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1、Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 April 27, 1882) was an American lecturer, philosopher, essayist, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of societ
2、y, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 ess
3、ay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be Americas Intellectual Declaration of Independence.1 Considered one of the great lecturers of the time, Emerson had an enthusiasm and respect for
4、his audience that enraptured crowds.Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 represent the core of his thinking, and include s
5、uch well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emersons most fertile period.Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developi
6、ng certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for man to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emersons nature was more philosophical than naturalistic; Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.Whil
7、e his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time, Emersons essays remain one of the linchpins of American thinking, and Emersons work has influenced nearly every generation of thinker, writer and poet since his time. When asked to sum up his work, he
8、said his central doctrine was the infinitude of the private man.Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803,3 son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mothers brother Ralph and the fathers great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo.4 Ralph Wal
9、do was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles.5 Three other childrenPhebe, John Clarke, and Mary Carolinedied in childhood.5The young Ralph Waldo Emersons father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks
10、before Emersons eighth birthday.6 Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family; his aunt Mary Moody Emerson played an important role. Aunt Mary had a profound effect on Emerson.7 She lived with the family off and on, and maintained a constant correspondence with E
11、merson until her death in 1863.8Emersons formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine.9 In October 1817, at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent students and send messages to fa
12、culty.10 Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called Wide World.11 He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher wo
13、rking with his uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts.12 By his senior year, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo.13 Emerson served as Class Poet; as was custom, he presented an original poem on Harvards Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18.
14、14 He did not stand out as a student and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people.15In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek out warmer climates. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the weather was still too cold.16 He then went further south, to St. Au
15、gustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach, and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine, he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat. Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was only two years his senior; the two became extremely good friends and enjoyed one anothers company.
16、 The two engaged in enlightening discussions on religion, society, philosophy, and government, and Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education.17While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first experience of slavery. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Societ
17、y while there was a slave auction taking place in the yard outside. He wrote, One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with Going, gentlemen, goingSelf-Reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
18、 It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emersons repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emersons most famous quotes, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of littl
19、e minds.HistoryThe first hint of the philosophy that would become Self-Reliance was presented by Emerson as part of a sermon in September 1830 a month after his first marriage.1 His wife was sick with tuberculosis2 and, as Emersons biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, Immortality had never been st
20、ronger or more desperately needed!1From 1836 into 1837, Emerson presented a series of lectures on the philosophy of history at Bostons Masonic Temple. These lectures were never published separately but many of his thoughts in these lectures were later used in Self-Reliance and several other essays.3
21、 Later lectures by Emerson, especially the Divinity School Address, led to public censure for Emersons radical views; the staunch defense of individualism in Self-Reliance may be a reaction to that censure.4Self-Reliance was first published in his 1841 collection, Essays: First Series.AnalysisEmerso
22、n presupposes that the mind is initially subject to an unhappy nonconformism.5 However, Self-Reliance is not anti-society or anti-community. Instead, Emerson advocates self-reliance as a starting point, not as a goal.6Transcendentalism is a group of ideas in literature and philosophy that developed
23、in the 1830s and 40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among transcendentalists core beliefs was the belief in an ideal spiri
24、tual state that transcends the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individuals intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.The major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, an
25、d Amos Bronson Alcott. Other prominent transcendentalists included Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester
26、 Judd, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, and Jones Very.The publication of Ralph Waldo Emersons 1836 essay Nature is usually considered the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Emerson wrote in his speech The American Scholar: We will
27、walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; Divine Soul which also inspires all men. Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human consciousness to emerge from the new idealist philosophy:So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inqu
28、iry of the intellect, What is truth? and of the affections, What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. . Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things
29、will attend the influx of the spirit.In the same year, transcendentalism became a coherent movement with the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 8, 1836, by prominent New England intellectuals including George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry
30、 Hedge. From 1840, the group published frequently in their journal The Dial, along with other venues. The movement was originally termed Transcendentalists as a pejorative term by critics, who were suggesting their position was beyond sanity and reason.2The practical aims of will the transcendentali
31、sts were varied; some among the group linked it with utopian social change; Brownson connected it with early socialism, while others considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture The Transcendentalist, Emerson suggested that the goa
32、l of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice:You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a transcendental party; that there is no pure transcendentalist; that we know of no one but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all who by strong b
33、ias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels food; who
34、, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. . Shall we say, then, that transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith;
35、the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish.By the late 1840s, Regina Emerson believed the movement was dying out, and even more so after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. All that can be said, Emers
36、on wrote, is, that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation.3 There was, however, a second wave of transcendentalists, including Moncure Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.4edit OriginsTranscendentalism was rooted in the t
37、ranscendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), which the New England intellectuals of the early 19th century embraced as an alternative to the Lockean sensualism of their fathers and of the Unitarian church. They found the alternative in Vedic thought, German idea
38、lism, and English Romanticism.The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the inner spiritual or mental essence of the human. Immanuel Kant had called all knowl
39、edge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects. The transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Stal, and
40、 other English and French commentators for their knowledge of it. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English Romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as a slightly later, American outgrowth of Romanticism. Another major influence was the mystical spiritu
41、alism of Emanuel Swedenborg.Thoreau in Walden spoke of the debt to the Vedic thought directly, as did other members of the movement:In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in co
42、mparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of
43、the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.