known man of letters in America, establishing himself as a prolific
poet, essayist, popular lecturer, and an advocate of social reforms
who was nevertheless suspicious of reform and reformers. Emerson
achieved some reputation with his verse, corresponded with many of the
leading intellectual and artistic figures of his day, and during an
off and on again career as a Unitarian minister, delivered and later
published a number of controversial sermons. Emerson's enduring
reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like
Friedrich Nietzsche) and a quintessentially American thinker whose
championing of the American Transcendental movement and influence on
Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and others would
alone secure him a prominent place in American cultural history.
Transcendentalism in America, of which Emerson was the leading figure,
resembled British Romanticism in its precept that a fundamental
continuity exists between man, nature, and God, or the divine. What is
beyond nature is revealed through nature; nature is itself a symbol,
or an indication of a deeper reality, in Emerson's philosophy. Matter
and spirit are not opposed but reflect a critical unity of experience.
Emerson is often characterized as an idealist philosopher and indeed
used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it simply as a
recognition that plan always precedes action. For Emerson, all things
exist in a ceaseless flow of change, and "being" is the subject of
constant metamorphosis. Later developments in his thinking shifted the
emphasis from unity to the balance of opposites: power and form,
identity and variety, intellect and fate. Emerson remained throughout
his lifetime the champion of the individual and a believer in the
primacy of the individual's experience. In the individual can be
discovered all truths, all experience. For the individual, the
religious experience must be direct and unmediated by texts,
traditions, or personality. Central to defining Emerson's contribution
to American thought is his emphasis on non-conformity that had so
profound an effect on Thoreau. Self-reliance and independence of
thought are fundamental to Emerson's perspective in that they are the
practical expressions of the central relation between the self and the
infinite. To trust oneself and follow our inner promptings corresponds
to the highest degree of consciousness.
Emerson concurred with the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe that originality was essentially a matter of reassembling
elements drawn from other sources. Not surprisingly, some of Emerson's
key ideas are popularizations of both European as well as Eastern
thought. From Goethe, Emerson also drew the notion of "bildung," or
development, calling it the central purpose of human existence. From
the English Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emerson
borrowed his conception of "Reason," which consists of acts of
perception, insight, recognition, and cognition. The concepts of
"unity" and "flux" that are critical to his early thought and never
fully depart from his philosophy are basic to Buddhism: indeed,
Emerson said, perhaps ironically, that "the Buddhist . . . is a
Transcendentalist." From his friend the social philosopher Margaret
Fuller, Emerson acquired the perspective that ideas are in fact ideas
of particular persons, an observation he would expand into his more
general—and more famous—contention that history is biography.
On the other hand, Emerson's work possesses deep original strains that
influenced other major philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche read Emerson in
German translations and his developing philosophy of the great man is
clearly influenced and confirmed by the contact. Writing about the
Greek philosopher Plato, Emerson asserted that "Every book is a
quotation . . . and every man is a quotation," a perspective that
foreshadows the work of French Structuralist philosopher Roland
Barthes. Emerson also anticipates the key Poststructuralist concept of
differance found in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan—"It
is the same among men and women, as among the silent trees; always a
referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction."
While not progressive on the subject of race by modern standards,
Emerson observed that the differences among a particular race are
greater than the differences between the races, a view compatible with
the social constructivist theory of race found in the work of
contemporary philosophers like Kwame Appiah.
1. Biography
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston to Ruth
Haskins Emerson and William Emerson, pastor of Boston's First Church.
The cultural milieu of Boston at the turn of the nineteenth century
would increasingly be marked by the conflict between its older
conservative values and the radical reform movements and social
idealists that emerged in the decades leading up through the 1840s.
