CONCEPT OF NATURE IN THE WORKS OF MARX AND EMERSON PHILOSOPHY ESSAY   pt3   1700w

Nature as Spirit

Emerson’s concept of nature is very different to that of Marx. Nature, which includes “all other men and my own body”q9 is opposed to the concept of “soul”. Thus, in Emersonian metaphysics “reality”, consists of a Cartesian dualism, which distinguishes between mind and body.

Although Emerson recognises that the term “nature” can be used as a term to represent the static side of reality, saying that “nature, in the more common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man, space, the air, the river, the leaf” (Emerson, 36), it is more significant that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit” (Emerson, 39) The crucial relationship is still that existing between man and nature, but between spiritual nature and spiritual man, not between material nature and material man. This nature is also somewhat ephemeral and unknowable:

“What is nature to him (the scholar)? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always a circular power returning into itself…so entire, so boundless” q10

Because Nature appears as God, or pure spirit, it is, unlike Marx’s concept of nature as essentially material, amenable to rational and analytical scientific investigation, as can be evidenced in Emerson’s attitude towards the study of history:

” along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily forward,- that of the external world” (Emerson, 169), but, in complete contrast to Marx, he says of this: “Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder its thoughts for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day” (Emerson, 171)

Whereas for Marx, the study of natural history reveals the laws of nature, and the physical