2019.11.28 拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生的美国理念

shiyi18

IDEAS
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American Idea
He co-founded The Atlantic 162 years ago this month. His vision of progress shaped the magazine—and helped define American culture, in his time and in ours.

By Annika Neklason
a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson on a gray background
Library of Congress / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
NOVEMBER 28, 2019
SHARE
About the author: Annika Neklason is a former assistant editor at The Atlantic.

During Harvard University’s commencement week in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the podium at the annual meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa society. The group, composed of the top students in the graduating class, was gathered in the First Parish Church in Cambridge. Emerson, the class poet of his own Harvard class a decade before, and a writer and philosopher of growing stature, had been chosen as the honored guest to address the future intellectual elite of New England.

The event was a capstone in a week of ceremony and tradition. That changed when Emerson began to speak.


In his speech, titled “The American Scholar,” Emerson called for the young country to develop a national intellectual life distinct from lingering colonial influences. He also delivered an incisive critique of his audience, condemning academic scholarship for its reliance on historical and institutional wisdom. The eponymous scholar, he argued, had become “decent, indolent, complaisant.” To become more than “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking,” a scholar must begin to engage with the world for oneself.

Emerson was an unlikely critic of the country’s intellectual establishment. The son of a Unitarian minister, he had attended Harvard Divinity School and taken a position after graduation as a junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church. But the loss of his young wife to tuberculosis shortly after his ordination—just 16 months into their marriage—had shaken the foundation of his faith, and he had begun to chafe against the restrictions of institutionalized knowledge.

A similar frustration with New England’s dominant religious and academic culture was growing among many of the region’s other young intellectuals. In 1836, Emerson had joined a handful of them in founding the Transcendental Club. As Emerson laid out in his essay “Nature,” published the same year the club began, the transcendentalists sought freedom from the “poetry and philosophy of … tradition” and “religion by … history.” They believed that moral truth should be sought not in accepted wisdom, but through individual thought and experience.

With “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave voice to the movement’s individualism: envisioning an independent American intellectual culture premised not on any kind of nationalist pride—nor on any particular doctrine or political system—but on a dedication to independence itself. He would later define the “American idea” he sought to promote through his work simply as “Emancipation.”

The speech elicited praise from many of Emerson’s fellow transcendentalists and anger from the Harvard administration; after giving a similarly critical address at the divinity school the following year, he was banned from speaking on campus for three decades.

RECOMMENDED READING
Cartoons of office workers whose bodies are shaped like the letters M, T, W, T, and F.
There’s a Perfect Number of Days to Work From Home, and It’s 2
AMANDA MULL

Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something
JOSEPH FRANKEL

The Sex Drought
JACKIE LAY
But “The American Scholar” had made its mark. Emerson’s speech left a particular impression on two members of the Harvard community, a troublemaking undergraduate named James Russell Lowell and a recent alumnus named Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought,” Lowell later wrote, “till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”

Holmes called the speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson’s appeal for cultural independence coincided with the nationwide struggle toward another kind of emancipation. As transcendentalism began to take root in New England, abolitionism was gaining fervor across the Northern states. The debate over slavery seeped into churches, literature, and colleges, dominating conversations about America’s future.

Though he was initially hesitant to speak publicly about slavery, by the 1840s Emerson came to believe that American culture could be used to advance the cause of emancipation. He wasn’t alone: His view was shared by many other transcendentalists and prominent New England abolitionists. In May 1857, he convened at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with several of them, including Lowell, Holmes, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Together they founded a magazine dedicated to advocating abolitionism and promoting American voices: The Atlantic Monthly.

Read more: The birth of The Atlantic Monthly

The mission statement printed in the first issue of The Atlantic that November echoed Emerson’s expansive philosophy. The founders disavowed prejudice and promised to “be the organ of no party or clique,” and to pursue morality and truth no matter where they stemmed from or led to. They sought too to advance American writing and the “American idea” “wherever the English tongue is spoken or read”—a reflection of Emerson’s desire for a national intellectual identity that could transcend the country’s institutions and borders.