Emerson was one of five surviving sons who formed a supportive
brotherhood, the financial and emotional leadership of which he was
increasingly forced to assume over the years. "Waldo," as Emerson was
called, entered Harvard at age fourteen, taught in the summer, waited
tables, and with his brother Edward, wrote papers for other students
to pay his expenses. Graduating in the middle of his class, Emerson
taught in his brother William's school until 1825 when he entered the
Divinity School at Harvard. The pattern of Emerson's intellectual life
was shaped in these early years by the range and depth of his
extracurricular reading in history, literature, philosophy, and
religion, the extent of which took a severe toll on his eyesight and
health. Equally important to his intellectual development was the
influence of his paternal aunt Mary Moody Emerson. Though she wrote
primarily on religious subjects, Mary Moody Emerson set an example for
Emerson and his brothers with her wide reading in every branch of
knowledge and her stubborn insistence that they form opinions on all
of the issues of the day. Mary Moody Emerson was at the same time
passionately orthodox in religion and a lover of controversy, an
original thinker tending to a mysticism that was a precursor to her
nephew's more radical beliefs. His aunt's influence waned as he
developed away from her strict orthodoxy, but her relentless
intellectual energy and combative individualism left a permanent stamp
on Emerson as a thinker.
In 1829, he accepted a call to serve as junior pastor at Boston's
Second Church, serving only until 1832 when he resigned at least in
part over his objections to the validity of the Lord's Supper. Emerson
would in 1835 refuse a call as minister to East Lexington Church but
did preach there regularly until 1839. In 1830, Emerson married Ellen
Tucker who died the following year of tuberculosis. Emerson married
again in 1835 to Lydia Jackson. Together they had four children, the
eldest of whom, Waldo, died at the age of five, an event that left
deep scars on the couple and altered Emerson's outlook on the
redemptive value of suffering. Emerson's first book Nature was
published anonymously in 1836 and at Emerson's own expense. In 1837
Emerson delivered his famous "American Scholar" lecture as the Phi
Beta Kappa address at Harvard, but his controversial Harvard Divinity
School address, delivered in 1838, was the occasion of a twenty-nine
year breach with the university and signaled his divergence from even
the liberal theological currents of Cambridge. Compelled by financial
necessity to undertake a career on the lecture circuit, Emerson began
lecturing in earnest in 1839 and kept a demanding public schedule
until 1872. While providing Emerson's growing family and array of
dependents with a steady income, the lecture tours heightened public
awareness of Emerson's ideas and work. From 1840-1844, Emerson edited
The Dial with Margaret Fuller. Essays: First Series was published in
1841, followed by Essays: Second Series in 1844, the two volumes most
responsible for Emerson's reputation as a philosopher. In 1844,
Emerson also purchased the land on the shore of Walden Pond where he
was to allow the naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau to
build a cabin the following year. While sympathetic to the
experimental collective at Brook Farm, Emerson declined urgent appeals
to join the group and maintained his own household in Concord with
Lydia and their growing family. Emerson attempted to create his own
community of kindred spirits, however, assembling in the neighborhood
of Concord a group of writers including Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
the social thinker Margaret Fuller, the reformer Bronson Alcott, and
the poet Ellery Channing. English Traits was inspired by a trip to
Britain during 1847-1848. By the 1850s, Emerson was an outspoken
advocate of abolition in lectures across New England and the Midwest
and continued lecturing widely on a number of different topics—eighty
lectures in 1867 alone. Emerson spent the final years of his life
peacefully but without full use of his faculties. He died of pneumonia
in 1882 at his home in Concord.
2. Major Works
As a philosopher, Emerson primarily makes use of two forms, the essay
and the public address or lecture. His career began, however, with a
short book, Nature, published anonymously in 1836. Nature touches on
many of the ideas to which he would return to again and again over his
lifetime, most significantly the perspective that nature serves as an
intermediary between human experience and what lies beyond nature.
Emerson expresses a similar idea in his claim that spirit puts forth
nature through us, exemplary of which is the famous "transparent
eye-ball" passage, in which he writes that on a particular evening,
while "crossing a bare common . . . the currents of Universal Being
circulate through me." On the strength this passage alone, Nature has
been widely viewed as a defining text of Transcendentalism, praised
and satirized for the same qualities. Emerson invokes the "transparent
eye-ball" to describe the loss of individuation in the experience of
nature, where there is no seer, only seeing: "I am nothing; I see
all." This immersion in nature compensates us in our most difficult
adversity and provides a sanctification of experience profoundly
religious —the direct religious experience that Emerson was to call
for all his life. While Emerson characterizes traversing the common
with mystical language, it is also importantly a matter of knowledge.
