Representative Men

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Overview

Representative Men includes seven lectures on great men -- Plato, Swedenborg, Montaige, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found it deliciously sweet.

Emerson is one of the most influential thinkers in American history. His Transcendentalism preached a close communion with man and nature and is one of the great life-affirming philosophies of any age. Society and Solitude provides a salient exemplification of Emerson's thought.

As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized "the splendid labyrinth of one's own perceptions." More than any writer of his time, he forged a style distinct from his European predecessors and embodied and defined what it meant to be an American. Matthew Arnold called Emerson's essays "the most important work done in prose."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605972428
Publisher:	Book Jungle
Publication date:	03/13/2008
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led 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 society, 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 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance",[7] "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature",[8] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement,[10] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man."[11]Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.
Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803,] a son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarianminister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. Three other children-Phebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline-died in childhood.] Emerson was entirely of English ancestry, and his family had been in New England since the early colonial period.
Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday.[17] Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family; his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in particular had a profound effect on him.[18] She lived with the family off and on and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863.

Read an Excerpt

"Emerson is a writer who grows restless if he stays too long with any proposition. And so, as one of his most intelligent modern readers, Judith Shklar, has pointed out, he built Representative Men around the principle of 'rotation,' which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian America—the idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title, and it employs political metaphors throughout. 'We are multiplied,' the opening chapter declares, 'by our proxies.' "

—From the Introduction by Andrew Delbanco

Table of Contents

I.	Uses of Great Men	7
II.	Plato; or, The Philosopher	39
	Plato: New Readings	78
III.	Swedenborg; or, The Mystic	89
IV.	Montaigne; or, The Skeptic	141
V.	Shakspeare; or, The Poet	179
VI.	Napoleon; or, The Man of the World	211
VII.	Goethe: or, The Writer	247

Preface

"Emerson is a writer who grows restless if he stays too long with any proposition. And so, as one of his most intelligent modern readers, Judith Shklar, has pointed out, he built Representative Men around the principle of 'rotation,' which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian America—the idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title, and it employs political metaphors throughout. 'We are multiplied,' the opening chapter declares, 'by our proxies.' "

—From the Introduction by Andrew Delbanco