Emerson Influence

During the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was able to efficiently influence people from his poetry and essays to his lectures. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Emerson shared the same beliefs as other intellectuals in the area. He was characterized as an idealist philosopher whose new ideas changed the way people thought about and comprehended reality. Over the time of his career, Ralph Waldo Emerson formed many notions shown in his work based upon his independent learnings from reading and writing, having family history in ministry, and collaborating with colleagues. Emerson would not have become as great in his day if it was not for the time he spent alone learning. His intellectual life was shaped by a range and depth
of his extracurricular reading in history, literature, philosophy, and religion (Brewton). He was interested in the work of other individuals such as Plato, Charles Darwin, Michel de Montaigne, Johann Goethe, and Immanuel Kant. Also, he was an avid student of Eastern religion (Heitman). Furthermore for a Concord study, he read hundreds of volumes and in several languages, including the latest scientific publications and newly translated sacred texts of Eastern religions (Schulman). While in primary school, Emerson was fonder of desultory reading rather than of regular study, and naturally, because of this, came into some disfavor with the authorities (Lewis). Throughout his adolescence, he often wrote in journals, and even sent letters to his aunt. When his first wife, Ellen, passed away, he was able to cope by writing about it in one of his many journals (Schulman). This practice of composition of journal entry to lecture to published work stayed with him into his career (Myerson). In the winter of 1832, Emerson decided to sail for Europe, where he saw the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France. The observation gave him an insight into the concept of an order and interconnectedness behind all living things and of a man’s relationship to the physical world (Myerson). A few years later, Emerson became an active participant in the new Transcendentalism movement, which had a spiritual aspect to it. This spirituality resulted from a background of family ministry.
The Emerson family were descendants of a number of noteworthy New England ministers (Schulman). Like his father, William, Ralph Waldo Emerson became a minister at the local church in Boston. Even though Emerson enjoyed preaching, he did not believe that ministry was his calling. He was often thought to leave the ministry because he could not inconscience serve communion knowing the members construed the meaning differently than he did. While most of his family members practiced ministry, his paternal aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, did not. Her relentless intellectual energy and combative individualism left a permanent stamp on him as a thinker (Brewton). She knew all the thinkers of the day, taught Ralph many aphorisms, and first introduced him to Hindu scriptures and Neoplatonism (Schulman). Mary was at the same time passionately orthodox in religion and a lover of controversy, as well as an original thinker tending to a mysticism that was a precursor to her nephew’s more radical beliefs (Brewton). It is further said that Mary anticipated the Transcendentalist sensibility because of her openness to natural religion (Schulman). Ralph eventually joined the Transcendentalist movement, where people shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition (“Ralph Waldo”). Also, Emerson’s spiritual thoughts
seemed to anticipate Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, recognizing that we will pursue our higher, freer goals only after satisfying our lower ones (Turner). Sharing ideas with colleagues and learning from others helped Emerson become as successful as he was. His interest in European and Eastern thought stemmed from his concurrence with the German poet and philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Together, they drew the notion of “bildung,” or development, calling it the central purpose of human existence, which is shown multiple times throughout Emerson’s work (Brewton). From the English Romantic poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he borrowed the conception of “reason,” which consists of actions of perception, insight, recognition, and cognition (Brewton). When in college, Emerson attended lectures from the Greek professor, Edward Everett, and George Ticknor, who taught modern languages (Lewis). During his expedition to Europe in 1832, he met several people, including Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, and ended up collaborating with them over the time of his career (“Ralph Waldo”). Other notable people who contributed to Emerson’s work are all of the Transcendentalists. There were different people and events that have greatly impacted the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His philosophical views touched the lives of many, and his words will continue to live on for years to come. As he was influenced by the people around him at the time, he influenced numerous other individuals after he passed. The work of Ralph Waldo Emerson will not soon fade away.