With only two sections in NATURE to go — and a very short one entitled “Spirit” on tap for today — it’s tempting to finish up this book now and move on to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. I’m not going to do that because Emerson’s final section, “Prospects,” rivals “Idealism” (which I covered yesterday) for complexity and density.  So instead, I’m going to take stock of NATURE up to this point and set up tomorrow’s conclusion.

NATURE has surprised me. I didn’t expect the piece to be so difficult — and I didn’t expect some of my essays to turn into exegesis. Yesterday’s essay, in particular, had to go deep because it took multiple readings for me to gain a grasp of the material.  I knew when I started with Emerson that I’d find shadows of Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare and Kant in his work and knew how much he inspired Whitman, Nietzsche and Thoreau, but I wasn’t prepared for how much Emerson anticipated 20th Century philosophy, including Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

A little reading yesterday brought to my attention voluminous writing from Stanley Cavell on these connections. That interested me, because Cavell was a mentor to director Terrence Malick, whose film THE TREE OF LIFE was the subject of my first Emerson essay. That seems like validation to me and I was tempted to dig a little deeper, but then I remembered Emerson’s opening call. To seek out second-hand interpretations is the most un-Emerson path a reader can take.

Similarly, I advise anyone reading my essays to understand what they are and what they are not. I am not attempting to uncover Emerson for anyone but myself. If what I write piques your interest, the logical next step is for you to read Emerson and make your own discoveries.

These essays — and those in the Montaigne Project — aren’t literary criticism. I can’t quite explain what I’m attempting to do in these posts, but I think Nietzsche comes close to capturing it in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

I make no claim to be producing great philosophy on these pages (anyone with analytic philosophical training no doubt dismisses these essays as not-philosophy, although Nietzsche would scold me for these statement — he loathed modesty.) But I do believe that I’m creating something of a memoir in these projects. These essays are the best reflection I can capture of my day to day thoughts. These are the issues that haunt me, these are the other works that seem related to the subject and, from time to time, I drop in experience from my life to illuminate my statements. I don’t write about my life much because I simply don’t think about it very often.

Which brings me to “Spirit” and the greatest difficulty that I’m having with NATURE — I’m not a man of faith. I find Emerson’s take on religion fascinating and in some ways appealing, but at times it all appears like a massive rationalization for avoiding atheism. If we define God down to the point where the Divine is a process and a mood, haven’t we actually killed Him? If we make God contingent on the natural laws of science, don’t we make his existence contingent on future scientific discovery?

By contrast, I find Kierkegaard’s view of religion much more logical — you cannot make a rational claim for God, you simply have to take the leap of faith. There are limits to our understanding of the universe, there are mysteries not only before our eyes, but in the quantum mechanics of life and in the dark matter of space. And the more we know about the world, the less rational claims for God become. At this time, a scientifically plausible definition of God would be a Creator who set off the evolutionary and entropic processes of our universe (and perhaps others), then walked away and let them grow at will. That universe as petri dish approach would suggest that we’re mere microbes in the eyes of God. Which only raises more questions — like why a Deity capable of creating life would bother experimenting with it, unless there are multiple bored Deities competing to see who can grow the most disgusting mold in their celestial dorm room.

This view, of course, falls right into the anthropomorphic trap, defining God with human motives. We can’t escape an understanding of God that excludes us as creations in his image. Any God that doesn’t create us in his image becomes unknowable and irrelevant to our lives … and any “plan” of this God would no more include us than we would include the well being of dust mites in our day-to-day thinking.

Emerson is on to this, even if he cannot let go of his convoluted faith. He writes:

We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

But just when I’m about to become discouraged in Emerson’s thinking, he throws out this glorious twisted metaphor of God:

Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being and the evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry.

The most memorable line is the one about the divine dream, but I didn’t want to isolate the sentence because everything around it is important. The part about idealism is what Emerson covered in the last section, but it’s condensed and clarified beautifully here. Matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.  Everything in the universe is in a state of flux, decay and transformation. Heraclitus has been translated many ways, but I prefer this one because it sounds most like The Dude in BIG LEBOWSKI:

Everything flows and nothing abides.