In his earlier work, Emerson had emphasized the importance of great American writers who could offer insight into national life and introduce readers to new moral truths. “We love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a new thought,” he wrote in 1844. “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.” He saw the same potential in The Atlantic. He backed Lowell for the role of founding editor, believing that he would act as an effective guide for the publication rather than pander to its readers.

He also supported the choice to exclude bylines from early issues of The Atlantic, explaining, “The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles.” In fact, the magazine included the work of some of the nation’s most notable literary figures, many of them connected to Emerson through his work and his carefully cultivated intellectual circles.

As his influence had grown as a writer and lecturer, Emerson had helped inspire and support some of the 19th century’s best-known American writers. Primary among these young protégés was Henry David Thoreau, whom Emerson befriended in the late 1830s. He introduced Thoreau to transcendentalist ideas, encouraged him to begin writing journal entries and essays, and provided him land with which to conduct his experiment in simple living. In 1840, Emerson urged another friend and protégé, the journalist and women’s-rights activist Margaret Fuller, to publish Thoreau’s first essay in the Transcendental Club’s magazine, The Dial (a publication that Emerson also helped establish). Following Thoreau’s early death, in 1862, Emerson helped champion Walden and secure the book and its author vaunted positions in the pantheon of American literature.

In 1842, Emerson gave a lecture appealing for a distinctly American writer who could give voice to the yet “unsung” nation. In attendance was a 22-year-old Walt Whitman, who was determined to answer his call. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

In 1855, Whitman paid for his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, to be printed at a local shop, and sent one of the first copies to Emerson. Emerson responded soon after with a laudatory letter. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” he wrote.

Inspired by the positive response, Whitman passed Emerson’s letter on to an editor at the New York Tribune and quickly paid to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass. He printed a phrase from Emerson’s letter on the book’s spine: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Read more: Walt Whitman’s “An American Primer”

Early issues of The Atlantic featured Whitman’s poetry and Thoreau’s essays, along with short stories from Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Emerson’s close friend Bronson Alcott; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson’s neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts; and Henry James, a friend of Emerson’s by way of his father. The community he had created would help establish the new magazine, and further his vision for a generation of American writers who could put the spirit of the young country into words.

Emerson’s vision of emancipation shone through in the magazine’s approach to slavery, women’s rights, and labor rights, among other topics, in the years that he served as a regular contributor. He himself became a leading voice for abolitionism in The Atlantic as the country entered the Civil War, making a passionate moral case that the nation could not survive unless slavery was extinguished.

In one of his most famous lectures, “American Civilization,” published in the magazine’s April 1862 issue, he reiterated his call for independence from the past. “America is another word for Opportunity,” he observed. “Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.”

He beseeched the government to abolish slavery immediately and permanently. After Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation six months later, Emerson hailed the measure as a “heroic” and “genius” step forward in the long fight for moral governance—a fight that would not end when slavery did, but that would continue to march toward ever greater political liberty.

In other essays for the magazine, he urged readers to seek their own freedom outside the bounds of politics. A measure of individual solitude, he wrote, was necessary for the endurance of society. He argued that power was derived from wisdom, and wisdom from the accumulation of personal experience. And the best personal experience was to be found walking in nature alone: nature that “kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity.” Out of nature, he believed, could grow good and wise men; out of good and wise men, perhaps, a good and wise nation.

Published over the course of 50 years, his dozens of essays, poems, and lectures in The Atlantic were an encapsulation of the same vision of independence that he’d outlined in “The American Scholar” and that had, by the time he co-founded the magazine, earned him international recognition.

