a book, as well as the proper way to educate children to Emerson, will always involve inspiring creativity. I mean, what kind of society do you want to have? Do you want a society of mindless robots that are good at memorizing information? Or do you want people that know how to do something useful with that information? The value of a book is only as much as the level that it inspires its reader.

To Emerson, anything outside of that is just the mere idolization of books, the deification of the historical record of ideas rather than the act of creating new ones. It seems clear to him that we need both of these. Now there's of course a structuralist response to basically everything that Emerson has said so far. Here's Emerson for the last two episodes singing the praises of thinking for yourself. Intuition. Shedding yourself of the third-party dogmas that have been handed down to you by society.

But couldn't you say that the entire process of thinking for yourself is an illusion anyway? I mean, Emerson's talking about this like he's some sort of brain in a vat removed from society. But a structuralist might say, you can't escape society's influence.

Whether you like it or not, society has given you a narrative, and with it, the narrow parameters that you use to navigate the world. Down to every category you use to categorize things, every binary opposition, everything that seems like a reasonable solution to a problem. Society has given you not only the building blocks of every thought you will ever think, but every thought that you can possibly think.

Put another way, there of course are possible thoughts outside of what you will ever think. You just effectively will never think about them because you were given a different set of cultural inputs since birth. So even the most seemingly outside-of-the-box idea arrived at you in the most seemingly independent way imaginable, and its foundation was ultimately given to you by society. But I think Emerson would have a response to this criticism. Let's say that what this person is saying here is 100% true.

Does that really take the power away from what Emerson is saying in these essays? I mean, even if every thought that I've ever had could have been predicted by some sort of cultural supercomputer, and that the act of thinking entirely for myself is ultimately nothing but an illusion, isn't there an enormous amount of value in being more self-aware of the origins of my thinking? Of being more cautious of how others may be influencing my thinking?

isn't there value in working the muscles of the brain, not relying on rote memorization or just trying to please the people around me, but instead trying to create something that inspires people? After all, I think you might say to this person that it may be true that you're nothing more than a byproduct of the ideas of the past. But recognize the fact that one day, the ideas that you have today will be the ideas of the past, and that the people living then will have no choice, apparently, but to be a byproduct of you.

A determined, thoughtful individual can inspire culture with new ideas. And if that's something that you have aspirations of doing, then I guess what Emerson might say is to make sure that you choose for yourself what you want those ideas to be. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.