Emerson Ralph Waldo (1803–82), American philosophical essayist, lecturer, and poet, a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. As a young man he taught school and served as a Unitarian minister (1826–32). After he resigned his pastorate in 1832, he traveled to Europe to visit Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. Upon his return, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and began anew as a public lecturer, essayist, and cultural critic. All the while he maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept a detailed, evocative journal. Most of this material has been published, and it casts considerable light on the depth of his thought, at times more so than his public presentations and books. His life was pockmarked by personal tragedies, notably the death of his father when Emerson was eight; the death of his first wife, Ellen, after two years of marriage; and the death of his oldest son, Waldo, at the age of five. Such afflictions belie the commonly held assumption that Emerson was a thinker who did not face the intractable problem of evil. To the contrary, his writings should be read as a continuing struggle to render the richest possible version of our situation, given that ‘things are in the saddle and ride mankind.’ Although Emerson did not write a systematic work in philosophy, he unquestionably bequeathed an important philosophical vision and countless philosophical pieces. Beginning with his concentration on the motif of nature, its embracing quality, and the rhythms of our inextricable presence within its activities, Emerson details the ‘compensatory’ ebb and flow of the human journey. The human soul and nature are related as ‘print’ to ‘seal,’ and yet nature is not always beneficent. In his essay ‘Compensation,’ Emerson writes that ‘the value of the universe continues to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion, if the force, so the limitation.’
After the acclaim given the publication of Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), he began to gather his public lectures, a presentational medium at which he was riveting, convincing, and inspiring. In 1841 Emerson published his Essays – First Series, which included the lovely piece ‘Circles,’ wherein he follows the blunt maxim ‘we grizzle every day’ with the healing affirmation that ‘life is a series of surprises.’ This volume also contains ‘Self-Reliance,’ which furnished a motto for the self-proclaiming intrepidity of nineteenth-century American individualism.
The enthusiastic response to Emerson’s essays enabled him to publish three additional collections within the decade: Essays – Second Series (1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and Representative Men (1850). These books and their successors contained lectures, orations, poems, and addresses over a wide range of topics, philosophical, personal, characterological, travel, historical, and literary. Emerson’s prose is swift, clear, and epigrammatic, like a series of written stochastic probes, resulting in a Yankee crazy quilt, munificent of shape and color. Emerson spoke to be heard and wrote to be read, especially by the often denigrated ‘common’ person. In fact, during Emerson’s European lecture tour in 1848, a letter to a London newspaper requested lowering the admission price so that poorer people could attend, for ‘to miss him is to lose an important part of the Nineteenth Century.’
Emerson’s deeply democratic attitude had a reflective philosophical base. He believed that ordinary experience was epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite messages. Despite his Brahmanic appearance and demeanor, Emerson was in continuous touch with ordinary things. He wrote, ‘Our chief experiences have been casual.’ His belief in the explosive and pedagogical character of ordinary experience is especially present in his influential oration ‘The American Scholar.’ After criticizing American thought as thoroughly derivative, he plots the influences necessary to generate a genuine scholar, paramount among them nature and the learning of the past, though he cautions us not to be trapped in excessive retrospection at the expense of ‘an original relation to the universe.’ It is his discussion of ‘action’ as the third influence on the scholar that enables him to project his clearest statement of his underlying philosophical commitment. Without action, ‘thought can never ripen into truth,’ moreover, ‘thinking is a partial act,’ whereas living is a ‘total act.’ Expressly opposed to any form of psychological, religious, philosophical, or behavioral dualism, he counsels us that the spiritual is not set apart, beyond reach of those who toil in the everyday. Rather, the most profound meanings of the human condition, ‘lurk’ in the ‘common,’ the ‘low,’ the ‘familiar,’ the ‘today.’ The influence of the thought of Emerson reaches across class, caste, genre, and persuasion. Thinkers as diverse as James, Nietzsche, Whitman, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Wallace Stevens are among those deeply indebted to Emerson. Yet, it was Dewey who best caught the enduring bequest of Emerson, writing of ‘the final word of Emerson’s philosophy, [as] the identity of Being, unqualified and immutable, with character.’ See also TRANSCENDENTALISM. J.J.M.