Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882)

emersonIn his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most widely known homo of letters in America, establishing himself as a prolific poet, essayist, popular lecturer, and an advocate of social reforms who was notwithstanding suspicious of reform and reformers. Emerson accomplished some reputation with his verse, corresponded with many of the leading intellectual and artistic figures of his twenty-four hours, and during an off and on again career equally a Unitarian government minister, delivered and later on published a number of controversial sermons. Emerson's enduring reputation, withal, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic author (similar 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 lonely 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'due south philosophy. Thing and spirit are not opposed but reverberate a critical unity of feel. Emerson is often characterized equally an idealist philosopher and indeed used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it just as a recognition that plan e'er precedes activeness. For Emerson, all things exist in a ceaseless flow of change, and "being" is the subject of constant metamorphosis. Subsequently developments in his thinking shifted the accent from unity to the rest of opposites: power and form, identity and diversity, intellect and fate. Emerson remained throughout his lifetime the champion of the individual and a laic in the primacy of the private's feel. In the individual can be discovered all truths, all experience. For the individual, the religious feel must exist direct and unmediated by texts, traditions, or personality. Key to defining Emerson'south contribution to American thought is his emphasis on non-conformity that had so profound an effect on Thoreau. Self-reliance and independence of idea are primal to Emerson'southward perspective in that they are the practical expressions of the fundamental 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 thing of reassembling elements fatigued from other sources. Non surprisingly, some of Emerson's fundamental ideas are popularizations of both European as well as Eastern thought. From Goethe, Emerson also drew the notion of "bildung," or evolution, calling it the cardinal purpose of human existence. From the English language 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 disquisitional to his early idea 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 caused the perspective that ideas are in fact ideas of detail persons, an ascertainment he would aggrandize into his more full general—and more famous—contention that history is biography.

On the other manus, Emerson'due south work possesses deep original strains that influenced other major philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The High german philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche read Emerson in German language translations and his developing philosophy of the peachy man is clearly influenced and confirmed by the contact. Writing virtually 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 besides anticipates the primal Poststructuralist concept of différance institute in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan—"Information technology is the same among men and women, equally among the silent trees; ever a referred beingness, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction." While non progressive on the subject field of race past mod 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 constitute in the piece of work of contemporary philosophers similar Kwame Appiah.

Table of Contents

  1. Biography
  2. Major Works
  3. Legacy
  4. References and Farther Reading

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 betwixt its older conservative values and the radical reform movements and social idealists that emerged in the decades leading upwards through the 1840s. Emerson was ane of five surviving sons who formed a supportive alliance, the fiscal and emotional leadership of which he was increasingly forced to assume over the years. "Waldo," equally 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 blood brother William's school until 1825 when he entered the Divinity Schoolhouse at Harvard. The design of Emerson'southward 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 of import to his intellectual evolution 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 cognition and her stubborn insistence that they course opinions on all of the problems of the day. Mary Moody Emerson was at the aforementioned time passionately orthodox in religion and a lover of controversy, an original thinker disposed 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 every bit a thinker.

In 1829, he accepted a phone call to serve as junior pastor at Boston'southward Second Church building, serving merely until 1832 when he resigned at least in part over his objections to the validity of the Lord's Supper. Emerson would in 1835 pass up a phone call as government minister to Eastward Lexington Church building only did preach there regularly until 1839. In 1830, Emerson married Ellen Tucker who died the following twelvemonth 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 contradistinct Emerson'southward outlook on the redemptive value of suffering. Emerson's first volume 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 accost at Harvard, but his controversial Harvard Divinity School address, delivered in 1838, was the occasion of a twenty-nine year alienation with the university and signaled his deviation 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'due south 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 every bit 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 Hold with Lydia and their growing family. Emerson attempted to create his own community of kindred spirits, still, 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 abet of abolition in lectures across New England and the Midwest and continued lecturing widely on a number of unlike topics—eighty lectures in 1867 alone. Emerson spent the concluding years of his life peacefully but without full use of his faculties. He died of pneumonia in 1882 at his habitation in Concord.

2. Major Works

Every bit a philosopher, Emerson primarily makes apply of ii 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 once again and again over his lifetime, well-nigh significantly the perspective that nature serves every bit an intermediary between man experience and what lies beyond nature. Emerson expresses a similar thought in his claim that spirit puts forth nature through the states, 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 broadcast 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 depict the loss of individuation in the experience of nature, where there is no seer, only seeing: "I am goose egg; I encounter all." This immersion in nature compensates usa in our most difficult adversity and provides a sanctification of feel profoundly religious —the directly religious feel that Emerson was to call for all his life. While Emerson characterizes traversing the common with mystical language, it is also chiefly a thing of knowledge. The fundamental noesis of nature that circulates through him is the basis of all human knowledge merely cannot be distinguished, in Emerson's thought, from divine understanding.

