Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803–1882)
Emerson wrote that geniuses’ biographies were likely to be short; even their family members could reveal little about them. This remark reflects Emerson’s view that those who change our understanding of the world do so through the power of their ideas. Outwardly their lives may be unremarkable and leave little for family to remember. Their real life exists within the mind. Although it was not Emerson’s intention, he might have been speaking of himself. For many who read and heard him, especially the young, his ideas were an intellectual awakening to a revolutionary sense of the world. To understand his life, we must turn not to the recollections of family members but to his Journals where, from the age of sixteen, he recorded the life of his mind. Emerson is truly one of the geniuses whose outer life yields a short biography.
Emerson was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister whose ancestors were clergymen back to the time of the Puritans. The father’s early death left Emerson’s mother and her five sons in poverty. But in this family, a son’s education justified any sacrifice, and Emerson entered Harvard at the age of fourteen. As we know from his Journals, the dozen years after his graduation were a time of self-doubt, indecision, serious illness, and several false starts toward a career. The last of these false starts led him to enter the ministry. Three years later, when he was twenty-nine, he resigned his pastorate, perhaps partly in reaction to the death of his wife after only a year of marriage. To some, he may have appeared to be drifting, to lack purpose, but he was seeking an inner direction, searching his mind and feelings for the inner needs that would show him his work. His resignation from the pulpit, an important step for this son of seven generations of ministers, brought this process near completion. He would still speak of religion and the spiritual life, but from outside the church. After some months in Europe, he returned to settle in the village of Concord, Massachusetts, married again, and took up the career of writing and lecturing that he would follow until his death. His first book, Nature, appeared in 1836; it was the opening statement of a new faith.
Emerson drew his ideas from many artists, philosophers, and religious thinkers, from all parts of the world, but he made those ideas his own. His intellectual accomplishment was to overturn the eighteenth-century idea of nature as a machine and of God as the master mechanic. This concept of nature as a machine, run by natural law, could account for much, but, in Emerson’s view, it could not account for a human being’s spiritual existence and the fact that we find our spiritual existence reflected in the world of nature. Beyond natural law and human reason, there must exist a higher, spiritual law that permeates all forms of life. Emerson sought to explain the experience of spirit or soul that human beings feel in themselves and see also in nature.
This effort at explanation carried his thought in directions that at first may seem contradictory. The presence of spirit in nature led him to the idea of the Over-Soul, an ultimate spiritual unity that encompasses all existence and in which each human being has an individual share. The existence of the Over-Soul explains why, at moments of spiritual intensity, we feel our individual being so strongly and at the same time feel our relationship to all being.
Emerson also maintained that the experience of spirit begins in the individual. Emerson gave great, almost overwhelming, emphasis to the self. Again and again he held the self up as the basis of morality, as superior to society, and as the ultimate standard of value. In this he opened himself to misunderstanding. He was accused of valuing self above others. But Emerson made a distinction between the outer self, by which others know us, and the essential self, which is each person’s share of universal being or the Over-Soul. It was his purpose, in fact, to give moral and spiritual meaning to the individualism that Americans so prized. He had only contempt for the view of individualism as narrow self-interest, which he called "selfism." He believed that individualism was a step toward the recognition of God within us, that each being represented the embodiment of spirit, and that human possibilities were limitless.
Emerson’s message to the young—of his own and succeeding generations—was exhilarating. Against the mechanical nature of the materialists, he offered an organic nature that was alive and vitally connected to our own spirit. He placed us inside the world in a new way. Against self-interest he offered a self-trust through which the individual could participate in the greatest of all enterprises, the spiritual development of human life. In later years, the stubborn resistance of social evils and Emerson’s own waning powers tempered his optimism. But he never lost his basic faith that the inner experiences of the human being are the true guide to reality. Later generations have often criticized Emerson for being far too optimistic about human nature and progress. But hope—about ourselves and about the world—is a fundamental condition of being alive, and American writers and thinkers have returned to Emerson again and again. No writer has been more influential in shaping American literature.
