Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Emerson. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Emerson. Mostrar todas las entradas
sábado, 14 de diciembre de 2024
martes, 19 de diciembre de 2017
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(From Hart and Leininger's Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed.)
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-82), born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister who was a member of an old Puritan family. After his father's death, he was raised by his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a zealous pious woman who expressed her sardonically critical mind in a style her nephew admired and imitated. At Harvard in 1820 he began to keep the voluminous journals that he continued throughout his life, and that formed the basis of most of his essays and poems. After graduation (1821) he took over his brother's Boston school for young ladies, although with some misgivings, and when he moved to Canterbury with his family in 1823 he expressed his relief at returning to the natural beauties of the countryside in the poem "Good-bye."* He taught for two more years, then entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where ill health and doubts on dogma made him a desultory student. Although approved as a candidate for the Unitarian ministry (1826), he had to go to Georgia and Florida for the winter because of a pulmonary disease. He married in 1829, but his wife died in 1831. A year later came the great turning point in his life; he resigned his pastorate of the Second Church of Boston, where he had been an effective and popular preacher, because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord's Supper.
During a tour of Europe (1832-33), he met Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, through whom he became intimately associated with the transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism. Other influences on Emerson's later thinking included his own Unitarian-Yankee background, his admiration for Plato and the neo-Platonists, his study of the sacred books of the East, the skepticism of Montaigne, the new republican tradition, the line of British philosophy that ran through Berkeley, Hume, and Locke, and the mystical metaphysics of Swedenborg. On his return to Boston he did some preaching, but turned more and more to lyceum lecturing, for which he drew materials from his journals. His addresses, presented in such series as "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture," "Human Life," and "The Present Age," in turn furnished the basis for his later essays, which, without formal unity, are bound together by pithy, stimulating sentences that contain the quintessence of his philosophy. Among these are "Self-Reliance,"* "The Over-Soul,"* "Compensation,"* "Spiritual Laws," "Love," and "Friendship,"
In 1835 Emerson remarried and settled in Concord,* the home of his forefathers, which was thereafter the center of his own activity. Here he was intimate with Thoreau, Alcott, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Brownson, Hawthorne, and others who shared in the movement of Transcendentalism.* His first book, Nature* (1836), is the fundamental document of his philosophy, and expresses also his constant, deeply felt love for the natural scenes in which he passed so much of his time. His Transcendental ideas were next applied to cultural and national problems in his oration The American Scholar* (1837). A year later, in his "Divinity School Address,"* he attacked formal religion and championed intuitive spiritual experience. As a result, it was 30 years before he was again invited to speak at Harvard.
To promulgate his ideas further, in 1840 he joined with other Transcendentalists in publishing The Dial, and, though he did not sympathize with the communal experiments at Brook farm and Fruitlands, he became interested in many contemporary reform movements and extended the sphere of his lecturing. Some of these lectures received their final form in the first series of Essays (1841), whose 12 pieces were "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art," With the second series of Essays, which appeared three years later, these works established Emerson's reputation throughout the U.S. and abroad. In 1845 he delivered the series of lectures published as Representative Men* (1850). His first volume of Poems (1847), together with May-Day and Other Pieces included such poems as "Threnody,"* "Compensation,"* "Each and All,"* "The Rhodora,"* "The Sphinx,"* "Days,"* "The Humble-Bee,"* "Voluntaries,"* "Concord Hymn,"* "May-Day,"* and "Brahma,"* His poetry is intellectual, gnomic, and metaphysical.
