Creation

I found Emerson’s essay on “The American Scholar” to be thoroughly digestible, but a little too filling. What I mean is, the sheer number of ideas he presents here are a bit excessive and hard to juggle. I felt like you could really see the way Emerson “speaks in topic sentences,” in this essay as we mentioned in our class discussion on Monday. However, though the transitions may have felt abrupt at times I felt like I was getting a decent grasp on individual concepts. Though I’m sure Emerson considers himself among Man Thinking, (a fun idea) I couldn’t help but feel slightly amused reading the section about books and how genius is separated from his lackey the bookworm.  I particularly liked this quotation which reminded me of Heidegger’s note on human need to categorize as well as Plato’s ladder:

“There is never a beginning; there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.”

However, I was particularly interested in this idea of Creation being the defining character of genius. I like how he talks about the ‘sacredness’ of creation, yet seems to condemn the created.       “The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”       Later Emerson goes on to talk about how the purpose of books should be to inspire, and would prefer the scholar to set forth to create for himself rather than devote his life to discussing and interpreting other’s works. However, I have been thinking about the act of creation in a different way lately. While I agree that to create is the greatest fulfillment of human potential, I don’t believe investing in others works puts any sort of stunt on our growth as individual thinkers. In fact I find it is quite the contrary. Hell, just through reading the assignments for this class I feel that my mind has been opened to a form of abstract thought that before was almost entirely foreign. If an idea is new to us, if it opens up to a new way of thinking, a way of thinking that we actually invest in and take farther, does it really matter whether or not that idea was organically generated or incepted? I have a lot to say in class. But I’m kind of losing my direction with this blog. See you all tomorrow.