The American Scholar

The American Scholar is a speech that Ralph Waldo Emerson was held on August 31, 1837 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been invited to talk about his new work Nature, which had been published a year earlier, in which he opened a new perspective on the world of adolescent Society of America. Sixty years after the Declaration of Independence, the American culture of the European was still strongly committed and Emerson offered probably for the first time in the history of the country a visionary philosophical framework in order to escape the pressures and emerge a new, own American identity.

Summary

Emerson refers to transzendentalistische and romantic locations to convey his position and to explain the true relationship of an American scholar of nature. Some key ideas illustrate the focus of this vision:

• We are all, like the hand divides into five fingers, fragments of a larger creature, which is humanity itself, a new and sublime doctrine.
• An individual can live in one of two states. In the one, the busy, shared or degenerate state, it has not itself, but identifies with his activity or a monotonous employment; in the other, the right condition, it is applicable to man, one with the entire human race.
• In order to achieve this higher state of mind, the American scholar must discard old ideas and think for themselves, to a thinking person to be instead of a simple thinker or worse a parrot the thoughts of other people, a victim of society, of a lazy mind this continent.
• The American Scholar is a thinking person under this concept of a people committed to clearly grasp the world in the eye, not from traditional / historical perspectives influenced, and constantly expand his understanding of the world through a fresh look, never the reputation of the people succumb.

• The training of scholars consists of three objectives:

• To explore the nature and understand, which includes the mind and person of the scholar.
• To study the spirit of the past: to read literature, to look at art, to examine institutions.
• To act and interact with the world; not become a reclusive scholar who commented from afar.
• The task of the scholar is to inspire people to call and lead by showing them facts amidst appearances.

Importance

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. stated that this speech America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence " was. This speech, which built on the attention that the essay had received Nature, Emerson's popularity and strengthened weight in America for the rest of his life. The magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society The American Scholar is named after this speech.