The fundamental knowledge of nature that circulates through him is the
basis of all human knowledge but cannot be distinguished, in Emerson's
thought, from divine understanding.
The unity of nature is the unity of variety, and "each particle is a
microcosm." There is, Emerson writes "a universal soul" that,
influenced by Coleridge, he named "reason." Nature is by turns
exhortative and pessimistic, like the work of the English Romantics,
portraying man as a creature fallen away from a primordial connection
with nature. Man ought to live in a original relation to the universe,
an assault on convention he repeats in various formulas throughout his
life; however, "man is the dwarf of himself . . . is disunited with
himself . . . is a god in ruins." Nature concludes with a version of
Emerson's permanent program, the admonition to conform your life to
the "pure idea in your mind," a prescription for living he never
abandons.
The unity of nature is the unity of variety, and "each particle is a
microcosm." There is, Emerson writes "a universal soul" that,
influenced by Coleridge, he named "reason." Nature is by turns
exhortative and pessimistic, like the work of the English Romantics,
portraying man as a creature fallen away from a primordial connection
with nature. Man ought to live in a original relation to the universe,
an assault on convention he repeats in various formulas throughout his
life; however, "man is the dwarf of himself . . . is disunited with
himself . . . is a god in ruins." Nature concludes with a version of
Emerson's permanent program, the admonition to conform your life to
the "pure idea in your mind," a prescription for living he never
abandons.
"The American Scholar" and "The Divinity School Address" are generally
held to be representative statements of Emerson's early period. "The
American Scholar," delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard
in 1837, repeats a call for a distinctively American scholarly life
and a break with European influences and models—a not original appeal
in the 1830s. Emerson begins with a familiar critique of American and
particularly New England culture by asserting that Americans were "a
people too busy to give to letters any more." What must have surprised
the audience was his anti-scholarly theme, that "Books are for the
scholar's idle times," an idea that aligns the prodigiously learned
and widely read Emerson with the critique of excessive bookishness
found in Wordsworth and English Romanticism. Continuing in this theme,
Emerson argues against book knowledge entirely and in favor of lived
experience: "Only so much do I know, as I have lived." Nature is the
most important influence on the mind, he told his listeners, and it is
the same mind, one mind, that writes and reads. Emerson calls for both
creative writing and "creative reading," individual development being
essential for the encounter with mind found in books. The object of
scholarly culture is not the bookworm but "Man Thinking," Emerson's
figure for an active, self-reliant intellectual life that thus puts
mind in touch with Mind and the "Divine Soul." Through this approach
to the study of letters, Emerson predicts that in America "A nation of
men will for the first time exist."
"The Divinity School Address," also delivered at Harvard in 1838, was
considerably more controversial and marked in earnest the beginning of
Emerson's opposition to the climate of organized religion in his day,
even the relatively liberal theology of Cambridge and the Unitarian
Church. Emerson set out defiantly to insist on the divinity of all men
rather than one single historical personage, a position at odds with
Christian orthodoxy but one central to his entire system of thought.
The original relation to nature Emerson insisted upon insures an
original relation to the divine, not copied from the religious
experience of others, even Jesus of Nazareth. Emerson observes that in
the universe there is a "justice" operative in the form of
compensation: "He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled." This
theme he would develop powerfully into a full essay, "Compensation"
(1841). Whether Emerson characterized it as compensation, retribution,
balance, or unity, the principle of an automatic response to all human
action, good or ill, was a permanent fixture of his thought. "Good is
positive," he argued to the vexation of many in the audience, "evil
merely privative, not absolute." Emerson concludes his address with a
subversive call to rely on one's self, to "go alone; to refuse the
good models."
