“The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
In his speech, The American Scholar, Emerson describes how, over time, man has become less of an active thinker and more of a passive sponge — soaking in the knowledge around him, the thoughts from scholars before him, and not stopping for a moment and thinking to himself, “And what do I think of this?”
Emerson uses a series of things to convey his idea. In this paragraph, Emerson describes Man Thinking as a “fountain of power,” evoking images of waterfalls and cascades and currents, powerful ripples of water rushing along in a single-minded path. And then, he goes on to describe that power subdivided, “spilled into drops and cannot be gathered.” I, for one, thought immediately of a spilled glass, its contents splashed across the floor with no hope of ever collecting every single droplet; no, spilled water is only to be mopped away. I think that could be something that Emerson tries to convey here, in a sense that all of this potential — this fountain of power — has been desiccated.
He goes on to say that this society now is more of a walking Frankenstein than a man; parts of a whole — “a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” — that carry on meaninglessly.
“Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.”
Emerson objectifies man here; man becomes nothing but a vessel through which is job is carried out. “The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship” serves to emphasize how, now, it is so easy for people to slip into these roles, work mindlessly and become nothing more than machines.
It is interesting because just after reading The American Scholar, I found an article that mentions something I hadn’t thought about before. How often now, does one simply ingest what others are saying? Even when I watch YouTube videos, just after the video finishes, I find myself scrolling down into the comments section to see what others are saying. Rarely do I stop and think to myself, “What did I think of that?” And when reading, I’ll look up online the symbolism found in my book without pausing to think for myself.
The article, entitled “Humanism and Terror,” touched on a variety of points, one of which was the ignorance that so many citizens in America have. For example, the interviews of Secretary Rumsfeld and General Pace regarding Abu Ghraib. While discussing the evasiveness of the officials’ interview, the author of the article mentions that there is a “gulf between what officials say and what the facts are… no one is willing to read the reports.” You might think of James Clapper and his perjury, or something of the like: a situation where there are wrongdoings in the world but no one goes so far as to research or listen and find out.
And then, Emerson goes on to describe action. He illustrates the process of turning present into past (or rather, what you do and what you experience, into thought stored in the mind) as an action.
“It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.”
By comparing this transformation of experience into thought to the transformation of raw materials into refined products, Emerson implies that this moulding is a very complicated process. Mulberry leaves and satin are two very different things. The process of this transformation is the act of refining the raw products that we began with. In a sense, it is taking the best of the start and then moulding it into something better. Does that mean, then, that our thoughts are more idyllic and more polished in our minds? In comparison to the actions that they were derived from, that is.
There is a theory that memories can change over time. Imagine each event in your mind as a piece of clay, and every time you go back to look over it, you must touch the clay, inadvertently reshaping the stuff, even if it is just a bit. Theoretically (and this has to do something with neurons refiring and your synapses releasing neurotransmitters), your memories change every time you cast your mind back to reflect on them. If this is true, and it may not be, then with Emerson in mind, one might think that memories become rather halcyon over time, worn smooth and polished soft after being handled over and over again. Is that why everything seems so much more wonderful in retrospect?
Emerson mentions that this “manufacture goes forward at all hours.” I think of a large factory, perhaps in colonial America, pumping out steel and iron, constantly smoking and puffing, working tirelessly to produce millions upon millions of pounds of metal. In this case, Emerson applies that to our minds, working ceaselessly to continually change action into memory.
“The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body... In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind... So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.”
Here, Emerson further juxtaposes the past and the present by describing the past as “pictures in the air.” I think of faded polaroids, floating down from where someone has dropped them out of a window, very loose and abstract things that you watch idly from where you sit on a porch. And then he says that present lies “in hand.” The present is tangible and palpable while thoughts of the past seem to be less concrete. Again, refrains of the idea that memories change and morph over time.
When Emerson describes the present action turning into thought, he calls it a ripe fruit detaching. I see an image of a fruit falling from the branches of a shady tree, the fruit dropping through the air, falling from present into past, through this air and space from one thing into the next.
Sources:
"The American Scholar" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Humanism and Terror (What Are You Going to Do With That?" by Mark Danner