But while Emerson’s work was widely read in his time, none of his writing for The Atlantic—nor the hundreds of other essays, lectures, poems, and books he produced over the course of his career—has endured as popular reading in the way of contemporaneous works like Alcott’s Little Women or Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The selections from Emerson’s expansive body of work that have found places on modern syllabi or in anthologies are, in the way of most literary classics, more often referenced than read. He remains perhaps one of the most cited American authors, but his words surface now mainly in the form of decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes: “To be great is to be misunderstood,” or “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

Reading Emerson’s essays, it’s not hard to understand why his words have found their most enduring currency in this form. As the literary critic Alfred Kazin observed in a July 1957 Atlantic article, “Emerson’s genius is in the sudden flash rather than in the suavely connected paragraph and page.”

His writing, on the scale of pithy phrases—or even of paragraphs or brief sections—can be eloquent, clear, moving. On the scale of whole works, however, he charts convoluted, snaking routes toward his point. He overuses rhetorical questions; he tends toward rambling tangents; he dwells overlong on obscure concepts and metaphors; he becomes mired in dense, verbose passages that are at best tangential to his core ideas.

And his ideas were often as convoluted as his writing. He enshrined individualism, urging readers to “trust thyself” rather than being drawn in by “the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” or relying “on Property, or the … governments which protect it.” But he dismissed the idea of deep or lasting individuality, insisting that truth was ultimately universal and “within man is the soul of the whole … the eternal ONE.” He argued that society suppressed liberty and that “the less government we have, the better.” But he also asserted that “government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party,” and called for the state to promote virtue and to protect and secure individual rights. He spoke out against the immorality of slavery and the forced removal of Native Americans. But he also espoused a belief in absolute racial hierarchy even decades after he became a vocal abolitionist.

Yet even these inconsistencies were consistent, in the broadest sense, with Emerson’s American idea. For him, emancipation was an eternal work in progress—dependent on an unlimited openness to change, and an endless accrual of new insights and observations. Over the course of a lifetime, he noted, any single person accumulates knowledge through successive years of education, experience, and imagination; over the course of many lifetimes, society en masse incorporates the knowledge of individuals into a broader understanding of the world. He regarded perfect understanding as unachievable, so to him, virtue lay not in achieving it but rather in trying to move closer to it—imperfectly, inconsistently, humanly, the only way it could be done.

In this way, his ideas persist at the very heart of American culture, largely decontextualized from any particular piece of his work.

“Emerson, by no means the greatest American writer .... is the inescapable theorist of virtually all subsequent American writing,” the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in a 1984 article for The New York Review of Books. “From his moment to ours, American authors either are in his tradition, or else in a countertradition originating in opposition to him.”

Even if Emerson’s most influential lectures and essays are no longer universally read, the works he helped bring to life—such as Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—endure as cornerstones of the nation’s literature. His essays shaped a tradition of American essay-writing. His poetry gave rise to some of the country’s greatest poets: Emily Dickinson treasured a book of his verse; Robert Frost called him his favorite American poet. Even Hawthorne and Herman Melville, co-signers of The Atlantic’s founding manifesto who expressed reservations about the transcendentalist movement—what Melville once, after attending one of Emerson’s lectures, referred to as “myths and oracular gibberish”—committed a distinctly Emersonian individualism to the page with characters such as Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab.

Read more: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to save America

Transcendentalism went on to inform subsequent generations of philosophical and religious thought, including the existential musings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the civil disobedience of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Though Emerson never ventured into the visual arts, he influenced the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Great men,” Emerson wrote, “exist that there may be greater men.” So he set out to build a culture that could evolve beyond any one moment or person, even himself.

Emerson’s house in Concord is surrounded by more famous historical sites. About a mile to the north lies the reconstructed bridge where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought in 1775. To the south stretches the northern shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau retreated to “live deliberately” for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845.

Between them, the boxy white house rises up from the edge of the Cambridge Turnpike like an afterthought, an unremarkable Federal-style structure distinguished from its neighbors only by two neat signs proclaiming it to be “The Home of RALPH WALDO EMERSON.” Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who traveled to the town in 2018 seeking some insight into the nation’s history—and some resplendent fall foliage—just 3,000 stopped by to see the home.