During 1847-48 he visited England and France, renewed the friendship with Carlyle that had been maintained in their notable correspondence, and made new friends among the most distinguished European thinkers and writers. Selected Letters (1987) consists of correspondence with his wife Lillian. His lectures on England the following season formed the basis of his book English Traits* (1856). A collection of Addresses and Lectures was published in 1849, and The Conduct of Life* (1860) and Society and Solitude* (1870) contain the materials of the lectures in his lyceum circuit, which took him as far west as the Mississippi. He contributed, with Channing and Clarke, to the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller (1852), and in 1855 helped found the Saturday Club. During the 1850s, Emerson's journals exhibit his great interest in antislavery, and he was an active sympathizer with the Northern struggle in the Civil War, but by 1866 realized that his career was nearly at its end. In the poem "Terminus" he declared:
Emerson, whose thought is often considered the core of Transcendentalism, stood apart from much of the activity of the movement, and, though he summed up the major development of romanticism in America, his philosophy is rooted in the Puritan background and tempered by the many systems of thought that converged in him. He had no complete philosophical system, but with a style now vibrant, now flinty, preached the great doctrine of a higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, the obedience to instinct, the obligation of optimism and hope, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul which explains the many diverse phenomena of life.
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803-82), born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister who was a member of an old Puritan family. After his father's death, he was raised by his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a zealous pious woman who expressed her sardonically critical mind in a style her nephew admired and imitated. At Harvard in 1820 he began to keep the voluminous journals that he continued throughout his life, and that formed the basis of most of his essays and poems. After graduation (1821) he took over his brother's Boston school for young ladies, although with some misgivings, and when he moved to Canterbury with his family in 1823 he expressed his relief at returning to the natural beauties of the countryside in the poem "Good-bye."* He taught for two more years, then entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where ill health and doubts on dogma made him a desultory student. Although approved as a candidate for the Unitarian ministry (1826), he had to go to Georgia and Florida for the winter because of a pulmonary disease. He married in 1829, but his wife died in 1831. A year later came the great turning point in his life; he resigned his pastorate of the Second Church of Boston, where he had been an effective and popular preacher, because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord's Supper.
During a tour of Europe (1832-33), he met Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, through whom he became intimately associated with the transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism. Other influences on Emerson's later thinking included his own Unitarian-Yankee background, his admiration for Plato and the neo-Platonists, his study of the sacred books of the East, the skepticism of Montaigne, the new republican tradition, the line of British philosophy that ran through Berkeley, Hume, and Locke, and the mystical metaphysics of Swedenborg. On his return to Boston he did some preaching, but turned more and more to lyceum lecturing, for which he drew materials from his journals. His addresses, presented in such series as "The Philosophy of History," "Human Culture," "Human Life," and "The Present Age," in turn furnished the basis for his later essays, which, without formal unity, are bound together by pithy, stimulating sentences that contain the quintessence of his philosophy. Among these are "Self-Reliance,"* "The Over-Soul,"* "Compensation,"* "Spiritual Laws," "Love," and "Friendship,"
In 1835 Emerson remarried and settled in Concord,* the home of his forefathers, which was thereafter the center of his own activity. Here he was intimate with Thoreau, Alcott, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Brownson, Hawthorne, and others who shared in the movement of Transcendentalism.* His first book, Nature* (1836), is the fundamental document of his philosophy, and expresses also his constant, deeply felt love for the natural scenes in which he passed so much of his time. His Transcendental ideas were next applied to cultural and national problems in his oration The American Scholar* (1837). A year later, in his "Divinity School Address,"* he attacked formal religion and championed intuitive spiritual experience. As a result, it was 30 years before he was again invited to speak at Harvard.
To promulgate his ideas further, in 1840 he joined with other Transcendentalists in publishing The Dial, and, though he did not sympathize with the communal experiments at Brook farm and Fruitlands, he became interested in many contemporary reform movements and extended the sphere of his lecturing. Some of these lectures received their final form in the first series of Essays (1841), whose 12 pieces were "History," "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "Spiritual laws," "Love," "Friendship," "Prudence," "Heroism," "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," and "Art," With the second series of Essays, which appeared three years later, these works established Emerson's reputation throughout the U.S. and abroad. In 1845 he delivered the series of lectures published as Representative Men* (1850). His first volume of Poems (1847), together with May-Day and Other Pieces included such poems as "Threnody,"* "Compensation,"* "Each and All,"* "The Rhodora,"* "The Sphinx,"* "Days,"* "The Humble-Bee,"* "Voluntaries,"* "Concord Hymn,"* "May-Day,"* and "Brahma,"* His poetry is intellectual, gnomic, and metaphysical.
