Essay
Who Was Ralph Waldo Emerson?
An Essay on the Transcendentalist from Concord, Massachusetts
The depth to which one knows a person has more to do with one’s familiarity with their ideas than their biography.
Hence, a historian of ideas knows the identity of humanity across time better than a mere historian.
In this respect, one can know many dead individuals better than alive ones — for the modern customs involved in ‘getting to know others’ seldom involve sharing the ideas one idiosyncratically holds but instead tend to devolve into sharing surface-level biographical pieces of information.
The Transcendental Beliefs of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not the purpose of this essay; to ask “Who was Ralph Waldo Emerson?” is to ask about the ideas he propounded.
And to ask of the ideas he propounded isn’t merely to expound on their contents but on how they arose for Emerson and how he managed to hone in on such materializations of creative energy — namely, through transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism is a school of American philosophy from the early-mid 19th century that Emerson spearheaded and was known for its metaphysical closeness to…