Emerson purchased the house in 1835, in the early stages of his new career as a writer and lecturer. When he first moved in, he set out to cultivate a garden. He planted hemlocks when his oldest son was born; pine trees after delivering “The American Scholar”; a fruit orchard as his first collection of essays launched him into international fame.

“I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world,” he wrote in 1841. More than a century and a half later, by the side of the Cambridge Turnpike, some of the things he planted still grow.

Annika Neklason is a former assistant editor at The Atlantic.



理念
拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生的美国理念
162年前的这个月，他共同创办了《大西洋》杂志。他对进步的看法塑造了该杂志--并帮助定义了美国文化，在他的时代和我们的时代。

作者：安妮卡-内克拉森
灰色背景下的拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生画像
美国国会图书馆/凯蒂-马丁/《大西洋》杂志
2019年11月28日

关于作者。安妮卡-内克拉森是《大西洋》杂志的前助理编辑。

在1837年哈佛大学的毕业典礼周，拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生在Phi Beta Kappa协会的年会上走上讲台。这个团体由毕业班的优秀学生组成，聚集在剑桥的第一教区教堂里。爱默生是十年前他自己的哈佛班的班级诗人，也是一位地位日益提高的作家和哲学家，他被选为向新英格兰地区未来的知识精英发表演讲的嘉宾。

这一活动是一周仪式和传统的顶点。当爱默生开始讲话时，情况发生了变化。


在题为 "美国学者 "的演讲中，爱默生呼吁这个年轻的国家发展一种有别于残存的殖民主义影响的民族知识生活。他还对他的听众进行了精辟的批评，谴责学术研究对历史和制度智慧的依赖。他认为，同名的学者已经变得 "体面、懒惰、抱怨"。要想成为超越 "单纯的思想家，或者更糟糕的是，成为其他人思想的鹦鹉"，学者必须开始亲自参与世界。

爱默生是一个不太可能的国家知识机构的批评者。他是一位一神论者的儿子，曾就读于哈佛大学神学院，毕业后在波士顿的第二教堂担任初级牧师。但在他被授予神职后不久，他年轻的妻子就因肺结核去世了--他们结婚才16个月--这动摇了他的信仰基础，他开始对制度化知识的限制感到不安。

对新英格兰地区占主导地位的宗教和学术文化的类似挫折感在该地区的许多其他年轻知识分子中不断增加。1836年，爱默生与他们中的少数人一起成立了超验俱乐部。正如爱默生在俱乐部成立的同一年发表的《自然》一文中所述，超验主义者寻求从 "传统的诗歌和哲学 "和 "历史的宗教 "中获得自由。他们认为，道德真理不应该在公认的智慧中寻找，而应该通过个人的思考和经验来寻找。

通过《美国学者》，爱默生表达了该运动的个人主义：设想一种独立的美国知识文化，其前提不是任何种类的民族主义自豪感，也不是任何特定的学说或政治制度，而是对独立本身的奉献。他后来将他试图通过自己的作品推广的 "美国理念 "简单地定义为 "解放"。

这次演讲引起了爱默生的许多超验主义者的赞扬和哈佛大学管理层的愤怒；次年在神学院发表了类似的批评性演讲后，他被禁止在校园内演讲三十年。

推荐阅读
身体形状像字母M、T、W、T和F的上班族的漫画。
有一个在家工作的完美天数，那就是2天
阿曼达-穆尔

能听到声音的灵媒可能是有原因的
约瑟夫-弗兰克尔

性干旱
杰基-莱（JACKIE LAY
但 "美国学者 "已经打下了烙印。爱默生的演讲给哈佛社区的两位成员留下了特别的印象，他们是一位名叫詹姆斯-拉塞尔-罗威尔（James Russell Lowell）的捣蛋鬼大学生和一位名叫奥利弗-温德尔-霍姆斯（Oliver Wendell Holmes）的新校友。

洛厄尔后来写道："清教徒的起义使我们在教会上独立，革命使我们在政治上独立，但我们在社会上和智力上仍被英国思想所束缚，""直到爱默生切断了电缆，让我们有机会看到蓝水的危险和光辉。"