 

Or, you can’t step into the same river twice. There is still water and silt in the stream, but not the same water and silt. The mind is part of the nature of things, so it too is subject to error and entropy … but also to radical discovery and transformation. You can’t really know anyone, yourself included. As Nietzsche and Freud will tell us later, you can’t really know why you took any action in life, you can only guess and rationalize, fitting the past into an accepted narrative definition.

Then we get the amazing “divine dream” metaphor. We are accustomed to waking from various human dreams, finding enlightenment, ovecoming misconceptions. But here Emerson completely turns the metaphor on its head.  It’s in our day-to-day understanding of the world, our relation to Dasein to use the language of Heidegger, that we exist in God’s grace, the Holy conception of the world. If it had ended there, the line would be profound.  But it keeps finding greater depth, because we have the ability to awaken from this graceful dream and discover reality, the glories and certainties of the day.

Going back to my MATRIX analogy, what Emerson is saying here is that the MATRIX is God’s grace. It’s God’s dream that we live in and we have been given the gift of walking around in it.  But, at the same time, we have the freedom to step out of this dream and if we choose to do so, we can discover the beauty of reality. This is a highly Gnostic way of thinking. We can become enlightened higher versions of humans who can see the world as it is.  Like the Gnostics and later Kierkegaard, Emerson believes that this enlightenment can come from flashes of faith, but he also believes that it can come from a deep understanding of science or a poetic view of life.

The quote closes with a line that proposes idealism as an alternate theory to “carpentry and chemistry.” Maybe I’m way off base here, but I read that to mean that Emerson is pre-dating Darwin with an alternative theory of Creation. He doesn’t explicitly state the alternative, but he shows remarkable insight in sensing that a scientific theory is out there, waiting to be discovered.

Again, this is just my reading of Emerson, dependent on my personal thoughts and biases. As this chapter unfolds, it’s clear that Emerson never intends to walk away from God. To me, though, this God that he describes can be substituted with the phrase natural universe and would lose nothing in translation. Take this quote for example:

The Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power.

Going back to my earlier thought about the anthropomorphic trap, Emerson understands this as well, which is why he wants us to find an original view of God, not dependent on history:

We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine.

How do we escape this trap? Through science and poetry, we find a way to clear the earth of human buzzing and see the world as it really exists:

You cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men.

All of this sets up the final section tomorrow, where Emerson attempts to obliterate Aristotle with originality and intuition.

If Morpheus meets Emerson, tells him about the Matrix and asks whether he wants to take the blue pill or the red pill, here’s how he would respond:

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space—or whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me.

This isn’t an “ignorance is bliss” response to the challenge.  Emerson comes down firmly on the side of sensations. This is the world I know and exist in, these are the sensations I feel in it, so what difference does it make whether this sensual world is in fact “real”?

Of course I’m not really being fair to Emerson because the question wasn’t posed to him the same way it was to Neo. He’s responding directly to Plato, Descartes, Kant and all philosophers through the ages who’ve argued that we exist in a shadow world of appearances. But in philosophical terms, the question is the same.

Emerson takes the Descartes response, that God would never jest with us by creating a false world. Maybe not, but reality show TV producers certainly do so every day. The creation of one-off worlds is a major industry in the contemporary world. (I just felt a bit of fleeting deja vu typing this paragraph, as if I’ve already dreamed this essay or composed it in a previous email to a friend.) Emerson further defends his faith in the phenomenal world by writing:

Any distrust of the permanence of laws would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect.

Speaking of the faculties of man, I read a piece in Scientific American this morning by Antonio Damasio, who wrote about how specific brain damage can hinder the ability to comprehend time. A 46 year old patient who suffered hippocampus and temporal lobe damage could not form new factual memories nor recall old ones.  He inhabited a permanent present. Time had no meaning to this person.

Thinking again of our postmodern condition, our new understanding of the physical world compared to the physical world Emerson could comprehend might lead to just such a paralysis or disorientation.  We can’t make the kinds of declarative statements about what the world is and how it behaves that Emerson could. Physics can’t really account for the existence of time, for example, and maybe these patients who lose all sense of past and future have a stronger grip on reality.

I think that Emerson senses this when he writes:

The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit.

It sounds like he’s defending this permanence.  But next he writes:

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

Next comes this very beautiful passage:

The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

This “reverential withdrawing of nature before its God” is a strange phrase that almost sounds like Heidegger.  We can’t ignore it because Emerson has called these the best moments of life.  This is something important.  But what is Emerson saying?

