Emerson’s Nature and My Emotions

The air is chilly as I open the door of the SUV that took me to Rocky Mountain National Park this Saturday in February, although perhaps not quite as freezing cold as the snow covered landscape would suggest. I step out of the car and into the parking lot of the Bear Lake trailhead, a popular spot in the Park to leave the paved road behind and begin an outdoor adventure, taking you farther into the wilderness of these enormous mountains.

I strap on my snowshoes and follow the rest of my group out of the parking lot and onto the trail that will take us a couple miles or so uphill to our destination of Emerald Lake. Along the way, we snowshoe past stunning vistas of expansive, sun-kissed valleys and directly over the frozen Dream Lake. At that time of year, with it frozen over and covered in the same deep snowdrifts as everything else, you would hardly know there was a lake there at all, save for it still being an open expanse among the towering exposed rock of the surrounding mountain peaks.

As we arrive at the final lake that we will be seeing today, I am even more stunned by its beauty than I was by the other frozen lakes, and even more stunned than I was preparing myself to be. Ahead of me is an even vaster open expanse that gives way to steep slopes of snow and ice, which in turn abruptly give way to rugged cliffs of exposed stone that reach up to the blue sky, how far up I do not know. It is in this moment that I reach something that is more than just admiration for the natural beauty around me. I feel something stronger, a true sense of calm and a genuine feeling of love for the surrounding landscape.

Is it normal that spending time in nature brings about this type of strong feeling? Does spending time in nature have the ability to do even more than bring us a sense of calm and love, but instead to cleanse us in a way, to bring about a sense of goodness for ourselves and our souls? This question and idea is certainly not a product of my mind, but instead is something that can be partially traced back to American writers of the early and mid 19th Century, who began considering this in their written works and built off of earlier writings about nature to attempt to offer an answer and explanation to this profound question.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the prominent American essayist of the mid 19th Century Romantic Period, attempted to answer this question in his essay Nature. But to understand the ideas Emerson addressed in Nature, it is important to have a sense of what Euro-American ideas about nature were before the Romantic Period. Typology, the interpretation of real world events as signs from God, held very strong in early colonial America, especially among Emerson’s Puritan ancestors in New England. These fervently religious people viewed the natural environment of their new North American home as something to tame, especially compared to the less quote-unquote “wild” landscape they had left behind in Europe.

The combination of their strongly held religious views and the unfamiliar environment they were living in led them to see events and happenings in nature as signs from God. In one prominent example of this thinking, colonial Massachusetts governor John Winthrop wrote of observing a mouse fend off a snake. Winthrop wrote of a pastor’s interpretation of the event, saying “the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor contemptible people which God had brought hither, which would overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom.” He interpreted this improbable event as a divine message that the Puritans he was leading, represented by the mouse, would overcome the challenges they were facing in their new land, represented by the snake, seeing a natural event as a divine message from God.

By Emerson’s time, ideas about the natural world had evolved. The rapid industrialization of North American cities, especially in Emerson’s home state of Massachusetts, combined with the natural world being tamed and made far less dangerous than it had been, led writers and philosophers of his time to consider the natural world as something to be appreciated. Emerson directly addressed the older typological way of interpreting the natural world, writing in Nature that “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes.” Emerson then asks “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” This pushes back on the Puritan’s ideas by asking what prevents ordinary people from experiencing the natural world themselves instead of just seeing it as something that God created and communicates through, with the older logic leaving nature as something that humans cannot come to their own understanding of.

Individuals coming to their own understanding of the natural world is a big part of what Emerson writes of in Nature. Emerson believed in the idea of the “noble doubt,” that because humans are limited to their five senses and because everyone sees the word slightly differently, there will always be doubt about how much we can know about the real world. In that understanding, we all live not in an objective world that God created but instead in a subjective world built from our individual ideas about what the world is like. Therefore, we are all free to see the natural world as having any kind of meaning we believe it has.

Emerson applied this idea to the natural world by writing “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature,” saying that nature is something that is not made clear to everyone as an objective truth and divine gift, but instead is something that most adults are unable to appreciate in their industrialized world lives, living farther away from nature than humans ever had before. Emerson then says that “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,” framing time spent in nature as a way to bring balance to one’s senses and life amid a rapidly changing world.

Emerson furthers this idea later in the essay by writing more directly of the powerful affect that he thinks nature can have on us, saying “Whole Floras, all Linnæus’ and Buffon’s volume, are but dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner.” This is a somewhat complicated sentence, referencing a French naturalist and Swedish botanist of the 1700s. What Emerson argues through that reference is that simply studying nature and putting your findings into a book, as that naturalist and botanist did, leads to a dulled down and unexciting view of nature’s true power. However, actually spending time in nature, seeing and coming to an understanding yourself of the habits of plants and noise of insects, instead of just reading about them in a book, leads to nothing less than an overall positive affect on one’s life.

It is notable that Emerson referred to observing nature there as a kind of “philosophy.” Towards the end of the Nature essay, Emerson begins to present a more radical version of his argument that nature is good for the soul. He writes “The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take…It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated….but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.” Far from the Puritan idea of seeing messages from God in natural events, Emerson instead sees the whole world and its natural beauty as a representation of God itself.

This outlook, Emerson says, is in fact more desirable than the view that Christianity holds of an unchanging world that was created by God in one fell swoop, “painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act.” In this way, Emerson’s most radical view of nature is revealed, especially for the far more religious time that he was writing in. To Emerson, spending time in nature and among natural beauty is not only good for our souls. Instead, this act offers something far larger than that. Nature, in both its viciousness and beauty, its change and its eternalness, can offer a complete alternative to traditional religion. Free from the view that God is a separate being who created the world the way it is, Emerson says that anyone is free to instead spend time in nature and see God within the natural world.

As strange as it is to me, I know that many people do not enjoy spending time in nature, preferring the trappings of the man-made world. But for those that do, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature gives insight into one man’s view of what the natural world meant to him, and gives us a unique way to think about what affect nature has on us as humans. Nature says that the strong emotions that being in nature bring to me, Emerson and anyone else are not only natural and good for ourselves, but are in fact the most natural and best way of considering the world and our place in it, to the point of being, in Emerson’s view, an outright replacement for more formal religious thought. Through Emerson’s writing, I am able to better understand why nature brings me such a sense of calm and love  and consider more deeply what it means to observe the natural world and my place in it, as not a spectator, but a participant.