Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

's The Transcendentalist is one of the essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

s he wrote while establishing the doctrine of American Transcendentalism. The lecture was read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, Massachusetts in January 1842.

The work begins by contrasting materialists and idealists. Emerson laments the absence of "old idealists." He goes on to outline the fundamental beliefs and characteristics of the New England Transcendentalists

New England Transcendentalists

New England Transcendentalists are the core group of writers from whom the phenomenon of American Transcendentalism radiated. The primary examples are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott among others from Concord, Massachusetts. This group was largely influenced by the...

. He discusses the nature of epistemology and the debate between Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

 and Kant

KANT

KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

 on Imperative

Imperative

Imperative can mean:*Imperative mood, a grammatical mood expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions * A morphological item expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions...

 forms and Transcendental forms, and discusses perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

 and reality

Reality

In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...

 in a blatantly Platonic

Platonism

Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...

 sense. He says that solitude

Solitude

Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with people. It may stem from bad relationships, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders or circumstances of employment or situation .Short-term solitude is often valued as a time when one...

 is a state of being that should be encouraged, for it allows human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

ity to achieve a higher level of alignment

Alignment

Alignment may refer to:* Alignment , secondary evidence used to associate features such as postholes* Alignment , in Israel from 1965 to 1992...

 with nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

 and prevents the contamination

Contamination

Contamination is the presence of a minor and unwanted constituent in material, physical body, natural environment, at a workplace, etc.-Specifics:"Contamination" also has more specific meanings in science:...

 that one encounters within a society

Society

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

 embodied the majority

Majority

A majority is a subset of a group consisting of more than half of its members. This can be compared to a plurality, which is a subset larger than any other subset; i.e. a plurality is not necessarily a majority as the largest subset may consist of less than half the group's population...

 of these characteristics, except for neglecting to take action against the government. Thoreau was a staunch abolitionist; his home was a stop on the underground railroad

Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...

. He was actively subverting the government, but Emerson admitted that there was no perfect Transcendentalist. Emerson created a perfect, ideal archetype

Archetype

An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...

for the Transcendentalist, but also realized that it would be adapted to fit imperfect humans in an imperfect world.

External links

• The Transcendentalist, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842.