He tries first to describe a similar sensation. He talks about the joy of passing a familiar place on horseback, but we actually have better examples today.  Think of when you’re on an airplane and look out the window trying to find your house or other familiar buildings. Better yet, think of using Google Earth and zooming from a space view of planet Earth all the way down to your house. My four-year old son Finn could spend all day doing this on the iPad. Seeing this vast expanse of natural space shrink to something specific and familiar is thrilling. It gives you a sense of being alive in something bigger and more important, but it also lends context to your life. You live in a far bigger, more fascinating world than the tiny place you walk around in, almost in a daydream at times, day by day.

Here’s how Emerson describes the sensation:

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt, from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

And now Emerson makes one of his most surprising and insightful turns.  That sensation of seeing the world out of context is precisely the work of a poet:

By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.

Emerson believes that philosophers find this truth about the world as well, but by different means:

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

The scientist too learns to distrust personal sensation and observation. This ability to step outside of yourself and observe the natural world without being influenced by sensation is critical for gaining a genuine understanding of the world. It is by escaping our day to day phenomenal experience that we find bliss:

We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity.

Of course Emerson has a religious goal in mind with this theory — he wants to take a stand for a type of faith that doesn’t need history or popular rituals:

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul.

So let’s return then to Morpheus’s question: does Emerson really want the blue pill? Emerson is in search of truth and beauty.  Through science, poetry, philosophy and eternal wonder about the universe, Emerson believes bliss can be attained. That is not blue pill resignation. It’s not about the joys of eating a virtual steak.

By the end of this chapter, I think Emerson talked himself into taking the red pill.

The world is naturally messy. Things fall apart, but not only that, dust settles, grass grows, garbage containers fill and dishes must be washed. Civilization isn’t simple and the larger and more complex societies become, the more expensive they are to maintain.

So the size of government must grow to meet those needs. If a city is going to remain open for business after a snowstorm, the city government will need a fleet of snow plows and mountains of salt. That salt corrodes the pavement, which then must be patched and re-plowed.  Cities are dynamic entities — neighborhoods rise and fall constantly, which means that city services must be adjusted constantly.

And this is just the local level. Move up to the federal level, and government has to inspect food, test pharmaceutical drugs for safety and efficacy, make sure drinking water is clean and inspect cargo containers entering the country. None of this is efficient, but that’s the way of the world — maintaining a modern global democracy takes effort.

If something we call progress exists, we can thank entropy for it. Because of entropy, the world becomes disorganized and things decay. This maintenance requires work, which demands wages, and those wages lead to spending and investing that grows the economy. It’s not all about government either. Your computer or car breaks down and eventually it looks cheaper to buy a new one than to keep fixing the old.

In short, entropy isn’t something to be feared, it should be revered. We should be grateful that nature demands our constant attention. We should be cheerful about our daily opportunity to build the world anew, even if it breaks down again by the days’ end.

Emerson says that this daily interaction with the world is what teaches us how to understand it and how to gain what we call common sense:

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

While it’s true that we have lost some connection with the physical world, our daily interactions with the virtual world provide similar opportunities for understanding. We don’t have to buy into the magical illusions. We can marvel at the electrical power that our cellphone caries around in its tiny battery instead of becoming infuriated when it starts to run dry. When we’re talking and the call drops, we can remember what a telephone call meant in our childhood compared to what it is now and recognize that we’re talking on a subway moving under the city. It’s only because systems tend to break down over time — in this case the Bell System — that innovation becomes possible and necessary. It’s only the deficiencies in our current system that creates space for better products and services later.

The combination of human will and curiosity has led to astounding discoveries. We keep finding ways to manipulate and shape nature to our needs. Emerson is sanguine about this progress and sees it almost as a birthright:

Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes at last only a realized will—the double of the man.

That’s one way to put it.  Another is that nature is out to kill us and succeeds one at a time. Our drive to keep nature’s dark victory at bay compels us to conquer the natural world. Sometimes it leads us to do foolish things, such as building expensive houses on hillsides that will inevitably we washed away in mudslides. Or it tempts us into an addiction to fossil fuel energy that upsets the planet’s ecosystem. But every new challenge creates new opportunity for innovation.

Emerson sees this interplay between humans and nature as highly religious:

Therefore is Nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted.

