The American Scholar
Emerson's August 31, 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard — called by Oliver Wendell Holmes "our intellectual Declaration of Independence"
Tradition: American transcendentalism
America's intellectual Declaration of Independence — the scholar's vocation, the proper relation between books and life
Emerson's 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard — called by Oliver Wendell Holmes "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Its argument: the American scholar must rise above mere bookishness ("Books are for the scholar's idle times"), draw on the threefold education of Nature, the Past (books), and Action, and form the proper American scholarly-intellectual life that has not yet been formed but must be. The address is one of the foundational texts of American intellectual nationalism and of the transcendentalist programme.
Author
Editions cited
- The American Scholar (delivered August 31, 1837; published 1837); modern critical edition in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (Belknap/Harvard UP, 1971)
School Embodiments
A founding document of American transcendentalism and the most concentrated statement of its programme for American intellectual life.
"The American Scholar...Man Thinking, must not be subdued by his instruments." (The American Scholar)
The "action" element of Emerson's threefold education anticipates American pragmatism's emphasis on doing as constitutive of thinking.
"Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man." (The American Scholar)
The address shaped Peirce, James, Dewey — pragmatism's self-understanding as a distinctively American philosophy descends from Emerson.
"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding." (The American Scholar)
The 1838 Divinity School Address would carry Emerson's liberal-religious programme further, but the seeds are in The American Scholar.
"In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all." (The American Scholar)
The call to authentic intellectual life against mere imitation has existentialist resonances.
"They are the lords of life, but they are not lords of mine." (The American Scholar, on books)
Emerson's broad American idealism — Nature as the visible expression of mind — runs through the address.
"Nature is to him the metre of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess." (The American Scholar)
The address's attention to felt qualities of the scholarly life — proper reading, proper writing, proper action — has phenomenological depth.
"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk... they are walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." (The American Scholar)
Internal Tensions
The address's nationalism has been variously assessed — some readers welcoming its independence from European intellectual authority, others noting the imperial-American tendencies that follow from it. Its influence on later American thought (Dewey, Trilling, Cornel West) has been continuous.
I. Time
The 1837 American moment of cultural-intellectual maturation; the longer historical time of the American intellectual project.
Attributes
II. Space
Harvard as the immediate audience-space; the broader American intellectual culture as the addressee.
Attributes
III. Matter
The embodied scholar; the material books, fields, and actions of the threefold education.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The scholar as proper observer; the Harvard graduates as the immediate audience.
Attributes
V. Energy
The intellectual energies of the scholarly vocation; the cultural energies of American nationalism.
Attributes
VI. Information
The threefold education of Nature, Books, Action.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The American Scholar resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.