Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82)

3. Early works

Emerson’s philosophy is often taken as starting with his first book Nature (1836), where he expresses a sense of ‘decorum and sanctity in the woods’ and of vast ‘prospects’ for a culture of new thought and ‘new men’. The new culture can be achieved, and the beauty of the world restored, ‘by the redemption of the soul’, but this redemption takes place, Emerson emphasizes, according to no formula or model, but through ‘untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility’.

Emerson’s distinctive philosophical voice emerges in ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) where, in one of the reversals characteristic of his thinking, he writes of the scholar less as a man in a library than as a complete ‘Man Thinking’, whose ‘dictionary’ is a life of free action. Influenced by but not ‘warped out of his own orbit’ by past writing, the scholar is an original source rather than ‘the parrot of other men’s thinking’. Emerson calls us back to ordinary life: to ‘the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life’. Although he is often termed a ‘transcendentalist’, Emerson does not wish to transcend the common world. ‘I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.’

‘An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge’, commonly known as the ‘Divinity School Address’ (1838), contains a fierce attack on institutional religion, but a defence of such ‘holy bards’ as Moses and Jesus. The ‘eastern monarchy of a Christianity’ that Emerson finds around him treats the revelation as something that happened ‘long ago… as if God were dead’. But, Emerson insists, ‘God is; not was’.

Emerson’s first series of twelve essays contains some of his best-known work, including ‘History’, ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘The Over-Soul’ and ‘Circles’, as well as ‘Friendship’, ‘Spiritual Laws’, ‘Intellect’ and ‘Compensation’. Emerson thinks of history, like scholarship, primarily as a matter of the personal and the present, as ‘the desire to do away this wild, savage and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now’. ‘The Over-Soul’ teaches a religion of the here and now to go along with Emerson’s present-oriented history and scholarship: ‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God.’ ‘Circles’ expresses Emerson’s vision of flux and incompletion, in which ‘permanence is but a word of degrees’. Especially in morality, ‘there is no virtue which is final; all are initial’. Yet Emerson presents his own set of initial or experimental virtues, including especially ‘abandonment’ and ‘enthusiasm’.

‘Self-Reliance’ offers an indictment of the crowd or public – a ‘mob’ of ‘timorous, desponding whimperers’ – and a radical defence of the individual. ‘Whoso would be a man’, Emerson states, ‘must be a nonconformist’; and the healthy attitude of human nature is displayed in ‘the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner’. Anticipating Nietzsche’s idea of the human creation of higher values, Emerson brazenly asks ‘What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions if I live wholly from within?’