I don’t question Emerson for drawing these conclusions. First, he does so based on the science of his age.  Second, he fitting the world into a narrative pattern that other humans have chosen for centuries. People yearn for stories to explain the complexity around them. But Emerson takes a very interesting turn next, back to where his essay began:

In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end is essential to any being.

Instead of matching up nature with the historical religions of our past, Emerson suggests a completely new version of God. Emerson’s God is an instrumental God — a God that not only exists in the details, but also in the raw materials of life. To Emerson, God isn’t just in the tree that becomes timber that builds the house for a family, God is also in the data that is minded to suggest a pattern that leads to a new financial instrument that creates higher returns for a pension fund, so a teacher can retire and afford to send her grandchildren to college. God doesn’t stand beside human creativity and help spark it, God is the creativity and the material that suggests it.

But this God works in mysterious ways — so much so that Emerson is the kind of believer atheists tend to appreciate. Emerson’s God isn’t necessarily all knowing and all loving. He can be a God of tedium and annoyances:

What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest—and all to form the Hand of the mind—to instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!” The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate—debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

Reading this passage, I’m not surprised that Nietzsche loved Emerson so much. Emerson was a Theist of eternal return. He maintained a cheerful disposition even when pondering the most soul crushing are aspects of the human experience. Yes, debt and credit are potentially spirit crushing devices, but even they are the stuff of God. Be grateful for what we can accomplish with these tools.

Emerson’s God inspires human greatness. He doesn’t crush us under the weight of moral laws, he starts a process that demands constant human attention and innovation and then gives us the sparks to keep moving, to stay busy and to lack satisfaction with our successes.

Harold Bloom considers Emerson’s Transcendentalism to be the true American religion. As a skeptic, I have no problem with that. Open up a church of Emerson in my community and I’ll cheerfully take my family every Sunday.

In case you think I just invented the discontinuity between Emerson’s world and ours, here’s what he wrote in NATURE about an age where words disconnect from meaning:

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires—the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Yes, he even brings up the currency, which should make Ron Paul followers happy. Just as Emerson believes in dollar bills backed by gold, he believes that words have fixed, original meaning:

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance …. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Taking it even further, Emerson then argues that the world has deep poetic meaning:

It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

And Emerson argues that if you take away this poetic meaning, human beings and life itself lose all meaning:

These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.

As the first quote would imply, we’ve lost this poetic connection and with it, the core of our being. Emerson, however, is confident that this connection can be restored by strong poets:

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.

The way to accomplish this is to tie language to science — to draw analogies from our understanding of the physical world:

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics.

Herein lies the problem. The physical world that we know today is dramatically different from the one that Emerson inhabited. He wrote NATURE before Darwin, before the second law of thermodynamics, before Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. This easy-to-understand ethical world of Newtonian physics no longer exists. Not surprisingly, our language has been overrun by cliche.

I agree with Emerson, however, and want to offer a way to recapture the language and its connection to nature. I believe that attempts to connect language to evolution have been rife with error, while analogies to relativity can be overextended far too easily. So instead, I’m going to focus on the second law of thermodynamics, specifically the issue of entropy.

In essence, entropy is about heat death and how areas of higher temperature will always flow towards those with lower temperature. Entropy is also about disorder and how every system will become increasing chaotic over time.

While most physical processes in the universe can move either forward or backward, entropy gives a direction to actions — it always flows toward heat death and chaos. Many cosmologists believe that entropy is the process most responsible for the evolution of life on earth and if there’s something akin to progress in the world, it’s really entropy doing it’s job.

So let me suggest something about the global protests of 2011. You could argue that these protests were about freedom or were cries of economic despair. But I believe they are signposts of continuing entropy around the world. Our institutions are crumbling. We switch back and forth in the U.S. between liberal and conservative approaches, but neither gets to the heart of our entropic problems. Liberals cannot root out the money corruption of the system and conservatives lack the power to clean up layers of government that have become bloated and ineffective.

The two parties are, in essence, promising the American people to create a Maxwell’s Demon, a device to fix an entropic problem by way of reform without upsetting the system as a whole. But Maxwell’s Demon is a science fiction fantasy and so too are all efforts to reform a system nearing heat death.

