In his native United States, Emerson became more revered as a literary figure—an essayist and poet—than as a philosopher, but his founding role in Transcendentalism drew admiration from the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers. Transcendentalism may be regarded as an American branch of British and German early nineteenth-century Romanticism, albeit influenced by Unitarian Christianity. In terms of ethics, it regarded human beings as inherently good. In terms of metaphysics, it regarded nature as inherently good but subject to corruption by some of society’s institutions. For this reason, the ideal man or woman was of independent mind and, to use Emerson’s own term, was “self-reliant.” In terms of theology, Transcendentalism was tinged with pantheism; that is, the Divine was deemed immanent in natural creation, and God could be best known through His natural works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, the son of a prominent clergyman. He entered Harvard when he was fourteen, graduated, taught at a school run by his brother, and, in 1825, enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. His true education, however, was earned in the voluminous reading he did on his own, devouring volumes of history, literature, philosophy, and theology. He was so intense a student that both his general health and his eyesight suffered.
In 1829, he became junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church, resigning in 1832 because he objected to the practice of the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist. In 1836, Emerson selfpublished a long essay titled Nature, which laid out the fundamentals of American Transcendentalism. The next year, he delivered “The American Scholar” as a Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, a plea for American intellectuals to break free of the prejudices of the Old World and create a literature, art, and philosophy of and for the New World. His “Harvard Divinity School Address,” delivered in 1838, was so radical in its religious views—savoring as it did of both pantheism and Deism—that he was not invited to speak again at Harvard for twenty-nine years.
Having essentially renounced both the pulpit and academia, Emerson found himself pressed for a living and embarked on a distinguished and spectacularly successful career on the lecture circuit, beginning in 1839. For the next four decades, he did what few philosophers have been able to do. He made philosophy both public and popular.
From 1840 to 1844, Emerson edited The Dial with fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He drew upon his lectures to create two distinguished and popular sets of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844). These established him as a philosopher. With his financial fortunes on the rise, Emerson in 1844 bought land on the shore of Walden Pond, on which he allowed the naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) to build a rude cabin, which inspired Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden (1854), a practical experiment in living “authentically” and according to the Transcendental tenet of self-reliance.
Inspired by the experimental quasi-utopian collective at Brook Farm, Emerson assembled around himself in Concord, Massachusetts, an informal community of kindred spirits including Thoreau, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the philosopher and social reformer Margaret Fuller, reformer Bronson Alcott, and the minor New England poet Ellery Channing. During this period, Emerson became an outspoken abolitionist, adding slavery to his menu of lecture subjects. He wrote and lectured well into the 1870s, but his final years were marked by an intellectual decline suggestive of dementia. He died on April 27, 1882, in his Concord home.
The core of Emerson’s Transcendentalism is found in his 1836 Nature, in which he portrays nature as the perfect medium through which the divine is communicated to humanity. He spoke of an existential epiphany evoked by the natural environment, in which he felt himself become a “transparent eye-ball … through which … the currents of Universal Being circulated.” Thus, nature, properly experienced, transports one to realms beyond nature, which Emerson implied were divine. Within nature, the individual becomes one with the experience of nature, and the seer becomes the actions of seeing. “I am nothing,” he writes. “I see all.”
Emerson proposed, in “The American Scholar,” that the philosopher should evolve himself into a new species of humanity, “Man Thinking.” His thought, however, was to be liberated from secondhand book knowledge: “Only so much do I know, as I have lived.” The true philosopher should live an active and self-reliant intellectual life that opens his mind to the “Divine Soul.” The American scholar, he proposed, will create in America, “for the first time” in history, a “nation of men.”
Throughout his essays collected in 1841 and 1844, Emerson fused philosophy and poetry. Although he wrote verse and was widely recognized as an important American poet, his philosophical prose is more provocative and original in its use of metaphor. Indeed, perhaps no nineteenth-century philosopher has so effectively bent literature to philosophic ends or so skillfully used philosophy to produce literature.
