person1803-1882

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Disciplines:

Summary

American essayist, lecturer, and philosopher who led the American Transcendentalist movement and developed a philosophy of self-reliance, the over-soul, and the divinity of nature.

Core Contribution

Self-Reliance: conformity and consistency are the hobgoblins of small minds; the individual must trust their intuitive conviction against society's pressure. The Over-Soul: all individual minds are expressions of a single universal mind accessible through moments of inspiration and nature. Nature as a symbol of spirit.

Key Spikes & Highlights

Quit the ministry after refusing to serve communion — too honest to perform a ritual he had ceased to believe in, rather than accommodating his skepticism to professional necessity.
Wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds — then spent decades carefully maintaining and refining a broadly consistent philosophical vision.
His journals run to sixteen volumes — the source of all his essays, which he assembled from journal passages, giving them their characteristic aphoristic density.

Notable Works & Achievements

Nature

Self-Reliance

The American Scholar

Essays: First Series

Representative Men

Historical Influences

Immanuel Kant Samuel Taylor Coleridge Emanuel Swedenborg

Intellectual Lineage

German Idealism Neoplatonism Unitarianism Hindu Philosophy

Contemporaries & Peers

Henry David Thoreau Margaret Fuller William Ellery Channing

Minds Influenced

William James Henry David Thoreau Friedrich Nietzsche Walt Whitman

Intellectual Posterity

American Pragmatism American Transcendentalism American Self-Help Culture

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