The unity of nature is the unity of diversity, and "each particle is a microcosm." There is, Emerson writes "a universal soul" that, influenced by Coleridge, he named "reason." Nature is past turns exhortative and pessimistic, like the work of the English Romantics, portraying man as a animal fallen abroad 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; yet, "man is the dwarf of himself . . . is disunited with himself . . . is a god in ruins." Nature concludes with a version of Emerson's permanent programme, the admonition to adapt your life to the "pure thought 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 on period. "The American Scholar," delivered every bit the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard in 1837, repeats a call for a distinctively American scholarly life and a intermission with European influences and models—a not original appeal in the 1830s. Emerson begins with a familiar critique of American and specially New England civilization by asserting that Americans were "a people too busy to give to letters any more." What must have surprised the audition 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 institute in Wordsworth and English Romanticism. Standing in this theme, Emerson argues confronting volume knowledge entirely and in favor of lived experience: "Only so much do I know, as I have lived." Nature is the most of import influence on the mind, he told his listeners, and information technology is the same mind, one mind, that writes and reads. Emerson calls for both artistic writing and "creative reading," individual evolution being essential for the encounter with mind found in books. The object of scholarly culture is not the bookworm only "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 arroyo to the study of letters, Emerson predicts that in America "A nation of men will for the first fourth dimension be."

"The Divinity School Address," also delivered at Harvard in 1838, was considerably more controversial and marked in earnest the commencement of Emerson'south opposition to the climate of religion in his day, even the relatively liberal theology of Cambridge and the Unitarian Church. Emerson ready out defiantly to insist on the divinity of all men rather than 1 single historical personage, a position at odds with Christian orthodoxy but i fundamental to his unabridged system of thought. The original relation to nature Emerson insisted upon ensures an original relation to the divine, not copied from the religious feel of others, even Jesus of Nazareth. Emerson observes that in the universe at that place is a "justice" operative in the course of compensation: "He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled." This theme he would develop powerfully into a full essay, "Bounty" (1841). Whether Emerson characterized it equally compensation, retribution, residual, or unity, the principle of an automatic response to all human being activity, good or ill, was a permanent fixture of his thought. "Adept is positive," he argued to the vexation of many in the audition, "evil simply privative, non absolute." Emerson concludes his address with a destructive phone call to rely on ane's self, to "get alone; to refuse the good models."

Ii of Emerson's first not-occasional public lectures from this early period incorporate especially important expressions of his thought. Ever suspicious of reform and reformers, Emerson was nevertheless an advocate of reform causes. In "Human being the Reformer" (1841), Emerson expresses this ambiguity by speculating that if we were to "Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a twenty-four hour period the greatest of all revolutions." In an early and partial conception of his theory that all people, times, and places are essentially alike, he writes in "Lecture on the Times" (1841) that "The Times . . . take their root in an invisible spiritual reality;" then more fully in "The Transcendentalist" (1842): "new views . . . are non new, but the very oldest of thoughts bandage into the mould of these new times." Such ideas, while quintessential Emerson, are all the same positions that he would qualify and complicate over the side by side twenty years.

