The American Scholar

“The American Scholar” is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson transposed into an essay; it is often classified under transcendentalism. The occasion for the lecture was an address that Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837.

The subject of the lecture is the role of the American intellectual, as distinct from the European intellectual. Emerson calls for an intellectualism that is engaged, optimistic, and forward-thinking. He believes that American scholars have been overly dependent on their European forebears, and that they need to forge a role of their own. He warns against the “sluggard intellects” (Paragraph 1) that are a result of overspecialization, and notes that “[m]an is thus metamorphosed into a thing” (Paragraph 5), rather than a full man.

Emerson views the role of the American intellectual in regard to nature, books, and action; these three different influences form three separate numbered sections of the lecture. In the first section, Emerson examines the intellectual’s relation to nature. He discusses the process by which scholars learn how to classify the natural world and to see the laws and systems behind the apparent disorderliness of nature: “To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself.