Mature Life And Works<\/h2>\r\nWhen Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain\u00a0conviction<\/a>\u00a0of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation\u2014i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw\u00a0Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu<\/a>\u2019s collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man\u2019s spiritual relation to\u00a0<\/span>nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge,\u00a0William Wordsworth<\/a>, and\u00a0Thomas Carlyle<\/a>. At home once more in 1833, he began to write\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.\r\n\r\n<\/span>The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other\u00a0intellectuals<\/a>. Before the decade was over his personal manifestos\u2014Nature,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThe American Scholar,\u201d and the divinity school\u00a0Address<\/em>\u2014had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate\u00a0Transcendentalism<\/a>\u00a0by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled\u00a0Nature.<\/em>\u00a0Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or\u00a0amendment<\/a>\u00a0of the ideas he first affirmed in\u00a0Nature<\/em>.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians\u2019 retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics\u2019 mechanistic\u00a0conception<\/a>\u00a0of the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for\u00a0free will<\/a>\u00a0in the chains of mechanical\u00a0cause and effect<\/a>\u00a0that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly\u00a0ascertaining<\/a>\u00a0reality.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to\u00a0transcend<\/a>\u00a0the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one\u2019s own self, one\u2019s own soul, and from such an\u00a0enlightened<\/a>\u00a0self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one\u2019s world according to the dictates of one\u2019s ideals and\u00a0conscience<\/a>. Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual\u2019s\u00a0intimate<\/a>\u00a0personal experience of his own portion of the divine \u201coversoul,\u201d which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how \u201creason,\u201d which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one\u2019s reliance on \u201cunderstanding\u201d\u2014i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson\u2019s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European\u00a0Romantics<\/a>, the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose\u00a0cumulative<\/a>\u00a0effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers\u2019 imaginations.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>In a lecture entitled \u201cThe\u00a0<\/span>American Scholar\u201d (August 31, 1837), Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Address at Divinity College,\u201d\u00a0Harvard University<\/a>, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man\u2019s attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited\u00a0sentiment<\/a>\u00a0of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young\u00a0disciples<\/a>, however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>In 1840 he helped launch\u00a0<\/span>The Dial<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0first edited by\u00a0Margaret Fuller<\/a>\u00a0and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his\u00a0<\/span>Essays<\/em>\u00a0into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral\u00a0individualism<\/a>\u00a0and preached the\u00a0ethics<\/a>\u00a0of self-reliance, the duty of\u00a0self-cultivation<\/a>, and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the\u00a0ambiguities<\/a>\u00a0and incompleteness of genius.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>His\u00a0<\/span>Representative Men<\/em>\u00a0(1849) contained biographies of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. In\u00a0<\/span>English Traits<\/em>\u00a0he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed.\u00a0<\/span>The Conduct of Life<\/em>\u00a0(1860), Emerson\u2019s most mature work, reveals a developed\u00a0humanism<\/a>\u00a0together with a full awareness of human limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson\u2019s collected\u00a0<\/span>Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1846) were supplemented by others in\u00a0<\/span>May-Day<\/em>\u00a0(1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>By the 1860s Emerson\u2019s reputation in America was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his\u00a0teaching<\/a>\u00a0without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882 Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s voice and\u00a0rhetoric<\/a>\u00a0sustained the faith of thousands in the American lecture circuits between 1834 and the\u00a0American Civil War<\/a>. He served as a cultural middleman through whom the\u00a0aesthetic<\/a>\u00a0and philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American renaissance (1835\u201365). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American tributary of European\u00a0Romanticism<\/a>, Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and\u00a0ethical<\/a>\u00a0movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person.\r\n\r\n<\/section><\/section>","rendered":"![\"emerson\"](\"https:\/\/www.iep.utm.edu\/wp-content\/media\/emerson.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\nRalph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston to Ruth Haskins Emerson and William Emerson, pastor of Boston\u2019s 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. \u201cWaldo,\u201d 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\u2019s school until 1825 when he entered the Divinity School at Harvard. The pattern of Emerson\u2019s 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\u2019s more radical beliefs. His aunt\u2019s 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 his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most widely 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\u2019s enduring reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like\u00a0Friedrich Nietzsche<\/a>) and a quintessentially American thinker whose championing of the\u00a0American Transcendental movement<\/a>\u00a0and 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\u2019s 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 \u201cbeing\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s key ideas are popularizations of both European as well as Eastern thought. From Goethe, Emerson also drew the notion of \u201cbildung,\u201d 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 \u201cReason,\u201d which consists of acts of perception, insight, recognition, and cognition. The concepts of \u201cunity\u201d and \u201cflux\u201d that are critical to his early thought and never fully depart from his philosophy are basic to Buddhism: indeed, Emerson said, perhaps ironically, that \u201cthe Buddhist . . . is a Transcendentalist.\u201d 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\u2014and more famous\u2014contention that history is biography.<\/p>\nOn the other hand, Emerson\u2019s 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 \u201cEvery book is a quotation . . . and every man is a quotation,\u201d a perspective that foreshadows the work of French Structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. Emerson also anticipates the key Poststructuralist concept of\u00a0diff\u00e9rance<\/em>\u00a0found in the work of\u00a0Jacques Derrida<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jacques Lacan<\/a>\u2014\u201cIt is the same among men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction.\u201d 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.<\/p>\nMature Life And Works<\/h2>\n
When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain\u00a0conviction<\/a>\u00a0of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation\u2014i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw\u00a0Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu<\/a>\u2019s collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man\u2019s spiritual relation to\u00a0<\/span>nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge,\u00a0William Wordsworth<\/a>, and\u00a0Thomas Carlyle<\/a>. At home once more in 1833, he began to write\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.<\/p>\n<\/span>The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other\u00a0intellectuals<\/a>. Before the decade was over his personal manifestos\u2014Nature,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThe American Scholar,\u201d and the divinity school\u00a0Address<\/em>\u2014had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate\u00a0Transcendentalism<\/a>\u00a0by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled\u00a0Nature.<\/em>\u00a0Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or\u00a0amendment<\/a>\u00a0of the ideas he first affirmed in\u00a0Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians\u2019 retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics\u2019 mechanistic\u00a0conception<\/a>\u00a0of the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for\u00a0free will<\/a>\u00a0in the chains of mechanical\u00a0cause and effect<\/a>\u00a0that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly\u00a0ascertaining<\/a>\u00a0reality.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to\u00a0transcend<\/a>\u00a0the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one\u2019s own self, one\u2019s own soul, and from such an\u00a0enlightened<\/a>\u00a0self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one\u2019s world according to the dictates of one\u2019s ideals and\u00a0conscience<\/a>. Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual\u2019s\u00a0intimate<\/a>\u00a0personal experience of his own portion of the divine \u201coversoul,\u201d which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how \u201creason,\u201d which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one\u2019s reliance on \u201cunderstanding\u201d\u2014i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson\u2019s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European\u00a0Romantics<\/a>, the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose\u00a0cumulative<\/a>\u00a0effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers\u2019 imaginations.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>In a lecture entitled \u201cThe\u00a0<\/span>American Scholar\u201d (August 31, 1837), Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Address at Divinity College,\u201d\u00a0Harvard University<\/a>, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man\u2019s attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited\u00a0sentiment<\/a>\u00a0of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young\u00a0disciples<\/a>, however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>In 1840 he helped launch\u00a0<\/span>The Dial<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0first edited by\u00a0Margaret Fuller<\/a>\u00a0and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his\u00a0<\/span>Essays<\/em>\u00a0into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral\u00a0individualism<\/a>\u00a0and preached the\u00a0ethics<\/a>\u00a0of self-reliance, the duty of\u00a0self-cultivation<\/a>, and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the\u00a0ambiguities<\/a>\u00a0and incompleteness of genius.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>His\u00a0<\/span>Representative Men<\/em>\u00a0(1849) contained biographies of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. In\u00a0<\/span>English Traits<\/em>\u00a0he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed.\u00a0<\/span>The Conduct of Life<\/em>\u00a0(1860), Emerson\u2019s most mature work, reveals a developed\u00a0humanism<\/a>\u00a0together with a full awareness of human limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson\u2019s collected\u00a0<\/span>Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1846) were supplemented by others in\u00a0<\/span>May-Day<\/em>\u00a0(1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>By the 1860s Emerson\u2019s reputation in America was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his\u00a0teaching<\/a>\u00a0without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882 Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s voice and\u00a0rhetoric<\/a>\u00a0sustained the faith of thousands in the American lecture circuits between 1834 and the\u00a0American Civil War<\/a>. He served as a cultural middleman through whom the\u00a0aesthetic<\/a>\u00a0and philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American renaissance (1835\u201365). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American tributary of European\u00a0Romanticism<\/a>, Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and\u00a0ethical<\/a>\u00a0movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t All rights reserved content<\/div>- Ralph Waldo Emerson. Provided by<\/strong>: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.. Located at<\/strong>: https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Ralph-Waldo-Emerson<\/a>. License<\/strong>: All Rights Reserved<\/em><\/li><\/ul>Public domain content<\/div>
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803u20141882). Authored by<\/strong>: Vince Brewton. Provided by<\/strong>: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Located at<\/strong>: https:\/\/www.iep.utm.edu\/emerson\/<\/a>. License<\/strong>: Public Domain: No Known Copyright<\/a><\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t <\/section>","protected":false},"author":6525,"menu_order":3,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"copyrighted_video\",\"description\":\"Ralph Waldo Emerson\",\"author\":\"\",\"organization\":\"Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Ralph-Waldo-Emerson\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"arr\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"pd\",\"description\":\"Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803u20141882)\",\"author\":\"Vince Brewton\",\"organization\":\"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.iep.utm.edu\/emerson\/\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"pd\",\"license_terms\":\"\"}]","CANDELA_OUTCOMES_GUID":"","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-417","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":212,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6525"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":825,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/417\/revisions\/825"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/212"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/417\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\nOn the other hand, Emerson\u2019s 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 \u201cEvery book is a quotation . . . and every man is a quotation,\u201d a perspective that foreshadows the work of French Structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. Emerson also anticipates the key Poststructuralist concept of\u00a0diff\u00e9rance<\/em>\u00a0found in the work of\u00a0Jacques Derrida<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jacques Lacan<\/a>\u2014\u201cIt is the same among men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n When Emerson left the church, he was in search of a more certain\u00a0conviction<\/a>\u00a0of God than that granted by the historical evidences of miracles. He wanted his own revelation\u2014i.e., a direct and immediate experience of God. When he left his pulpit he journeyed to Europe. In Paris he saw\u00a0Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu<\/a>\u2019s collection of natural specimens arranged in a developmental order that confirmed his belief in man\u2019s spiritual relation to\u00a0<\/span>nature. In England he paid memorable visits to Samuel Taylor Coleridge,\u00a0William Wordsworth<\/a>, and\u00a0Thomas Carlyle<\/a>. At home once more in 1833, he began to write\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0and established himself as a popular and influential lecturer. By 1834 he had found a permanent dwelling place in Concord, Massachusetts, and in the following year he married Lydia Jackson and settled into the kind of quiet domestic life that was essential to his work.<\/p>\n <\/span>The 1830s saw Emerson become an independent literary man. During this decade his own personal doubts and difficulties were increasingly shared by other\u00a0intellectuals<\/a>. Before the decade was over his personal manifestos\u2014Nature,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThe American Scholar,\u201d and the divinity school\u00a0Address<\/em>\u2014had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman. Emerson helped initiate\u00a0Transcendentalism<\/a>\u00a0by publishing anonymously in Boston in 1836 a little book of 95 pages entitled\u00a0Nature.<\/em>\u00a0Having found the answers to his spiritual doubts, he formulated his essential philosophy, and almost everything he ever wrote afterward was an extension, amplification, or\u00a0amendment<\/a>\u00a0of the ideas he first affirmed in\u00a0Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s religious doubts had lain deeper than his objection to the Unitarians\u2019 retention of belief in the historicity of miracles. He was also deeply unsettled by Newtonian physics\u2019 mechanistic\u00a0conception<\/a>\u00a0of the universe and by the Lockean psychology of sensation that he had learned at Harvard. Emerson felt that there was no place for\u00a0free will<\/a>\u00a0in the chains of mechanical\u00a0cause and effect<\/a>\u00a0that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly\u00a0ascertaining<\/a>\u00a0reality.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>Emerson reclaimed an idealistic philosophy from this dead end of 18th-century rationalism by once again asserting the human ability to\u00a0transcend<\/a>\u00a0the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. God could best be found by looking inward into one\u2019s own self, one\u2019s own soul, and from such an\u00a0enlightened<\/a>\u00a0self-awareness would in turn come freedom of action and the ability to change one\u2019s world according to the dictates of one\u2019s ideals and\u00a0conscience<\/a>. Human spiritual renewal thus proceeds from the individual\u2019s\u00a0intimate<\/a>\u00a0personal experience of his own portion of the divine \u201coversoul,\u201d which is present in and permeates the entire creation and all living things, and which is accessible if only a person takes the trouble to look for it. Emerson enunciates how \u201creason,\u201d which to him denotes the intuitive awareness of eternal truth, can be relied upon in ways quite different from one\u2019s reliance on \u201cunderstanding\u201d\u2014i.e., the ordinary gathering of sense-data and the logical comprehension of the material world. Emerson\u2019s doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches. The individual must then have the courage to be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>Obviously these ideas are far from original, and it is clear that Emerson was influenced in his formulation of them by his previous readings of Neoplatonist philosophy, the works of Coleridge and other European\u00a0Romantics<\/a>, the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Hindu philosophy, and other sources. What set Emerson apart from others who were expressing similar Transcendentalist notions were his abilities as a polished literary stylist able to express his thought with vividness and breadth of vision. His philosophical exposition has a peculiar power and an organic unity whose\u00a0cumulative<\/a>\u00a0effect was highly suggestive and stimulating to his contemporary readers\u2019 imaginations.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>In a lecture entitled \u201cThe\u00a0<\/span>American Scholar\u201d (August 31, 1837), Emerson described the resources and duties of the new liberated intellectual that he himself had become. This address was in effect a challenge to the Harvard intelligentsia, warning against pedantry, imitation of others, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life. Emerson\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Address at Divinity College,\u201d\u00a0Harvard University<\/a>, in 1838 was another challenge, this time directed against a lifeless Christian tradition, especially Unitarianism as he had known it. He dismissed religious institutions and the divinity of Jesus as failures in man\u2019s attempt to encounter deity directly through the moral principle or through an intuited\u00a0sentiment<\/a>\u00a0of virtue. This address alienated many, left him with few opportunities to preach, and resulted in his being ostracized by Harvard for many years. Young\u00a0disciples<\/a>, however, joined the informal Transcendental Club (founded in 1836) and encouraged him in his activities.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>In 1840 he helped launch\u00a0<\/span>The Dial<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0first edited by\u00a0Margaret Fuller<\/a>\u00a0and later by himself, thus providing an outlet for the new ideas Transcendentalists were trying to present to America. Though short-lived, the magazine provided a rallying point for the younger members of the school. From his continuing lecture series, he gathered his\u00a0<\/span>Essays<\/em>\u00a0into two volumes (1841, 1844), which made him internationally famous. In his first volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0Emerson consolidated his thoughts on moral\u00a0individualism<\/a>\u00a0and preached the\u00a0ethics<\/a>\u00a0of self-reliance, the duty of\u00a0self-cultivation<\/a>, and the need for the expression of self. The second volume of\u00a0Essays<\/em>\u00a0shows Emerson accommodating his earlier idealism to the limitations of real life; his later works show an increasing acquiescence to the state of things, less reliance on self, greater respect for society, and an awareness of the\u00a0ambiguities<\/a>\u00a0and incompleteness of genius.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>His\u00a0<\/span>Representative Men<\/em>\u00a0(1849) contained biographies of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. In\u00a0<\/span>English Traits<\/em>\u00a0he gave a character analysis of a people from which he himself stemmed.\u00a0<\/span>The Conduct of Life<\/em>\u00a0(1860), Emerson\u2019s most mature work, reveals a developed\u00a0humanism<\/a>\u00a0together with a full awareness of human limitations. It may be considered as partly confession. Emerson\u2019s collected\u00a0<\/span>Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1846) were supplemented by others in\u00a0<\/span>May-Day<\/em>\u00a0(1867), and the two volumes established his reputation as a major American poet.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>By the 1860s Emerson\u2019s reputation in America was secure, for time was wearing down the novelty of his rebellion as he slowly accommodated himself to society. He continued to give frequent lectures, but the writing he did after 1860 shows a waning of his intellectual powers. A new generation knew only the old Emerson and had absorbed his\u00a0teaching<\/a>\u00a0without recalling the acrimony it had occasioned. Upon his death in 1882 Emerson was transformed into the Sage of Concord, shorn of his power as a liberator and enrolled among the worthies of the very tradition he had set out to destroy.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span>Emerson\u2019s voice and\u00a0rhetoric<\/a>\u00a0sustained the faith of thousands in the American lecture circuits between 1834 and the\u00a0American Civil War<\/a>. He served as a cultural middleman through whom the\u00a0aesthetic<\/a>\u00a0and philosophical currents of Europe passed to America, and he led his countrymen during the burst of literary glory known as the American renaissance (1835\u201365). As a principal spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American tributary of European\u00a0Romanticism<\/a>, Emerson gave direction to a religious, philosophical, and\u00a0ethical<\/a>\u00a0movement that above all stressed belief in the spiritual potential of every person.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n\n\t\t\t Mature Life And Works<\/h2>\n
Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t