• Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston to the
Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister in a
famous line of ministers. He gradually drifted from
the doctrines of his peers, then formulated and first
expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in
his 1836 essay, Nature.
• Emerson's father, who called his son "a rather
dull(kalın kafalı) scholar", died in 1811, less than two
weeks short of Emerson's 8th birthday.
• After Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821 at
the age of eighteen, he assisted his brother in a
school for young ladies established in their mother's
house, after he had established his own school in
Chelmsford; when his brother went to Göttingen to
study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school.
Life (1803-1882)
• The distinguished poet, essayist, and lecturer was born in Boston,
Massachusetts.
• As a child, he experienced illness, poverty, and the death of a parent.
• His father, a Unitarian minister, died when Emerson was eight years old,
and his mother struggled to raise five boys
• . After graduating, Emerson taught several years at his brother's school
for girls.
• He returned to Harvard to study for the ministry and became a Unitarian
minister in 1829.
• His brief career as a minister was marred by religious doubt and by his
wife's death in 1831
• . After traveling to Europe for a year, Emerson returned to the United
States to devote himself to lecturing and writing. In 1835, he remarried
and settled in Concord.
• From 1836 through 1838 he served as Minister to the small Unitarian
congregation in East Lexington Massachusetts, Follen Church Society.
This was his last ministerial position.
Literary career
• In September 1835, Emerson and other like-minded
intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served
as a center for the movement, but did not publish its journal
The Dial, until July 1840. Emerson anonymously published
his first essay, Nature, in September 1836.
• In 1838 he was invited back to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity
School, for the school's graduation address, which came to be
known as his Divinity School Address. His remarks managed
to outrage the establishment and shock the whole Protestant
community at the time, as he proclaimed that while Jesus was
a great man, he was not God.
• At the time, such statements were rather unheard of. For this,
he was denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young
men's minds. Despite the roar of his critics, he made no reply,
leaving it to others for his defense. He was not invited back to
speak at Harvard for another 40 years, but by the mid-1880s
his position had become standard Unitarian doctrine.
What is transcendentalism?
• A floor wax? a breath mint?Actually it is a
philosophy.Here are the big three beliefs of
the transcendentalism:
1:There is a direct connection or
‘correspondence’ between the universe and
the individual soul.as a result nature is
where it’s at.
• Nature is the gospel of the new faith. ‘he
wrote in his :divinity school adress.
The sage of Concord:
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
‘The only way to have a friend is to be
one’
‘To be great is to be misundertood’
‘life only avails ,not the having lived’
‘’that government is best which governs not at all’’
thoreau
‘The mass of the men lead lives of quiet
desperation’’thoreau
• 2:By contemplating objects in nature,people
can transcend the world and discover union
with the Over soul that unities us all:He said in
‘nature’
• 3:follow your own intuition and own
beliefs,however divergent from the social norm
they may be.
• The transcendentalists were an equalopportunity groups.Not to worry;in the
transcendentalists’ democracy of intellect,you
could interpret the movement any way you
wanted
İmportant works:
• Nature;did little to establish his literary reputation at
first,at least in part because published it
anonymously.
• The American scholar:it was a call for american
intellctuals to trust their individualty and act as a
noble representatives to the world.
• The divinity school adress:He declared that true
religion resides wthin the individual ,not in
Christianity or in the Church.
• Self reliance:there is a time in every man’s
education when he arrives at the conviction that
envy is ignorance;that imitation is suicide.
The least you need to know:
• 1.Emerson is the key intellectual and
philosphical voice of 19 th-century America
• 2.Transcendentalism was a philosphical
movement that began around 1840.It
stressed individualsim ,intuition,nature,and
self-reliance.
• 3.In his ‘divinity school adress’he declared
that true religion resides within the
individual,not in Christianity or in the church.
• Early in 1842, Emerson lost his first son, Waldo, to scarlet fever. Emerson
wrote about his grief in two major works: the poem "Threnody", and the
essay "Experience." In the same year, William James was born, and
Emerson agreed to be his godfather.
• Emerson associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau
and often took walks with them in Concord. Emerson encouraged Thoreau's
talent and early career.
• The land on which Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond belonged to
Emerson. While Thoreau was living at Walden, Emerson provided food and
hired Thoreau to perform odd jobs. When Thoreau left Walden after two
years' time, it was to live at the Emerson house while Emerson was away on
a lecture tour.
