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- Emerson’s Life and Times
RALPH WALDO EMERSON"It is one soul that animates all men." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1803, into a family whose male members were typically clergymen. He studied divinity at Harvard. Well-educated and taught to embrace open-mindedness as well as religion, Emerson was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1929. He was a good speaker, delivered a good sermon or two, but something was missing. “He would begin his sermons with words from the Bible, but would gradually find himself discussing the unfathomable ideals found in nature,” or abstract philosophy. He had problems trying to find “his way back into the Bible to close the speeches.” Although some of his parishioners liked his style, others did not. “Stumbling for appropriate words at the bedside of a dying veteran of the American Revolution,” the dying man reportedly told Emerson: “Young man, if you don’t know your business, you had better go home” (www.litkicks.com). Although he had entered into the ministry with high hopes (and Unitarianism has always been a liberal and progressive religion, even back then), Emerson resigned from ministry and journeyed to England in 1832 following the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker. She had died of tuberculosis after they had been married only eighteen months. This broke Emerson’s heart and caused a deep spiritual crisis. His time in England was spent cultivating friendships and intellectual associations with people like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. Needless to say, by the time he returned to America, Emerson had a newfound optimism, as well as a greater understanding of philosophy. He returned to America in 1834, but tragedy would strike at his optimism once again. That same year, Ralph Waldo’s brother Edward died. To make matters worse, his brother Charles died in 1836. Emerson would be a haunted man the rest of his days. His writings and lectures contained dark clouds even in his most arduous attempts to celebrate the glory of humanity. By the time Charles had died, Emerson had remarried (his second wife was named Lydia Jackson), settled in Concord, and begun to publish essays about the human spirit, freedom and independence, and the undesirability of following tradition. Among these early essays was one of his greatest, “Self-Reliance,” a polemic about the necessity of complete individual freedom (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/poet/emerson.html, www.litkicks.com). Emerson co-founded a journal, The Dialand collected a group of fellow writers (both male and female; like his friend John Stuart Mill, Emerson believed in women’s emancipation), and started a tradition known as the New England Transcendentalists. Expanding outside that small circle of colleagues, Emerson discovered one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century, when he met and wrote a letter of recommendation for Henry David Thoreau. Two decades later, Emerson would again contribute to the intellectual history of America by promoting the work of poet Walt Whitman. Along the way, he promoted Buddhism and other eastern religions, opposed slavery, fought for women’s equality, and remained a dedicated, if cynical, proponent of democracy. Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882. His life had never been as peaceful and content as his privileged New England upbringing might have predicted; he lost a spouse, two brothers, a child, he had his house burn down, and lived through the Civil War. But he remained, at least in principle, optimistic about humanity, who he saw as intrinsically tied to the transcendent and divine. This mystical trust in human transcendence led many of Emerson’s contemporaries to view him less as a philosopher than a divine seer of sorts. Philosophers usually seek some kind of analytic understanding. Emerson, in contrast, seemed to de-value understanding in favor of heavenly emotions. In this sense, he was even more a mystic than Plato. As George Santayana characterizes him: A certain disquiet mingled, however, in the minds of Emerson’s contemporaries with the admiration they felt for his purity and genius. They saw that he had forsaken the doctrines of the Church; and they were not sure whether he held quite unequivocally any doctrine whatever…Emerson not only conceived things in new ways, but he seemed to think the new ways might cancel and supercede the old. His imagination was to invalidate the understanding. That inspiration which should come to fulfill seemed too often to come to destroy (George Santayana, EMERSON: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1962, p. 34). Similarly, Emerson had a habit of characterizing important figures of his time as somehow transcendent, removed from day-to-day history, even as they sought to reform the conditions of the time. He held Daniel Webster in such high esteem for Webster’s opposition to slavery that he identified Webster as “representative of the American continent” (Thomas J. Brown, LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, Spring, 2000, p. 669). This paradoxical figure would influence a certain strain of American thought well into the 20th century. Emerson was the first major thinker in America to offer up non-Western, non-linear thinking as an alternative to the dry, academic science of modernist philosophy. He influenced Henry David Thoreau and, in doing so, inspired civil disobedience advocates from Ghandi to Martin Luther King. And his marriage of philosophy, theology and poetry brought romanticism to America, a continent perhaps more ready for it that Europe had ever been. Today, however, it is impossible to systematize or categorize Emerson’s thinking. Even to call it “transcendentalism” seems a stretch, since “-isms” are usually systems, and Emerson was as anti-systemic as they come. However, certain major themes stand out in his writings, and have great potential for debates over morality, values, and politics. 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