Perhaps Thomas Jefferson was right, maybe every American generation needs its own revolution. Maybe we need a global reboot of the financial system. Maybe we need an American Constitutional Convention. The risks of such an approach are high, naturally, but if we want to bring dramatic change to the system, it cannot happen as the vitality of our system continues to leak.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote today:

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event — the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

It’s the entropy, stupid. And now we have to decide whether we have the courage to start anew or whether we going to keep muddling along with a leaky system, swinging wildly election after election from one failure to reform after another.

I am always doubtful about whether this world that I am in now is the real one. Somewhere in me, I feel there is a world that may not have been this way.

This quote from Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is an all-too-familiar expression of the postmodern condition. It’s an idea that stretches back at least a half century, as elucidated in Jorge Luis Borges’s story ON EXACTITUDE IN SCIENCE, where Borges describes a empire that created a map so detailed that it was as large as the empire itself. When the empire decayed, all that was left was the map.

We live in the age of this metaphor — the map of Borges lost empire, the simulacra of THE MATRIX, the time-lost decaying world of Philip K. Dick’s UBIK. The world seems to have lost connection to everything real. Our economy rises and falls on the value of financial instruments whose value is derived from other financial instruments, tied to currency backed by nothing but collective faith in those notes.

Computer game designers are racing to create alternate reality games, in essence wrapping a video game layer around everyday life. A game being designed by Will Wright, developer of SimCity and The Sims, is called HiveMind. Here’s the concept:

What Wright hopes to do is harvest a bunch of data and then use that to suggest ways to entertain a person. Once HiveMind gathers this kind of data on a lot of people, it could go into a kind of matchmaking service, as happens with sites that collect dating information. HiveMind could mine the data and discover useful things about its players.

Or, in other words, take the blue pill and walk around in the same boring old world, or take the red one, surrender everything about yourself, including how much money you have in your pocket, and enter HiveMind. Given the way the world is today, why would anyone chose to enter a world that is only more so the way we live already?

As an alternative, Internet rescue camps are propping up all over Asia, which promise to cure kids of their web addictions. Meanwhile, a growing number of plugged-in netizens are actively seeking out ways to unplug. Getting away from the future may be the wave of the future.

There’s a great yearning in the world to return to a comprehensible world and lives that existing within a natural rhythm. This lost world is described in Emerson’s NATURE. Emerson describes a world where art, language and truth are mirrors of nature. Human misery, now something we medicate away, is described as being out of harmony with nature:

The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens.

But even the city dweller, Emerson says, is capable of returning to a solid mind by returning to nature:

The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

I’m not a nature lover myself. I’m actually closer to Woody Allen’s description of being at two with nature. But Emerson’s book holds insights for our current condition by accurately describing the world as it existed in our not too distant past. Here, for example, is how Emerson views technology:

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus’s bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon!

Those technologies of the early 19th century were extrapolations of nature. But today, we seem to be adding layers of unreality on top of each other. We’re not only losing the original connection between a convenience and it’s natural form, we’re losing the simple human connections as well. For example at work, I communicate to someone five feet away via a global digital network.

The disconnect is even greater when we turn to the arts. Art is no longer a representation of natural forms — which is good. We now have the full human imagination at our disposal when bringing our visions to life. But this break isn’t without a cost. Emerson was able to describe aesthetic taste simply in the 1830s:

Almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them.

The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.

This belief in the order of arts leads to a belief in the rational order of life:

The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Today, the arts are a reflection of discontinuity. In the 1980 film THE STUNT MAN, Eli Cross, a film director played by Peter O’Toole, marvels at the special effects at his disposal and exclaims “If God could do the things we do, he’d be a happy man.” This is the nature of modern and postmodern art, a God-like belief in creating the world anew. It would have been inconceivable to Emerson:

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

An artistic sensibility for contemporary human is something that must be attained and refined. As I’ll note tomorrow in the NATURE section about language, I believe that finding the true and beautiful today means fighting against cliche and ideologically-determined reality. But even if you can get to that point, you will not reach where Emerson believes art should direct us. Something has been lost and we may never rediscover it:

No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

I’m tempted to kick off my Emerson Project in a conventional way — proposing a thesis, explaining why Ralph Waldo Emerson is especially relevant to this moment and why I chose him as a follow up to Michel de Montaigne. But that would not be in the spirit of my Montaigne Project and would not be justice for Emerson either.

