RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(1803-80)
· most influential 19th C writer
o reacting to
o reacting against
· 2nd of 5 surviving boys
· Father:
o William
§ Unitarian minister
§ dead when RWE = 8
· mother:
o succession of boarding houses
o for $$ to send boys to Harvard College
o (minister-training)
· Mary Moody Emerson: (1774-1863)
o aunt (paternal)
o influence on RWE intellectual growth
o inspiration
o guiding his reading & challenging his thinking
· education:
o Boston Latin School (1812-16) 9-13
o Harvard College (1817-21) 14-19
o Harvard Divinity School (1825) 22
o preaching (1826)
o ordained (1829)
§ Unitarianism (WE Channing)
· Bible = revelation of God’s intentions
· Man = not innately deprived
· question divinity of Jesus
§ German thinkers (Kant)
· “higher criticism”
· Bible = just an historical document, not the direct word of God
· miracle stories = myths of other cultures
§ Eastern thought -
· Hindu & Buddhist poetry
§ à struggle w/Christina beliefs
· occupations:
o taught at brother William’s school (“hopeless Schoolmaster”)
o for young women after college
· 1829:
o ordained Unitarian minister
§ Second Church of Boston
o married Ellen Louisa Tucker
§ dead of tuberculosis few years later @ 19
§ à caused more religious questioning & doubt
· 1835:
o remarried Lydia 'Lidian' Jackson
o moved to Concord, Mass. (rest of life)
o 4 kids
§ Waldo = dead 1842
· 1832:
o resigned from church
§ so disillusioned that stopped given Eucharist
o health = ailing
o à travels Europe 1832-33
o à met English Romantics
· 1833:
o returned from Europe
o started to receive 1st wife’s legacy
o ($1,000 per year) à no longer concerned @ making a living à writing & lecturing
· 1836:
o Nature (anonymous)
§ "Nature," "Commodity", "Beauty", "Language," "Discipline", "Idealism," "Spirit,"
§ "Prospects," "The American Scholar", "Divinity School Address," "Literary Ethics"
§ "The Method of Nature," "Man the Reformer," "Introductory Lecture on the Times"
§ "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "The Young American"
· TRANSCENDENTALISTS:
o pejorative
o anti-Lockean (Locke saw MIND as passive receptor of sense impressions)
o pro-Romantic (Coleridge, MIND as actively intuitive & creative)
o Emerson, Margaret Fuller, HD Thoreau, Theo. Parker, Bronson Alcott, Eliz. Peabody
· 1838: Divinity School Address à called atheist
· 1840-44:
o started The Dial
o w/Margaret Fuller
o official publication for the Transcendentalists
o his lectures
· 1841:
o Essays: First Series –
o "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence,"
o "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," “Art"
· 1842:
o son, Waldo, dies at 5
o RWE never recovers from
· 1844:
o Essays: Second Series –
o "The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature," "Politics,"
o "Nominalist and Realist," "New England Reformers"
· several lecture tours of Europe (1,500+)
· 60+
o signs of senility
· 4-27-82:
o 78
o pneumonia
o dead
· http://www.online-literature.com/emerson/
· Complete Works: http://www.rwe.org/
· Self-Reliance text: http://www.online-literature.com/emerson/588/
· STYLE:
o elliptical thought
o demanding on reader
o epistemological (human knowledge, limits & validity) quests
o maddeningly abstract at times
· READERS:
o “creative reading”
o reader’s active interpretive role
§ in generating meaning
§ & new ways of seeing the world
o respect for the independent spirit of readers
o prompts readers to trust their own ideas
o welcomes readers taking those ideas in new & even different directions
§ READER-RESPONSE
§ skepticism of language to embody truths
§ originality à don’t stop w/me à make your own way
EMERSON & REFORM:
· skeptical of movements that required group participation
· personal: Transcendentalism
· society: abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage
· literature: rejects American literary nationalism as timid, imitative à “American Scholar”
“The American Scholar” (1837)
· America’s “declaration of cultural independence”
· Original title = “An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, [Massachusetts,] August 31, 1837”
o before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society
§ a college fraternity composed of the 1st 25 in each graduating class
§ annual meetings =
· the occasion for addresses from the most distinguished scholars & thinkers of the day
· literary nationalism (#3):
o exhortation to break dependence on “courtly muses of Europe”
o a new call for “American” literature
o call for new generation of American writers moved by the “Divine Soul”
· OUTLINE:
o Introduction (1-7)
§ Scholar = 1 function of many
· “Man Thinking” (vs. thinking man)
§ 1 Body, several functions
· Winthrop “Model”
o Influences
§ Nature (8-9)
§ The Past (esp. Books) (10-20)
§ Action (21-30)
o Duties of the Scholar & Views on contemporary American society (31-45)
· I.
· break from past:
o call for “American” thinkers
o America = source of inspiration
o an independent American intelligentsia
· Allegory of 1 Man
o Plato
o each part does its thing for the good of the whole
o each w/its own function
· II. A
o NATURE & Man = linked
§ circular, eternal
§ order (organize the many through CLASSIFICATION)
o study nature = know thyself (self-knowledge – since similar/parallel)
· II. B
o Past, esp. in BOOKS
o “book worm” = worst scholar
o proper use of books = inspiration
§ books – inspire – innovation, originality, creativity
o proper pedagogy of colleges –
§ not rote memorization
§ but creation, originality
· knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation (Bloom’s Tax)
· II. C
o ACTION = imperative
o physical work
o thought = an action
o thought & action = vicious cycle
· III.
o DUTIES of Scholar –
§ “self-trust”
· self-reliance
· perseverance through poverty, obscurity,…
o (PURITAN, REVOLUTION)
· to be repository of wisdom for others
· teacher, not hoarder
§ bravery, courage
o America today –
§ 3 stages of life:
· Greek/Classical (childhood), Romantic (youth), Philosophical/Contemplative (adult)
§ Today = Period of Self-Criticism
· not a bad thing
· dissatisfaction, disillusionment = marks of transition period
· AMERICAN SCHOLAR:
o independent
o self-reliant (self-trust)
o courageous
o original
o brave, not timid
------
· GREAT AWAKENING:
o “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”
§ Edwards (religious), Paine (political), Emerson (intellectual, literary)
· Analogy of the One Man:
o “It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.”
§ each PART w/separate function
§ for the good of the WHOLE
§ to reunite
o America = amputated
§ “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
§ “In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.”
· Man Thinking vs. thinking man
· CLASSIFICATION:
o way of ordering the Chaos of our impressions of Nature
o power of the mind
o “Classification begins. To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.”
§ power of ANALOGY
· Paine, Madison, Emerson
· “transmuting life into truth”
· GOD-LIKE:
o Man = divine
o à thought = CREATION
o “Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit. Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke,[18] which Bacon,[19] have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
o Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20] with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad; this is worse than it seems.
o Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.”
§ BOOKS = “They are for nothing but to inspire.”
· unoriginal
· parrots, regurgitaters, book worms
· pedagogy
§ originality:
· “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.”
· planet analogy
· SOUL:
o democracy, equality
o “The one thing in the world of value is the active soul,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man”
· DIVINE:
o “To create,--to create,--is the proof of a divine presence.”
· 1:1 relationship to GOD:
o through Nature
o through creation – of thought
o “When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.”
· “CREATIVE READING”:
o Books = meant for inspiration
o “so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge”
o “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”
· COLLEGE (pedagogy):
o no rote memorization
o no teaching to the test
o à synthesis, creation
o “Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary [$] foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.”
· SELF-KNOWLEDGE:
o NATURE = MAN
o EXPERIENCE = teacher
o “The world--this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.