Two of Emerson's first non-occasional public lectures from this early
period contain especially important expressions of his thought. Always
suspicious of reform and reformers, Emerson was yet an advocate of
reform causes. In "Man the Reformer" (1841), Emerson expresses this
ambivalence by speculating that if we were to "Let our affection flow
out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all
revolutions." In an early and partial formulation of his theory that
all people, times, and places are essentially alike, he writes in
"Lecture on the Times" (1841) that "The Times . . . have their root in
an invisible spiritual reality;" then more fully in "The
Transcendentalist" (1842): "new views . . . are not new, but the very
oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times." Such
ideas, while quintessential Emerson, are nevertheless positions that
he will qualify and complicate over the next twenty years.
Emerson brought out his Essays: First Series, in 1841, containing
perhaps his single most influential work, "Self-Reliance." Emerson's
style as an essayist, not unlike the form of his public lectures,
operates best at the level of the individual sentence. His essays are
bound together neither by their stated theme nor the progression of
argument, but instead by the systematic coherence of his thought
alone. Indeed, the various titles of Emerson's do not limit the
subject matter of the essays but repeatedly bear out the abiding
concerns of his philosophy. Another feature of his rhetorical style
involves exploring the contrary poles of a particular idea, similar to
a poetic antithesis. As a philosopher-poet, Emerson employs a highly
figurative style, while his poetry is remarkable as a poetry of ideas.
The language of the essays is sufficiently poetical that Thoreau felt
compelled to say critically of the essays—"they were not written
exactly at the right crisis [to be poetry] though inconceivably near
it." In "History" Emerson attempts to demonstrate the unity of
experience of men of all ages: "What Plato has thought, he may think;
what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any
man, he may understand." Interestingly, for an idealist philosopher,
he describes man as "a bundle of relations." The experience of the
individual self is of such importance in Emerson's conception of
history that it comes to stand for history: "there is properly no
history; only biography." Working back from this thought, Emerson
connects his understanding of this essential unity to his fundamental
premise about the relation of man and nature: "the mind is one, and
that nature is correlative." By correlative, Emerson means that mind
and nature are themselves representative, symbolic, and consequently
correlate to spiritual facts. In the wide-ranging style of his essays,
he returns to the subject of nature, suggesting that nature is itself
a repetition of a very few laws, and thus implying that history
repeats itself consistently with a few recognizable situations. Like
the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Emerson disavowed nineteenth
century notions of progress, arguing in the next essay of the book,
"Society never advances . . . For everything that is given, something
is taken."
"Self-Reliance" is justly famous as a statement of Emerson's credo,
found in the title and perhaps uniquely among his essays, consistently
and without serious digression throughout the work. The emphasis on
the unity of experience is the same: "what is true for you in your
private heart is true for all men." Emerson rests his abiding faith in
the individual—"Trust thyself"—on the fundamental link between each
man and the divine reality, or nature, that works through him. Emerson
wove this explicit theme of self-trust throughout his work, writing in
"Heroism" (1841), "Self-trust is the essence of heroism." The apostle
of self-reliance perceived that the impulses that move us may not be
benign, that advocacy of self-trust carried certain social risks. No
less a friend of Emerson's than Herman Melville parodied excessive
faith in the individual through the portrait of Captain Ahab in his
classic American novel, Moby-Dick. Nevertheless, Emerson argued that
if our promptings are bad they come from our inmost being. If we are
made thus we have little choice in any case but to be what we are.
Translating this precept into the social realm, Emerson famously
declares, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"—a point of
view developed at length in both the life and work of Thoreau. Equally
memorable and influential on Walt Whitman is Emerson's idea that "a
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines." In Leaves of Grass, Whitman
made of his contradictions a virtue by claiming for himself a vastness
of character that encompassed the vastness of the American experience.
