Emerson, whose full name is Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a well-known 19th century American philosopher associated with the philosophical movement called Transcendentalism. He famously inspired the poet Walt Whitman, and was psychologist William James´ godfather. Scholar Harold Bloom called him "the prophet of American Religion."
Emerson was from a long line of ministers through the male side of the family, and his father was a Harvard graduate and minister with a liberal bent. Emerson was born in 1803, but his father passed away from stomach cancer when Emerson was eight. He entered college at 14, was Class Poet and read a poem at his graduation in a class of 59. He graduated at 18, worked as a teacher. He was accepted at Harvard Divinity School three years later, but at 23 had health problems and traveled to the South where he met Napoleon´s nephew in Florida and enjoyed wide-ranging conversations with him. Emerson was ordained in 1829, and married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker. She died of tuberculosis two years later. During her illness, he began to question his ministry, and after her death, he began to criticize the church´s methods. W Sullivan cites his journal entry, "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." He criticized things like Communion practices, and wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it."
In 1833, Emerson toured Europe where his visit to Paris` Jardin des Plantes impressed him with Jussieu´s botanical classification system, and RD Richardson has identified it as a powerful moment of epiphany for Emerson in recognizing the value of Science, i.e. Scientific Philosophy. Earlier in Rome, Emerson had met John Stuart Mill who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle.
Leaving Paris for England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Carlyle. Although Carlyle´s views later began to indulge increasingly in an elitist view of history and human nature, his earlier insights had a grasp of important insights. The contrast and connection that he maintained with Emerson make him interesting to appreciate in some detail even as his later views raise interesting questions. From his young manhood, Carlyle had had religious clerical ambitions as a University student, but began literary and philosophical study of German idealism, especially Johann Gottlieb Fichte, getting published in Fraser´s Magazine. Carlyle also wrote appraisals of the lives of poets and literary figures like Goethe, Voltaire, and Diderot. Carlyle began to keenly appreciate the distinction between the natural and the artificial. His groundbreaking book Sartor Resartus uses a fictional German philosopher of clothes in a complex approach that criticizes British ideologies like Utilitarianism and its effects like commercialization. Carlyle painted a spiritual process spectrum that used terms like the Everlasting Nay as the spirit of denying God´s existence, the Centre of Indifference of agnosticism and indifference, and then the Everlasting Yea for the spirit of faith in God. Certainly, Carlyle´s work seems part of a literary and spiritual tradition identifiable in Voltaire´s Candide (1759), and Jonathan Swift even earlier satire in A Modest Proposal (1729) and earlier works like A Tale of a Tub and An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and the work Carlyle had studied intently by Goethe, including Faust (1808).
Emerson greatly appreciated Carlyle´s spirit and the message of the book. Emerson helped Carlyle publish it in the US, writing the preface. The two maintained contact until Carlyle´s deaoth in 1881, the year before Emerson´s own passing.
Returning from Europe in 1833, Emerson gave a talk based on his experience in Paris, "The Uses of Natural History." In it, he expresses his view that the study of nature provides "new words" of a living language. "Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue." That clearly contrasted with his perception of his experience as a minister in the Unitarian denomination.
As he continued lecturing, he prepared his first published essay, "Nature" in 1836. Just before´publishing, he met with two Unitarian ministers FH Hedge and G Ripley, and publisher G Putnam who were interested in forming the Transcendental Club. A year later, he invited a group of women to dinner before the meeting so that they would be there for it, specifically, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Ripley, and Elizabeth Hoar. Just before that, Emerson had given his Phi Beta Kappa address "The American Scholar" that was called "the intellectual American Declaratio of Independence."
Two years later, Emerson was invited to give the Harvard Divinity School address, where he expressed his rejection of the Biblical miracles and his view of Jesus not being divine.
By 1845, Emerson had been introduced to Indian Religious Philosophy through French Philosopher Victor Cousin and the UK´s Henry T Colebrook. In Emerson´s work "The Over-soul," he wrote, "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole." RC Gordon and P Goldberg note that Emerson came to the view that "the purpose of life was spiritual transformation and direct experience of divine power, here and now on earth."
As to social issues, Emerson had nurtured common stereotypical conceptions based on the cultural differences between Euro-American culture and African. By the time the abolitionist Rev. Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois in the 1830s, however, the immorality of slavery drove Emerson to speak out against it in his lectures. The 1856 beating of Sen. Charles Sumner impelled Emerson further in his comments against the institution.
In his book, Harold Bloom compares Emerson to the pioneering French essayist M de Montaigne, and credits him as "the prophet of American religion." Bloom was apparently not very rigorous in his attribution, with Emerson being oddly credited by Bloom for Mormonism and Christian Science. A genuine psychosocial questioning would raise questions in my view about how Emerson´s influence compares with abolitionism and other issues advanced by the Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, the Unitarian SJ May, both credited by the renowned Frederick Douglass. Moreover, there is the Social Gospel movement after the 1870 of the likes of W. Gladden and W Rauschenbusch. In addition, what considerations exist with the distinction of evangelical religion by 1835 in the tradition of Charles G Finney´s Ohio-based abolition oriented preaching. Then there is the emergence of such categories as Christian healing, for one, and conservative evangelism for vanity salvation, for another. Emerson described himself with reference to the Quakers later in life. Elias Hicks had been a Quaker abolitionist, inspiring Lucretia Mott, and possibly Susan B Anthony, the daughter of a Quaker. The more independent William Lloyd Garrison worked helping lead a Quaker abolitionist paper, as an additional person of note to consider.
How do the issues discussed in the life, spiritual concerns, and biographical scholarship of Ralph Waldo Emerson relate to your own interests and concerns in these matters?
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