From the first paragraph of his first book, NATURE, Emerson calls on his readers to look at the world with fresh eyes:

OUR AGE is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

And so, I will look at Emerson with fresh eyes. I’m going to work through the Modern Library’s ESSENTIAL WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON in order, day by day. Some pieces will take longer than others. Like my Montaigne Project, I will write an essay a day until the book is complete. Unlike Montaigne, however, I may revisit pieces as I go or jump off onto periodic diversions. If I learned anything from the Montaigne Project it’s that I’m working toward the start of a project, not it’s completion. Only after all the essays are written will I begin to have an idea what I might do with the pieces next.

Consider it mere happenstance that I chose Emerson. If there’s meaning to this selection and the essays that follow, let the text reveal them to me in surprising ways. I wish for the insight to discover that meaning and to write about it in an interesting, unique way.

Emerson’s first pamphlet-sized book is entitled NATURE and in reading it, I couldn’t help but to compare it to Terrence Malick’s 2011 film THE TREE OF LIFE. It’s a happy coincidence that I watched THE TREE OF LIFE for the second time this weekend, because like Emerson, Malick is obsessed with the meaning of nature and humans’ place within it.

Emerson has a fascinating definition of nature that compares and contrast with Malick’s in interesting ways. Here, he describes it as everything outside of ourselves:

Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.

Another way of stating this: nature is everything in the universe that works to deny solipsism. How do we know that we aren’t just brains in vats, that the world around us isn’t some computer-created imitation of the world wired into our heads by an evil genius? The Wachowski brothers didn’t invent the plot to THE MATRIX, it goes back to Plato’s cave and the skeptical musings of Descartes.

The stuff that fills our brains with sensations is nature. But how harmonious is this nature with what Emerson calls our souls? In THE TREE OF LIFE, Malick has a curious definition of nature that sounds to me very much like will:

Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.

That version of nature may be called human nature. In the original script for THE TREE OF LIFE, which helps explain much of the film’s subtext, Malick’s skeptical questioning of nature is described this way:

To what end is nature? Is there nothing but this chaos, this congeries of scraps and fragments? Nothing which binds them together?

But this isn’t Malick’s final word on the subject. In his description of the Dawn of Time sequence that baffled many viewers (and no doubt led to numerous cinematic walk outs), Malick writes:

We see the creation, not as an event in the distant past, the result of a finished and forgotten act, but rather as something which happens in every moment of time: no less a miracle now, this present hour, than it was in the beginning.

Returning now to Emerson’s text, here’s how he begins chapter one of NATURE:

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

This reminds me of Carl Sagan’s quote in COSMOS:

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

It also harkens to David Foster Wallace’s line in his Kenyon College commencement speech:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Before I wander too far afield, I want to draw one more parallel. I don’t believe that Emerson mentions retiring to his chamber casually. He’s drawing an obvious comparison to Montaigne right from the start. But while Montaigne thought it was possible to withdraw from life and look within, Emerson argues that you still have not escaped the world. To reach genuine solitude, you must look to the stars and grasp the incomprehensible wonder of the universe, a universe that it turns out created us from the stuff of stars.

Or as Malick wrote, no less a miracle now than it was in the beginning. But Malick is still filled with confusion and wonder:

Nature seems everywhere to be leading towards something. Why this delay in arriving at its ends? Why does it feel its way along — wander, dawdle, delay? Why twist and turn and backtrack, as though it were finding its way through a maze? Why establish hindrances and obstacles only to put itself to the trouble of dividing stratagems for overcoming them?

These are postmodern words. Emerson would not express them. He felt that nature provided a template of order and understanding for humanity — a clear path, if only we had the insight to follow it. But few people can see this path. Emerson wrote:

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.

One reason why I love THE TREE OF LIFE so dearly is that it tries to make us see life through a child’s eyes. It tries to bring back that experience of exuberant experience, unencumbered by cliched plot or dialogue. And it also shows how all of these joys can be forgotten — even made painful — by unexpected tragedy. Emerson understood this:

For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Great art often asks more questions than it provides answers. THE TREE OF LIFE brims with profound questions. It comes to a rather unsatisfying conclusion, in my opinion, but even in anticlimax finds truth about the necessity of love in navigating our way through the world. As the mother so eloquently states toward the film’s end:

The only way to be happy is to love. Without love, your life will flash by.