Emerson opposes on principle the reliance on social structures (civil,
religious) precisely because through them the individual approaches
the divine second hand, mediated by the once original experience of a
genius from another age: "An institution," as he explains, "is the
lengthened shadow of one man." To achieve this original relation one
must "Insist on one's self; never imitate" for if the relationship is
secondary the connection is lost. "Nothing," Emerson concludes, "can
bring you peace but the triumph of principles," a statement that both
in tone and content illustrates the vocational drive of the former
minister to speak directly to a wide audience and preach a practical
philosophy of living.
Three years later in 1844 Emerson published his Essays: Second Series,
eight essays and one public lecture, the titles indicating the range
of his interests: "The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners,"
"Gifts," "Nature," "Politics," "Nominalist and Realist," and "New
England Reformers." "The Poet" contains the most comprehensive
statement on Emerson's aesthetics and art. This philosophy of art has
its premise in the Transcendental notion that the power of nature
operates through all being, that it is being: "For we are not pans and
barrows . . . but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same
divinity transmuted." Art and the products of art of every
kind—poetry, sculpture, painting, and architecture—flow from the same
unity at the root of all human experience. Emerson's aesthetics stress
not the object of art but the force that creates the art object, or as
he characterizes this process in relation to poetry: "it is not
metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem." "The Poet"
repeats anew the Emersonian dictum that nature is itself a symbol, and
thus nature admits of being used symbolically in art. While Emerson
does not accept in principle social progress as such, his philosophy
emphasizes the progress of spirit, particularly when understood as
development. This process he allies with the process of art: "Nature
has a higher end . . . ascension, or the passage of the soul into
higher forms." The realm of art, ultimately for Emerson, is only an
intermediary function, not an end itself: "Art is the path of the
creator to his work." On this and every subject, Emerson reveals the
humanism at the core of his philosophy, his human centric perspective
that posits the creative principle above the created thing. "There is
a higher work for Art than the arts," he argues in the essay "Art,"
and that work is the full creative expression of human being. Nature
too has this "humanism," to speak figuratively, in its creative
process, as he writes in "The Method of Nature:" "The universe does
not attract us until housed in an individual." Most notable in "The
Poet" is Emerson's call for an expressly American poetry and poet to
do justice to the fact that "America is a poem in our eyes." What is
required is a "genius . . . with tyrannous eye, which knew the value
of our incomparable materials" and can make use of the "barbarism and
materialism of the times." Emerson would not meet Whitman for another
decade, only after Whitman had sent him anonymously a copy of the
first edition of Leaves of Grass, in which—indicative of Emerson's
influence—Whitman self-consciously assumes the role of the required
poet of America and asserts, like his unacknowledged mentor, that
America herself is indeed a poem.
"Experience" remains one of Emerson's best-known and
often-anthologized essays. It is also an essay written out of the
devastating grief that struck the Emerson household after the death of
their five-year-old son, Waldo. He wrote, whether out of conviction or
helplessness, "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." Emerson goes
on, rocking back and forth between resignation and affirmation,
establishing along the way a number of key points. In "Experience" he
defines "spirit" as "matter reduced to an extreme thinness." In
keeping with the gradual shift in his philosophy from an emphasis on
the explanatory model of "unity" to images suggesting balance, he
describes "human life" as consisting of "two elements, power and form,
and the proportion must be invariably kept." Among his more quotable
aphorisms is "The years teach us much which the days never know," a
memorable argument for the idea that experience cannot be reduced to
the smallest observable events, then added back up again to constitute
a life; that there is, on the contrary, an irreducible whole present
in a life and at work through us. "Experience" concludes with
Emerson's hallmark optimism, a faith in human events grounded in his
sense of the total penetration of the divine in all matter. "Every
day," he writes, and "every act betrays the ill-concealed deity," a
determined expression of his lifelong principle that the divine
radiates through all being.