During 1847-48 he visited England and France, renewed the friendship with Carlyle that had been maintained in their notable correspondence, and made new friends among the most distinguished European thinkers and writers. Selected Letters (1987) consists of correspondence with his wife Lillian. His lectures on England the following season formed the basis of his book English Traits* (1856). A collection of Addresses and Lectures was published in 1849, and The Conduct of Life* (1860) and Society and Solitude* (1870) contain the materials of the lectures in his lyceum circuit, which took him as far west as the Mississippi. He contributed, with Channing and Clarke, to the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller (1852), and in 1855 helped found the Saturday Club. During the 1850s, Emerson's journals exhibit his great interest in antislavery, and he was an active sympathizer with the Northern struggle in the Civil War, but by 1866 realized that his career was nearly at its end. In the poem "Terminus" he declared:
Fancy departs; no more invent;Thereafter, although in 1870 he gave a series of lectures at Harvard, published as Natural History of Intellect (1893), and continued to lecture and write, issuing Letters and Social Aims (1876), his mental capacities showed a slow but sure decline. He made journeys to California (1871) and to Europe (1872), but gradually slipped into a serene senility in which his mind finally became a calm blank. His son Edward Waldo Emerson (1844-1930) edited his Complete Works (1903-4), along with the Journals (10 vols, 1909-14), and several collections of correspondence. A complete edition of previously unpublished Letters was edited by R. L. Rusk (6 vols., 1939). Early Lectures appeared in three volumes (1959-64). Publication of a complete edition of the Journals and Notebooks (16 vols.) was begun (1960- ), as was a scholarly edition of Collected Works (1972- ).
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
Emerson, whose thought is often considered the core of Transcendentalism, stood apart from much of the activity of the movement, and, though he summed up the major development of romanticism in America, his philosophy is rooted in the Puritan background and tempered by the many systems of thought that converged in him. He had no complete philosophical system, but with a style now vibrant, now flinty, preached the great doctrine of a higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, the obedience to instinct, the obligation of optimism and hope, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul which explains the many diverse phenomena of life.
martes, 3 de diciembre de 2013
Transcendentalism
From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger.
Transcendentalism, a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particularly at Concord (c. 1836-60), as a reaction against 18th-century rationalism, the skeptical philosophy of Locke, and the confining religious orthodoxy of New England Calvinism. This romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualistic belief was more a cast of thought than a systematic philosophy. It was eclectic in nature and had many sources. Its qualities may be discerned in Jonathan Edwards's belief in "a Divine and Supernatural Light, immediately imparted to the soul by the spirit of God," and the idealism of Channing, whose Unitarianism was a religious predecessor of this belief in an indwelling God and intuitive thought. It was also a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th-century thought. The name, as well as many of the ideas, was derived from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he declares, "I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori." From other German philosophers, such as Jacobi, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Herder, it received impulses toward mysticism and toward practical action as an expression of the will. Through Goethe, Richter, Novalis, and other literary figures, the philosophy was more easily communicated to American authors, and, at second remove, the doctrines of German transcendentalism were reflected in the poetry and criticism of such English authors as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. In addition, the New England Transcendentalist belief was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, and such English neo-Platonists as Cudworth and More, as well as by certain aspects of the teachings of Confucius, the Mohammedan Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddhists, the eclectic idealist Victor Cousin, the Hebrew and Greek scriptural authors, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Swedenborg.
