Philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Overview
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. His speech "The American Scholar", given in 1837, was called America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence" by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures, and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience". Together with "Nature", these essays made the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets. He instead developed ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to achieve almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's conception of "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." He was one of several major figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach, by rejecting views of God as separate from the world".
Emerson remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well-known as a mentor and close friend of his fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Thomas Carlyle
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Victor Cousin
- Plutarch
- Harold Bloom
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Henry More
- Walt Whitman
- Plotinus
- Henry David Thoreau
- Michel de Montaigne
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Frithjof Schuon
- Charles Hartshorne
- William James
- Emma Goldman
- Amos Bronson Alcott
- Nikolas Kompridis
- Robert Musil
- William Henry Channing
- George Holmes Howison
- Chauncey Wright
- Robert S. Corrington
Ideas Ralph Waldo Emerson discusses
- Wallace Stevens
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Harvard Divinity School
- Florence
- Thomas Carlyle
- Herman Melville
- Individualism
- Atheism
- John Stuart Mill
- Transcendentalism
- The Dial
- Victor Cousin
- Philosophy of history
- Louis Agassiz
- Harvard University
- Mayflower
- Malta
- Henry Thomas Colebrooke
- Conformity
- Aphasia
- 19th-century philosophy
- Mormonism
- New England
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.