The early 1850s saw the publication of a number of distinctively
American texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850);
Melville's Moby-Dick (1851); Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852); and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Emerson's Representative
Men (1850) failed to anticipate this flowering of a uniquely American
literature in at least one respect: none of his representative
characters were American—nevertheless, each biography yields an
insight into some aspect of Emerson's thought he finds in the man or
in his work, so that Representative Men reads as the history of
Emerson's precursors in other times and places. Emerson structures the
book around portraits of Plato, the Swedish mystic Emmanuel
Swedenborg, the French essayist Montaigne, the poet William
Shakespeare, the statesman Napoleon Bonaparte, and the writer Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe. Each man stands in for a type, e.g. Montaigne
represents the "skeptic," Napoleon the "man of the world." Humanity,
for Emerson, consisted of recognizable but overlapping personality
types, types discoverable in every age and nation, but all sharing in
a common humanity that has its source in divine being. Each portrait
balances the particular feature of the representative man that
illustrates the general laws inhabiting humanity along with an
assessment of the great man's shortcomings. Like Nietzsche, Emerson
did not believe that great men were ends in themselves but served
particular functions, notably for Emerson their capacity to "clear our
eyes of egotism, and enable us to see other people in their works."
Emerson's representative men are "great," but "exist that there may be
greater men." As a gesture toward self-criticism about an entire book
on great men by the champion of American individualism, Emerson
concedes, "there are no common men," and his biographical sketches
ultimately balance both the limitations of each man with his—to use an
oxymoron—distinctive universality, or in other words, the impact he
has had on Emerson's thought. While Plato receives credit for
establishing the "cardinal facts . . . the one and the two.—1. Unity,
or Identity; and, 2. Variety," Emerson concedes that through Plato we
have had no success in "explaining existence." It was Swedenborg,
according to Emerson, who discovered that the smallest particles in
nature are merely replicated and repeated in larger organizations, and
that the physical world is symbolic of the spiritual. But although he
approves of the religion Swedenborg urged, a spirituality of each and
every moment, Emerson complains the mystic lacks the "liberality of
universal wisdom." Instead, we are "always in a church." From
Montaigne, Emerson gains a heightened sense of the universal mind as
he read the French philosophers Essays, for "It seemed to me as if I
had myself written the book"—as well as an enduring imperative of
style: "Cut these words, and they would bleed." The "skeptic"
Montaigne, however, lacks belief, which "consists in accepting the
affirmations of the soul." From Shakespeare, Emerson received
confirmation that originality was a reassembly of existing ideas. The
English poet possessed the rare capacity of greatness in that he
allowed the spirit of his age to achieve representation through him.
Nevertheless the world waits on "a poet-priest" who can see, speak,
and act, with equal inspiration." Reflection on Napoleon's life
teaches the value of concentration, one of Emerson's chief virtues. In
The Conduct of Life, Emerson describes "concentration," or bringing to
bear all of one's powers on a single object, as the "chief prudence."
Likewise, Napoleon's shrewdness consisted in allowing events to take
their natural course and become representative of the forces of his
time. The defect of the "man of the world" was that he possessed "the
powers of intellect without conscience" and was doomed to fail.
Emerson's moral summary of Napoleon's sounds a great deal like
Whitman: "Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors
open, and which serves all men." Goethe, "the writer," like Napoleon,
represents the countervailing force of nature against Emerson's
lifelong opponent, what he called "the morgue of convention." Goethe
is also exemplary of the man of culture whose sphere of knowledge, as
Emerson himself tried to emulate with his wide and systematic reading,
knows no limits or categorical boundaries. Yet, "the lawgiver of art
is not an artist," and repeating a call for an original relation to
the infinite, foregoing even the venerable authority of Goethe,
Emerson concludes, "We too must write Bibles."
English Traits was published in 1856 but represented almost a decade
of reflections on an invited lecture tour Emerson made in 1847-48 to
Great Britain. English Traits presents an unusually conservative set
of perspectives on a rather limited subject, that of a single nation
and "race," in place of human civilization and humanity as a whole.
English Traits contains an advanced understanding of race, namely,
that the differences among the members of a race are greater than the
differences between races, but in general introduces few new ideas.
The work is highly "occasional," shaped by his travels and visits, and
bore evidence of what seemed to be an erosion of energy and
originality in his thought.
