The general argument made by Emerson in his work, “The American Scholar,” is that people rarely take the initiative to demonstrate their true potential of their knowledge. More specifically, scholars, at a degenerative state, have the propensity to merely absorb knowledge from books and live in sedentariness, which results in conformity. He writes,” 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.” In this passage, Emerson is suggesting that everyone should not hesitate to go out and speak to others such as on the knowledge they have procured from books; overall, he wanted people to think for themselves, use knowledge from books within moderation for originality. In conclusion, Emerson’s belief is that society is forgetting the goal to be active members in society, who can actually “think” for himself.
In my view Emerson is right because people lately do have the tendency to both socially conform to what people or books state and rely on gaining “experience” from literature than to face reality. More specifically, I believe that people are just merely getting lazy where they refuse to expend their energy and time to go out and experience life. They consider learning from books solely as a shortcut to knowledge in life. For example, many college lecture halls seem to promote sedentary life styles especially in certain jobs like office work. Since we live in the Information Age, knowledge seems like the vital focus of our time. We merely learn knowledge from books rather than to take the active approach in trying to experience life and speak to others about it. Although Emerson might objective that education and careers enforce this lifestyle, I maintain that it does. Therefore, I conclude that if we incorporate sedentary routines, then it is most likely that people will follow them.
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