A View of Nature: The Indigenous to The Transcendental

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In the post colonial era we find some clashing of literary styles concerning the value and presentation of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson is an American poet and philosopher. He was the founder of the American Transcendentalist movement, and wrote a great deal on nature. As the 19th century draws to a close we find Walt Whitman and Thoreau also taking up the mantle of nature in their writings. This Transcendental movement was imperative to the shaping of American Literature to come. The movement did, however, introduce a new philosophy based upon the importance of nature, the lessening of religion, and a return to the symbiotic relationship that the Native Americans shared with the world around them. A reverence for nature had come back to America.

In the 19th Century, the American authors begin to look at the natural world as a retreat from the mundane work world. With the advent of mass production, factories, the growing cities, men were becoming more removed from their natural state and nature in general. The Transcendentalist movement, founded by Emerson, and followed by Thoreau, valued nature for its own sake. These authors wrote about the importance of nature for man’s spiritual well-being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson began a movement that would diverge from the popularly held belief that God was sole creator, and benefactor for the natural world. Emerson, coming from a religious background in the church having been a minister in the Unitarian Church, turned away from God’s divinity and maintained that divinity was in nature and man him, or herself. “The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship” (McMichael & Leonard, 2011, pg. 568). This diversion from Christian dogma is what separates Emerson and the transcendentalists from the evangelicals. In essence, Emerson created his own dogma that puts nature in the forefront, rather than human interpretations or man-mad institutions. A key point can be found in Emerson’s view that humans are good, and the evil corrupts, which is a direct counterpoint to Edwards and his puritan movement.

Emerson relied totally upon nature in his writings. Emerson saw nature as an immense and unstoppable force that could be neither tamed nor understood. His quest to understand is what lent him to his quest to find the ultimate truth. A universal truth that transcends man and the world he resides in. Emerson saw a direct relationship between the taming of nature, or the building of roads, cities, institutions, and the loss of our humanity. Emerson was directly influenced by early puritan writers. Emerson, having been a preacher in his early years, shared a direct relationship with those puritan writers of early America. He then turned his back on the faith and set about finding his new faith, nature. Emerson concluded, “To be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry” (McMichael & Leonard, 2011 pg.545). This direct action led to his influential works in and around nature.

Thoreau was another transcendentalist whose writings focused on nature. Thoreau was directly shaped by the tutelage and writings of Emerson. Where Emerson most often postulated about nature, Thoreau immersed himself within it. “Passages from his Journal and other publications reiterate his belief that knowledge alone does not shape our values; we come to care about nature by writing and speaking of it in words that appeal to our emotions and our senses. ‘A history of animated nature must itself be animated,’ he recorded in his Journal in 1850” (Spratt, 2012). Thoreau felt that we should work with nature instead of against it. This immersion into nature shows that Thoreau viewed his relation to nature as a symbiotic one. “Thoreau sees the human mind—the imagination itself—as biologically part and parcel of the body and the organic world at large. We are naturally given to understand the world neither on the basis of matter or meaning alone but by the relational dynamics between the two” (Spratt, 2012).

Despite sharing many of the same views, Native Americans and Transcendentalists like Emerson or Thoreau, we’re separated more by culture than belief. Where Thoreau believed in the “joyous present moment,” Native Americans were well steeped into the past rather than the future. It was a cultural difference that separates the Transcendentalist and the Native American, not a spiritual one. It is hard to compare the night in jail Thoreau spent in jail in Civil Disobedience to the massacres at Wounded Knee. “The Native American is in the unhappy position of having strong awareness of what Transcendentalism calls the "inner spark of divinity" while at the same time possessing little strength against outside forces that would quell it” (Brulatour, 1999).

The transcendentalist view that nature is paramount to spirituality shares a direct link with the early nature worship of the Native Americans, and for this purpose, the Iroquois. The traditional Native American view of nature is a direct influence to Emerson. Much of the philosophy of Emerson that was found in his work Nature relies heavily upon early Native American nature worship. Emerson wrote, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature” (McMichael & Leonard, 2011, pg.577), and this personifies his entire philosophy. Emerson felt as though the laws of nature, and his own constitution based upon nature, are the guiding force within the universe. This sentiment is shared with the Native American and Iroquois when in the form of their own government do they enlist nature as the primary entity.

Despite the differences between the puritan and transcendental movements the latter was still influenced by the former. Even though the dogma of the two philosophies is radically different they still share some common ground and influence. Both find a resilient beauty in nature, despite a different view on the source of the beauty, and attribute this to the work of God in different ways. A heartfelt belief in God mired both philosophies into a single point of influence. Emerson saw his newfound philosophy as a progression from religious dogma; it was a logical conclusion to an outdated philosophy. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world” (McMichael & Leonard, 2011, pg. 577), and thus Emerson distances himself from the puritanical view.

The Transcendental movement, though its inception was founded in religion, steered itself away from the church. “The Transcendental Movement denounced the age-old doctrines of the Church as man-made superstitions” (Jahanpour, 2007). That