The Conduct of Life (1860), however, proved to be a work of startling
vigor and insight and is Emerson's last important work published in
his lifetime. "Fate" is arguably the central essay in the book. The
subject of fate, which Emerson defines as "An expense of means to
end," along with the relation of fate to freedom and the primacy of
man's vocation, come to be the chief subjects of the final years of
his career. Some of Emerson's finest poetry can be found in his
essays. In "Fate" he writes: "A man's power is hooped in by a
necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until
he learns its arc." Fate is balanced in the essay by intellect: "So
far as a man thinks, he is free." Emerson's advice for the conduct of
life is to learn to swim with the tide, to "trim your bark" (i.e.
sails) to catch the prevailing wind. He refines and redefines his
conception of history as the interaction between "Nature and thought."
Emerson further refines his conception of the great man by describing
him as the "impressionable" man, or the man who most perfectly
captures the spirit of his time in his thought and action. Varying a
biblical proverb to his own thought, Emerson argues that what we seek
we will find because it is our fate to seek what is our own. Always a
moderating voice in politics, Emerson writes in "Power" that the
"evils of popular government appear greater than they are"—at best a
lukewarm recommendation of democracy. On the subject of politics,
Emerson consistently posited a faith in balance, the tendencies toward
chaos and order, change and conservation always correcting each other.
His late aesthetics reinforce this political stance as he veers in
"Beauty" onto the subject of women's suffrage: "Thus the circumstances
may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes,
legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world,
if only it come by degrees."
In his early work, Emerson emphasized the operation of nature through
the individual man. The Conduct of Life uncovers the same
consideration only now understood in terms of work or vocation.
Emerson argued with increasing regularity throughout his career that
each man is made for some work, and to ally himself with that is to
render himself immune from harm: "the conviction that his work is dear
to God and cannot be spared, defends him." One step above simple
concentration of force in Emerson's scale of values we find his sense
of dedication: "Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of
your life." While in favor of many of the social and political reform
movements of his time, Emerson never ventured far into a critique of
laissez-faire economics. In "Wealth" we find the balanced perspective,
one might say contradiction, to be found in all the late work. Emerson
argues that to be a "whole man" one must be able to find a "blameless
living," and yet this same essay acknowledges an unsentimental
definition of wealth: "He is the richest man who knows how to draw a
benefit from the labors of the greatest numbers of men." In the final
essay of the book, "Illusions," Emerson uses a metaphor—"the sun
borrows his beams"—to reassert his pervasive humanism, the idea that
we endow nature with its beauty, and that man is at the center of
creation. Man is at the center, and the center will hold: "There is no
chance, and no anarchy, in the universe."
3. Legacy
Emerson remains the major American philosopher of the nineteenth
century and in some respects the central figure of American thought
since the colonial period. Perhaps due to his highly quotable style,
Emerson wields a celebrity unknown to subsequent American
philosophers. The general reading public knows Emerson's work
primarily through his aphorisms, which appear throughout popular
culture on calendars and poster, on boxes of tea and breath mints, and
of course through his individual essays. Generations of readers
continue to encounter the more famous essays under the rubric of
"literature" as well as philosophy, and indeed the essays, less so his
poetry, stand undiminished as major works in the American literary
tradition. Emerson's emphasis on self-reliance and nonconformity, his
championing of an authentic American literature, his insistence on
each individual's original relation to God, and finally his relentless
optimism, that "life is a boundless privilege," remain his chief
legacies.
4. References and Further Reading
Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New
York: Penguin, 1997.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York:
Library of America, 1983.
Essays and Poems. Ed. Joel Porte et al. New York: Library of American, 1996.
The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. 4. Ed Wesley T. Mott
et al. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Joel Myerson. New
York: Columbia, 1997.
The Heart of Emerson's Journals. Ed. Bliss Perry. Minneola, NY: Dover
Press, 1995.
Field, Peter. S. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic
Intellectual. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Porte, Joel. Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Porte, Joel and Morris, Saundra. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995
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