• Their close relationship fractured after Emerson gave Thoreau the poor
advice to publish his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, without extensive drafts, and directed Thoreau to his own agent who
made Thoreau split the price/risk of publishing. The book found few readers,
and put Thoreau heavily into debt.
• Emerson was noted as being a very abstract and difficult writer who
nevertheless drew large crowds for his speeches.
• The heart of Emerson's writing were his direct observations in his journals,
which he started keeping as a teenager at Harvard.
• The journals were elaborately indexed by Emerson. Emerson went back to
his journals, his bank of experiences and ideas, and took out relevant
passages, which were joined together in his dense, concentrated lectures.
He later revised and polished his lectures for his essays and sermons.
• Emerson was strongly influenced by his early reading of the French essayist
Montaigne. From those compositions he took the conversational, subjective
style and the loss of belief in a personal God.
• He never read Kant's works, but, instead, relied on Coleridge's interpretation
of the German Transcendental Idealist. This led to Emerson's non-traditional
ideas of soul and God.
Essential Bibliography on Emerson
• Cavell, S., Emerson Transcendental Etudes.
• Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. This is a collection of all the essays
written on Emerson by his most profound philosophical scholar.
• Kateb, G., Emerson and Self-Reliance. Thousand Oaks: Sage Press,
1995. Emerson’s democratic individualism.
• Richardson, R., Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: U of California
Press, 1995. The most up to date biography. And the author is
extraordinarily careful about the textual origin of Emerson’s thinking.
• Stack, G.J., Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity. Athens: Ohio
UP, 1992. Soressi, B., Ralph Waldo Emerson. Il pensiero e la
solitudine. Roma: Armando, 2004. An introduction to Emerson’s
philosophy through Cavell’s interpretations and from a European
perspective.
• Urbinati, N., Individualismo democratico. Emerson, Dewey e la
cultura politica americana. Roma: Donzelli, 1997.
Essays
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Nature
Representative Man
History
Self-Reliance
Spiritual Laws
Love
Friendship
Prudence
Heroism
Intellect
Art
Poetry
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Alphonso of Castile
Astræ
Bacchus
Berrying
Blight
Celestial Love
Compensation
Concord Hymn
Days
Dirge
Dæmonic Love
Fate
Ode To Beauty
Poetry
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
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Song Of Nature
Sphynx
The Amulet
The Apology
The Bell
The Day's Ration
The Problem
The Rhodora
The Snow-Storm
The World-Soul
To-day
Nature (1836)
• In these years Emerson, who already in Paris is fascinated by the
Jardin des plantes and the Musée des sciences, enthusiastically
reads the theorist of sciences and astronomer Herschel, and writes
natural history essays, essays on English literature, and
biographies.
• In 1836 comes out, anonymous, Nature, a little systematic treatise which
is central in the landscape of American Transcendentalism, that is a
philosophical current which in Emerson’s and Thoreau’s versions one
can see as a sort of existentialism which has pragmatist as much as
idealistic and prophetic ramifications.
• Nature begins with an explicit critique of post-hegelian historicism
and of every “retrospective” attitude; a critique that he will further
develop in the following essays and which one can find – almost
without consistent variations, in Nietzsche’s second Untimely
Meditation.
The American Scholar (1837) and
Divinity School Address (1838)
• These two essays are the fruit of years of fervid studies in
education, in the philosophy of culture and in philosophical
anthropology (concentrated into a consistent number of essays which
perhaps would be worthwhile to reconsider).
• The essay of 1837 is the elaboration of an homonymous conference
held at Harvard and defined by O.W.Holmes as “our intellectual
Declaration of Independence”. Readers and scholars of any sort are
invited to build from the foundations a new authentically American
culture, and to free themselves from the eagerness to imitate at
any cost the European models. Moreover, it is suggested
Gramscian ideal of a total, organic intellectual, one who can unite
both thinking and acting.
• The scholar must be – rather than a reader of books – an observer of
reality, of even the most ordinary and humble everydayness.
Representative Men (1850)
• This collection of essays shows in a first instance, what could
be the scope and goal of our knowing the works and the life
of the “great men”: they are worth not so much in that they are
exemplars we have to servilely imitate, but as they are stimulating
figures because representative of the potential inside each
human being: Plato will speak to the Plato that is in us, and
analogously Shakespeare, and so on. One needs to put himself
in dialogue with these voices, but he also needs to use them
well, avoiding being subjected by their authoritative influence.