霍姆斯称这篇演讲是美国的 "智力独立宣言"。

爱默生对文化独立的呼吁与全国范围内争取另一种解放的斗争相吻合。随着超验主义开始在新英格兰地区扎根，废奴主义在北方各州的热度也越来越高。关于奴隶制的辩论渗入了教堂、文学和大学，主导了关于美国未来的对话。

尽管他最初对公开谈论奴隶制问题感到犹豫不决，但到了19世纪40年代，爱默生开始相信，美国文化可以用来推动解放事业。他并不孤单：他的观点得到了许多其他超验主义者和新英格兰著名废奴主义者的认同。1857年5月，他在波士顿的帕克楼酒店与他们中的一些人，包括洛厄尔、霍姆斯和诗人亨利-沃兹沃思-朗费罗一起开会。他们共同创办了一份杂志，致力于倡导废奴主义和宣传美国的声音。大西洋月刊》。

阅读更多。大西洋月刊》的诞生

那年11月，《大西洋月刊》创刊号上刊登的使命宣言呼应了爱默生的广义哲学。创始人摒弃偏见，承诺 "不成为任何党派或集团的机关"，并追求道德和真理，无论它们源自何处或通向何方。他们还寻求推进美国写作和 "美国理念"，"无论在哪里说英语或阅读英语"--这反映了爱默生对能够超越国家机构和边界的国家知识认同的渴望。

在他早期的作品中，爱默生强调了伟大的美国作家的重要性，他们可以提供对国家生活的洞察力并向读者介绍新的道德真理。"他在1844年写道："我们热爱诗人、发明家，他们以任何形式，无论是在颂歌中，还是在行动中，或是在神态和行为中，都为我们带来了新的思想。"他解开了我们的枷锁，让我们进入一个新的场景"。他在《大西洋》中看到了同样的潜力。他支持洛厄尔担任创刊编辑，认为他将作为出版物的有效指导，而不是迎合读者。

他还支持在《大西洋》的早期期刊中排除署名的选择，解释说："当名字比文章更有价值时，投稿人的名字就会被送出去"。事实上，该杂志收录了美国一些最知名的文学家的作品，其中许多人是通过爱默生的作品和他精心培养的知识界与他联系起来的。

随着他作为作家和讲师的影响力越来越大，爱默生帮助启发和支持了一些19世纪最知名的美国作家。在这些年轻的门徒中，最重要的是亨利-大卫-梭罗（Henry David Thoreau），爱默生在19世纪30年代末与他结识。他向梭罗介绍了超验主义思想，鼓励他开始写日记和散文，并为他提供土地，让他进行简单生活的实验。1840年，爱默生敦促另一位朋友和门徒，记者和妇女权利活动家玛格丽特-富勒，在超验主义俱乐部的杂志《拨号》（The Dial）上发表梭罗的第一篇论文（爱默生也帮助建立了这份出版物）。梭罗于1862年早逝后，爱默生帮助《瓦尔登湖》获得冠军，并确保该书及其作者在美国文学的万神殿中享有崇高地位。

1842年，爱默生在一次演讲中呼吁建立一个独特的美国作家，为这个 "无名 "的国家发声。参加讲座的是22岁的沃尔特-惠特曼，他决心响应他的号召。惠特曼后来说："我一直在酝酿，酝酿，酝酿，"。"爱默生把我带到了沸腾的地方"。

1855年，惠特曼支付了他的第一本诗集《草叶》，在当地一家商店印刷，并将其中的第一本寄给了爱默生。爱默生很快就回复了一封赞美信。他写道："我发现它是美国迄今所贡献的最杰出的机智和智慧的作品"。

受到积极回应的鼓舞，惠特曼将爱默生的信转交给了《纽约论坛报》的一位编辑，并迅速支付了制作《草叶》第二版的费用。他把爱默生信中的一句话印在书脊上。"我在一个伟大事业的开始向你问好"。

阅读更多。沃尔特-惠特曼的 "美国入门书"

早期的《大西洋》杂志刊登了惠特曼的诗歌和梭罗的散文，以及爱默生的密友布朗森-奥尔科特的女儿路易莎-梅-奥尔科特、爱默生在马萨诸塞州康科德的邻居纳撒尼尔-霍桑和爱默生通过其父亲认识的朋友亨利-詹姆斯的短篇小说。他所创建的社区将有助于建立新的杂志，并进一步推动他对一代美国作家的设想，这些作家可以将年轻国家的精神融入文字。

在他担任定期撰稿人的那些年里，爱默生的解放愿景在该杂志对奴隶制、妇女权利和劳工权利等话题的处理上大放异彩。当国家进入内战时，他本人在《大西洋》杂志上成为废奴主义的主要代言人，提出了一个充满激情的道德论点，即如果不消灭奴隶制，国家就无法生存。

在他发表在该杂志1862年4月号上的最著名的演讲之一 "美国文明 "中，他重申了他对摆脱过去的呼吁。"美国是机会的另一个词，"他说。"我们的整个历史看起来就像天意为人类所做的最后努力；像治安法官那样对先例进行字面的奴役，不适合那些在此刻领导这个民族命运的人。"

他恳求政府立即和永久地废除奴隶制。6个月后，亚伯拉罕-林肯发布了初步版本的《解放奴隶制宣言》，爱默生称赞这一措施是在争取道德治理的长期斗争中迈出的 "英雄 "和 "天才 "的一步--这场斗争不会因为奴隶制的结束而结束，而是会继续朝着更大的政治自由前进。

在该杂志的其他文章中，他敦促读者在政治的范围之外寻求自己的自由。他写道，一定程度的个人孤独对于社会的持久发展是必要的。他认为，权力来源于智慧，而智慧来源于个人经验的积累。而最好的个人经验是在大自然中独自行走：大自然 "杀死了自我主义和自负；严格对待我们；并给予理智。" 他认为，从大自然中可以培养出优秀和明智的人；从优秀和明智的人中，也许可以培养出优秀和明智的国家。

他在《大西洋》杂志上发表的几十篇散文、诗歌和演讲历时50年，囊括了他在《美国学者》中概述的独立愿景，在他共同创办该杂志时，这已经为他赢得了国际认可。

但是，尽管爱默生的作品在他的时代被广泛阅读，但他为《大西洋》撰写的文章，以及他在职业生涯中创作的数百篇散文、演讲、诗歌和书籍，都没有像阿尔科特的《小妇人》或惠特曼的《我之歌》那样，作为大众读物而经久不衰。在现代教学大纲或选集中找到位置的爱默生广泛的作品选段，与大多数文学经典一样，更多的是被引用而不是阅读。他也许仍然是被引用最多的美国作家之一，但他的话现在主要是以非语境化的警句和励志语录的形式出现。"伟大就是被误解"，或者 "除了你自己，没有什么能带给你和平"。

阅读爱默生的文章，不难理解为什么他的话以这种形式找到了最持久的货币。正如文学评论家阿尔弗雷德-卡津（Alfred Kazin）在1957年7月《大西洋》杂志的一篇文章中所指出的，"爱默生的天才在于突然的闪光，而不是在风度翩翩的段落和页面中。"

他的写作，在精炼的短语或甚至段落或简短的章节的范围内，可以是雄辩的、清晰的、动人的。然而，在整部作品的规模上，他描绘了曲折蜿蜒的路线，走向他的观点。他过度使用反问句；他倾向于漫无边际的切入；他在晦涩难懂的概念和隐喻上纠缠过久；他陷入了密集、冗长的段落中，这些段落充其量也只是与他的核心思想有联系。