Although the very spirit of Transcendentalism permitted contradiction, and its eclectic sourdes made for diverse concepts, in its larger outlines the belief had as its fundamental base a monism holding to the unity of the world and God and the immanence of God in the world. Because of this indwelling of divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within itself all the laws and meaning of existence. Likewise, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rapt mystical state, in which the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and originating in the Over-Soul. Thus occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul's intuitions and impulses, based on this identification of the individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self-reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority, tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of the movement.
These primary beliefs varied greatly as they were interpreted in the writings of differnt authors, although the most important literay expression of transcendental thought is considered to lie in Thoreau's Walden* and in such works of Emerson as Nature,* The American Scholar,* the Divinity School Address,* "The Over-Soul,"* "Self-Reliance,"* and "Compensation."* Other members of the informal Transcendental Club* whose prose and poetry expresses similar ideas, included Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the younger W. E. Channing, Ripley, Jones Very, C. P. Cranch, J. F. Clarke, Theodore Parker, Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody, and W. H. Channing. Since there was no formal association, many writers of the time, such as Hawthorne and Julia Ward Howe, were on the fringe of the steadfast believers, and in one way or another the beliefs affected many not usually associated with the movement, including Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Melville, and Whitman. So far as the movement had a certain voice, The Dial* (1840-44) may be considered its organ, and, although it necessarily remained on an idealistic plane, it was instrumental in the formation of such social experiments as Brook Farm* and Fruitlands.*
Transcendentalism, a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particularly at Concord (c. 1836-60), as a reaction against 18th-century rationalism, the skeptical philosophy of Locke, and the confining religious orthodoxy of New England Calvinism. This romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualistic belief was more a cast of thought than a systematic philosophy. It was eclectic in nature and had many sources. Its qualities may be discerned in Jonathan Edwards's belief in "a Divine and Supernatural Light, immediately imparted to the soul by the spirit of God," and the idealism of Channing, whose Unitarianism was a religious predecessor of this belief in an indwelling God and intuitive thought. It was also a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th-century thought. The name, as well as many of the ideas, was derived from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he declares, "I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori." From other German philosophers, such as Jacobi, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Herder, it received impulses toward mysticism and toward practical action as an expression of the will. Through Goethe, Richter, Novalis, and other literary figures, the philosophy was more easily communicated to American authors, and, at second remove, the doctrines of German transcendentalism were reflected in the poetry and criticism of such English authors as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. In addition, the New England Transcendentalist belief was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, and such English neo-Platonists as Cudworth and More, as well as by certain aspects of the teachings of Confucius, the Mohammedan Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddhists, the eclectic idealist Victor Cousin, the Hebrew and Greek scriptural authors, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Swedenborg.
Although the very spirit of Transcendentalism permitted contradiction, and its eclectic sourdes made for diverse concepts, in its larger outlines the belief had as its fundamental base a monism holding to the unity of the world and God and the immanence of God in the world. Because of this indwelling of divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within itself all the laws and meaning of existence. Likewise, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rapt mystical state, in which the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and originating in the Over-Soul. Thus occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul's intuitions and impulses, based on this identification of the individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self-reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority, tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of the movement.
These primary beliefs varied greatly as they were interpreted in the writings of differnt authors, although the most important literay expression of transcendental thought is considered to lie in Thoreau's Walden* and in such works of Emerson as Nature,* The American Scholar,* the Divinity School Address,* "The Over-Soul,"* "Self-Reliance,"* and "Compensation."* Other members of the informal Transcendental Club* whose prose and poetry expresses similar ideas, included Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the younger W. E. Channing, Ripley, Jones Very, C. P. Cranch, J. F. Clarke, Theodore Parker, Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody, and W. H. Channing. Since there was no formal association, many writers of the time, such as Hawthorne and Julia Ward Howe, were on the fringe of the steadfast believers, and in one way or another the beliefs affected many not usually associated with the movement, including Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Melville, and Whitman. So far as the movement had a certain voice, The Dial* (1840-44) may be considered its organ, and, although it necessarily remained on an idealistic plane, it was instrumental in the formation of such social experiments as Brook Farm* and Fruitlands.*
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