Emerson brought out his Essays: First Series, in 1841, which contain perchance his single about influential work, "Cocky-Reliance." Emerson'due south style equally an essayist, not unlike the grade of his public lectures, operates all-time at the level of the individual sentence. His essays are bound together neither past their stated theme nor the progression of argument, merely instead past the systematic coherence of his thought alone. Indeed, the various titles of Emerson's exercise not limit the bailiwick affair of the essays but repeatedly bear out the abiding concerns of his philosophy. Some other feature of his rhetorical fashion involves exploring the contrary poles of a particular idea, similar to a poetic antithesis. Equally a philosopher-poet, Emerson employs a highly figurative way, 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 non written exactly at the right crunch [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 recall; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at whatever time has befallen any man, he may understand." Interestingly, for an idealist philosopher, he describes man every bit "a bundle of relations." The experience of the individual self is of such importance in Emerson's formulation of history that it comes to represent history: "at that place is properly no history; only biography." Working dorsum from this idea, Emerson connects his understanding of this essential unity to his fundamental premise about the relation of homo and nature: "the mind is ane, and that nature is correlative." By correlative, Emerson ways that mind and nature are themselves representative, symbolic, and consequently correlate to spiritual facts. In the broad-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, "Gild 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 peradventure uniquely among his essays, consistently and without serious digression throughout the piece of work. The emphasis on the unity of experience is the same: "what is true for yous in your private heart is truthful for all men." Emerson rests his abiding religion in the individual—"Trust thyself"—on the fundamental link betwixt each man and the divine reality, or nature, that works through him. Emerson wove this explicit theme of cocky-trust throughout his piece of work, writing in "Heroism" (1841), "Self-trust is the essence of heroism." The campaigner 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 Helm Ahab in his classic American novel, Moby-Dick. Nevertheless, Emerson argued that if our promptings are bad they come up from our inmost being. If we are made thus nosotros have fiddling choice in whatsoever case only to be what we are. Translating this axiom into the social realm, Emerson famously declares, "Whoso would be a man must exist a nonconformist"—a point of view adult at length in both the life and piece of work of Thoreau. Equally memorable and influential on Walt Whitman is Emerson's idea that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of pocket-size minds, adored past little statesmen and philosophers and divines." In Leaves of Grass, Whitman fabricated 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 (ceremonious, religious) precisely because through them the individual approaches the divine 2nd mitt, mediated by the once original feel of a genius from another historic period: "An institution," as he explains, "is the lengthened shadow of one homo." To achieve this original relation one must "Insist on one's self; never imitate" for if the relationship is secondary the connectedness is lost. "Zero," Emerson concludes, "tin can bring yous peace but the triumph of principles," a argument that both in tone and content illustrates the vocational drive of the former minister to speak direct to a wide audition and preach a practical philosophy of living.

Three years after in 1844 Emerson published his Essays: Second Series, eight essays and 1 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 argument on Emerson's aesthetics and fine art. This philosophy of art has its premise in the Transcendental notion that the ability of nature operates through all existence, that information technology is being: "For we are not pans and barrows . . . but children of the fire, fabricated of it, and only the same divinity transmuted." Fine art and the products of art of every kind—poetry, sculpture, painting, and compages—catamenia from the same unity at the root of all human experience. Emerson'south aesthetics stress non the object of art but the forcefulness 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 take 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 college end . . . rising, or the passage of the soul into higher forms." The realm of fine art, ultimately for Emerson, is only an intermediary part, not an stop itself: "Fine art is the path of the creator to his work." On this and every subject, Emerson reveals the humanism at the cadre of his philosophy, his human being centric perspective that posits the artistic principle above the created affair. "At that place is a higher piece of work for Art than the arts," he argues in the essay "Fine art," and that work is the full creative expression of human being. Nature too has this "humanism," to speak figuratively, in its artistic process, every bit he writes in "The Method of Nature:" "The universe does not concenter usa until housed in an private." 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 middle, which knew the value of our incomparable materials" and can make employ of the "barbarism and materialism of the times." Emerson would not come across Whitman for some other decade, only after Whitman had sent him anonymously a re-create of the beginning 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 1 of Emerson'southward best-known and often-anthologized essays. It is also an essay written out of the devastating grief that struck the Emerson household subsequently the death of their five-year-sometime son, Waldo. He wrote, whether out of conviction or helplessness, "I grieve that grief tin can teach me nothing." Emerson goes on, rocking back and along 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" every bit consisting of "ii elements, ability and form, and the proportion must exist invariably kept." Among his more than quotable aphorisms is "The years teach us much which the days never know," a memorable statement for the idea that feel cannot be reduced to the smallest appreciable events, then added support again to constitute a life; that at that place is, on the contrary, an irreducible whole present in a life and at piece of work through u.s.. "Experience" concludes with Emerson'southward authentication optimism, a faith in man events grounded in his sense of the total penetration of the divine in all matter. "Every day," he writes, and "every human activity betrays the ill-curtained 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'southward The Ruby Letter (1850); Melville'southward 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 to the lowest degree i respect: none of his representative characters were American—nevertheless, each biography yields an insight into some attribute of Emerson'south thought he finds in the man or in his work, then 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 author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Each man stands in for a type, for case, Montaigne represents the "skeptic," Napoleon the "human being of the world." Humanity, for Emerson, consisted of recognizable just overlapping personality types, types discoverable in every historic period and nation, but all sharing in a mutual humanity that has its source in divine being. Each portrait balances the particular characteristic of the representative man that illustrates the general laws inhabiting humanity along with an assessment of the great man'south shortcomings. Like Nietzsche, Emerson did not believe that great men were ends in themselves just 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 "not bad," but "exist that there may be greater men." As a gesture toward cocky-criticism most an entire book on corking men past the champion of American individualism, Emerson concedes, "there are no mutual men," and his biographical sketches ultimately balance both the limitations of each homo 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.—ane. Unity, or Identity; and, two. Variety," Emerson concedes that through Plato we have had no success in "explaining being." Information technology was Swedenborg, according to Emerson, who discovered that the smallest particles in nature are only 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 "e'er in a church." From Montaigne, Emerson gained 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"—likewise as an enduring imperative of style: "Cutting these words, and they would drain." The "skeptic" Montaigne, nonetheless, 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 language poet possessed the rare capacity of greatness in that he immune the spirit of his age to achieve representation through him. However the earth waits on "a poet-priest" who tin see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration." Reflection on Napoleon's life teaches the value of concentration, ane of Emerson'southward chief virtues. In The Acquit of Life, Emerson describes "concentration," or bringing to bear all of i's powers on a single object, equally the "chief prudence." Likewise, Napoleon's shrewdness consisted in allowing events to take their natural course and become representative of the forces of his fourth dimension. The defect of the "homo of the world" was that he possessed "the powers of intellect without conscience" and was doomed to neglect. Emerson's moral summary of Napoleon's sounds a great deal similar Whitman: "Only that good profits, which we can gustatory modality with all doors open, and which serves all men." Goethe, "the author," similar 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 human being of civilization whose sphere of knowledge, every bit Emerson himself tried to emulate with his wide and systematic reading, knows no limits or categorical boundaries. Even so, "the lawgiver of art is non an artist," and repeating a call for an original relation to the infinite, foregoing even the venerable dominance of Goethe, Emerson concludes, "We as well must write Bibles."

