RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(1803 to 1882)
CONTENTS
 Emerson: An Overview
 His Life and Works
 His Major Ideas
 Emerson's Writings
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Emerson
is best known as
leader of the "Transcendentalist" movement in America. He was one who
pursued the quest for God – not through the way of Christ, but rather
as a higher order of "pure thought." He and his Transcendentalists
sought, through mental discipline, to be broad in their intellectual
reach, encompassing a variety of refined efforts to embrace God both in
a oneness with nature and a sense of reaching beyond even the natural.
They sought to be as fully human as possible, so as to find God as
fully as possible. They too tended toward lofty communalism in the hope
of reaching beyond the coarse nature of selfishness and sin, to find a
more perfect human harmony.
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Emerson was born (1803) into
a prominent Boston family, one characterized by generations of service
to the church (his father, William, was the Unitarian minister of the venerable First
Church of Boston). Emerson grew up as the second of five sons (two daughters and another son died in infancy) of William, a Unitarian pastor of the venerable First
Church of Boston, and
his wife Rebecca. His father died when he was almost eight and he
was raised by a circle of women, including an aunt with whom he would
become very close. At age fourteen he entered Harvard College and
graduated at age eighteen (surprisingly, only in the middle ranking of
his class). He went to work with a brother, William, teaching young
women at his mother's home. When William went off to Germany to study
divinity, Emerson then established his own school. Several years later
he himself entered Harvard Divinity School for study. In early 1829 he
was ordained to the ministry at Boston's Second Church as its junior
pastor. There he soon
achieved recognition as an excellent preacher.
Then tragedy began to hit Emerson. In 1831 his young wife Ellen died of
tuberculosis. Then a younger and very brilliant brother, Edward, who
also had long been struggling with his health, both emotional and
physical, died of the same disease in 1834. Finally another younger
brother, Charles, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis. Emerson was
devastated.
Following his wife's death, he began to distance himself emotionally from traditional Christianity. Like his father before
him, he found himself being drawn into new realms of thought that challenged
his orthodox Christian beliefs. The writings of the English romantics,
Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, the philosophy of Swedenborg, the new biblical text-criticism
coming out of Germany, plus his own cool intellectual rather than warm
pastoral nature began to distance him emotionally from his work.
The following year (1832) he resigned his position at the church to
begin the search elsewhere for the answer to life's questions. At the
end of that year he departed for a grand tour of Europe. Here
he would meet a number of such intellectual luminaries as the English
philosopher John Stuart Mill and the Scottish lecturer and social
commentator Thomas Carlyle. In Paris he would become intrigued by the
botanical gardens of the Jardin des Plantes, where he hit upon the
thought of how all things in life seemed mystically interconnected.
Returning to America in October of
1833 he contemplated Carlyle's career as a lecturer, and the next month
undertook the first of the 1,500 lectures he would offer over the next
near-half century. These lectures would be his stock-in-trade,
the source of a number of books he would publish. Thus he immediately began work on his small, but revolutionary book,
Nature--which
he published anonymously three years later. In this book he outlined
the basic ideas that underpinned his Transcendalist philosophy.
In 1835 he remarried (Lydia or Lidian) and they moved to Concord, where
two sons and two daughters were born. Here, in company with three other
scholars, the Transcendental Club was founded (1836) – with the hope of
birthing a community similar to the salons of Europe where
intellectuals would gather to discuss weighty matters of life. Among
those who would join them was Thoreau, for whom Emerson took on
something of a role as a father-figure.
Emerson's split with Christianity became evident when in 1838 he
delivered a lecture at Harvard Divinity School, affirming that Biblical
miracles and the claim of Jesus's divinity were merely the inventions
of the classic mind that assigned God-like qualities to their heroes.
Emerson instead advocated something of a Humanism that freed the soul
from the shackles of traditional religion so that it could soar in
search of the higher meaning of life. Harvard Divinity School was
scandalized by his bold Humanism (he would not be invited again to
lecture there, until thirty years later when even Harvard Divinity
School had begun to come around to holding many of Emerson's Humanist
ideas).
Efforts were made by Emerson's neighbor Alcott to put their organic
philosophy into full operation as an experiment in communal living,
when the entirely vegetarian farm Fruitlands was established. It was
not a grand success. After it failed, Emerson purchased another farm
for Alcott for a second attempt. He even purchased two sections of land
for himself (though he himself did not work the land). As it turned
out, the Transcendentalists were better at thinking, discussing,
lecturing and publishing than at securing material success, although
Emerson's lectures were beginning to pay well and his books were being
widely read.
Emerson now branched into esoteric or Universalistic study, taking up
the study of Hindu Vedanta, reading the Bhagavad Gita and commentaries
on the Vedas by Henry Thomas Colebrooke. His philosophy of the Oneness
of Life had the larger religious confirmation of the Hindu religion.
This fit his temperament better than traditional Christianity.
Emerson had built up such
a faith in the natural attraction of the human mind to high-minded ideas
that he was a bit taken aback when his ideas failed to persuade--but only
stirred animosity. He learned the hard lesson that reform of human
life was not going to take place just in the presenting of ideas.
There was going to have to be concerted action that accompanied these ideas.
Though Emerson himself would not become an activist-reformer, many of his
close associates in the Transcendalist movement would--especially those
closely involved in the Abolitionist movement (to end slavery in the United
States).
He spent the rest of his
life serving as a lecturer, philosopher and poet--in wide demand on the
lecture circuit, even being called to Harvard to present his ideas.
He was definitely a man of the times, philosopher of the young, optimistic
American Republic which felt that it had a mandate to show the rest of
the world the higher, more humane way to live.
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Basically he took the ancient
Idealist position of Plato--in strict opposition to the mechanistic-materialist
philosophy of Newton and Locke which he saw as undergirding modern life
(including the Unitarian theology that was so prevalent around him).
He was in part a mystic (in keeping somewhat with the older Puritan tradition!)--seeking
direct knowledge of God through divine revelation, rather than through
systematic theology or rational philosophy.
He felt that Newton had imprisoned
the human spirit within his model of life as a machine made up of bits
of matter in motion in accordance to a fixed system of natural laws.
Further, he felt that Locke had only added to this error by depicting the
human mind as a similar machine, linked only to the outside world through
the the bombardment of external sensations upon the receptors of the mind.
This mechanistic-materialistic philosophy was all lacking the force of
spirit, a transcending spirit--which was to Emerson the substance
that gives rise to all life, human and otherwise. To Emerson, this
transcending spirit unites all life into a single harmony which flows from
God--and at the same time is God.
The moral implications of
Emerson's philosophy were in the vast freedoms this spirit seemed to give
man--freedoms to make choices about his own life. To Emerson man
was not a machine, but part of the great flow of the power of God--and
capable of fulfilling the most noble visions endowed by God to the active
human mind/spirit. Indeed, the human spirit was potentially so powerful
that it had a proper place in the on-going unfolding of all creation.
The human mind was thus not the victim of a supposedly machine-like environment
around it--but was instead its natural master, inasmuch as man acted in
harmony with that environment.
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 Emerson's major works or writings:
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 Miles
H. Hodges
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