English Traits was published in 1856 but represented near a decade of reflections on an invited lecture tour Emerson made in 1847-48 to Great britain. English Traits presents an unusually bourgeois set up of perspectives on a rather limited subject, that of a unmarried 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 past his travels and visits, and bore bear witness of what seemed to be an erosion of energy and originality in his idea.

The Bear of Life (1860), however, proved to be a piece of work of startling vigor and insight and is Emerson's terminal important piece of work published in his lifetime. "Fate" is arguably the primal essay in the book. The subject of fate, which Emerson defines equally "An expense of ways to end," forth with the relation of fate to freedom and the primacy of man'due south vocation, come up to be the chief subjects of the final years of his career. Some of Emerson'due south 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 costless." Emerson'southward advice for the acquit of life is to larn to swim with the tide, to "trim your bark" (that is, sails) to catch the prevailing wind. He refines and redefines his conception of history equally the interaction betwixt "Nature and idea." Emerson further refines his conception of the dandy human by describing him as the "impressionable" human, or the man who most perfectly captures the spirit of his time in his idea and activeness. Varying a biblical maxim to his own thought, Emerson argues that what we seek we volition 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 discipline of politics, Emerson consistently posited a faith in balance, the tendencies toward chaos and social club, change and conservation always correcting each other. His belatedly aesthetics reinforce this political stance as he veers in "Beauty" onto the subject of women's suffrage: "Thus the circumstances may be hands imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a bus, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees."

In his early on work, Emerson emphasized the operation of nature through the individual man. The Conduct of Life uncovers the same consideration simply at present understood in terms of work or vocation. Emerson argued with increasing regularity throughout his career that each man is fabricated for some piece of work, and to ally himself with that is to return himself immune from damage: "the conviction that his piece of work is dear to God and cannot exist spared, defends him." One step above simple concentration of force in Emerson's scale of values nosotros find his sense of dedication: "Nothing is beneath yous, if information technology 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 observe the counterbalanced perspective, 1 might say contradiction, to be found in all the tardily piece of 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 sunday borrows his beams"—to reassert his pervasive humanism, the idea that we endow nature with its beauty, and that homo is at the center of creation. Homo 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 effigy of American idea since the colonial period. Perchance due to his highly quotable style, Emerson wields a glory unknown to subsequent American philosophers. The general reading public knows Emerson'south piece of 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" too as philosophy, and indeed the essays, less so his poetry, stand undiminished as major works in the American literary tradition. Emerson'south emphasis on self-reliance and nonconformity, his championing of an accurate American literature, his insistence on each individual'due south 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 Grouping 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: Academy 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. Elation Perry. Minneola, NY: Dover Printing, 1995.
  • Field, Peter. Southward. 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 Heed on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995

Author Information

Vince Brewton
Email: vjbrewton@una.edu
University of North Alabama
U. South. A.