而他的思想往往和他的写作一样错综复杂。他崇尚个人主义，敦促读者 "相信你自己"，而不是被 "吟游诗人和圣人的光辉 "所吸引，或依靠 "财产或保护财产的......政府"。但他否定了深刻或持久的个性的想法，坚持认为真理最终是普遍的，"人的内心是整体的灵魂......是永恒的一个"。他认为，社会压制了自由，"我们的政府越少越好"。但他也断言，"政府的存在是为了保护弱者、穷人和受害方"，并呼吁国家促进美德，保护和保障个人权利。他大声疾呼，反对不道德的奴隶制和强迫美国原住民迁移。但他也支持绝对的种族等级制度，甚至在他成为一个声势浩大的废奴主义者几十年之后。

然而，即使是这些不一致的地方，在最广泛的意义上，也与爱默生的美国理念相一致。对他来说，解放是一项永恒的工作，取决于对变化的无限开放，以及对新见解和观察的无尽积累。他指出，在一生中，任何一个人都会通过连续多年的教育、经验和想象力积累知识；在许多人的一生中，社会将个人的知识纳入对世界更广泛的理解。他认为完美的理解是无法实现的，所以对他来说，美德不在于实现它，而在于努力向它靠近--不完美的、不一致的、人性化的，这是唯一可以做到的方式。

这样一来，他的思想就在美国文化的核心中持续存在，在很大程度上与他的任何特定作品都没有关联。

"耶鲁大学文学评论家哈罗德-布鲁姆（Harold Bloom）在1984年为《纽约书评》（The New York Review of Books）撰写的一篇文章中写道："爱默生，绝不是最伟大的美国作家....，他是几乎所有后来的美国写作中不可避免的理论家。"从他的时代到我们的时代，美国作家要么在他的传统中，要么在与他对立的反传统中。

即使爱默生最具影响力的演讲和散文不再被普遍阅读，但他帮助带来的作品--如梭罗的《瓦尔登湖》和惠特曼的《草叶》--仍是国家文学的基石。他的散文塑造了美国散文写作的传统。他的诗歌催生了美国一些最伟大的诗人。艾米莉-迪金森珍藏了一本他的诗集；罗伯特-弗罗斯特称他是他最喜欢的美国诗人。甚至连霍桑和赫尔曼-麦尔维尔，这些《大西洋月刊》创始宣言的共同签署者，也对超验主义运动--麦尔维尔在参加了爱默生的一次讲座后，曾将其称为 "神话和白话文"--在书中的人物如海丝特-白兰因和亚哈船长身上体现了明显的爱默生式个人主义。

阅读更多。拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生对拯救美国的呼吁

超验主义为后世的哲学和宗教思想提供了参考，包括弗里德里希-尼采的存在主义思考以及莫汉达斯-甘地和小马丁-路德-金的公民不服从。

爱默生写道："伟大的人，""存在就是为了有更伟大的人"。因此，他着手建立一种能够超越任何一个时刻或人的文化，甚至是他自己。

爱默生在康科德的房子周围有更多著名的历史遗迹。北面约一英里处有一座重建的桥，1775年美国革命的第一场战役就在这里打响。南面是瓦尔登湖的北岸，从1845年夏天开始，梭罗在那里隐居了两年，"刻意地生活"。

在它们之间，方方正正的白色房子从剑桥公路的边缘升起，就像一个事后的想法，一个不起眼的联邦风格的结构，只有两个整齐的标志，宣称它是 "RALPH WALDO EMERSON的家"，与邻居们区分开来。在2018年前往该镇寻求了解国家历史的数十万游客中，以及在一些灿烂的秋季落叶中，只有3000人顺道参观了这所房子。


爱默生于1835年购买了这所房子，当时他正处于作为作家和演讲家的新事业的早期阶段。当他第一次搬进来的时候，他就开始着手培养一个花园。在他的大儿子出生时，他种植了铁杉；在发表《美国学者》后，他种植了松树；在他的第一本散文集将他推向国际声誉时，他种植了一个果园。

他在1841年写道："我参加了世界种子的播种"。一个半多世纪后，在剑桥公路边，他种下的一些东西仍在生长。

安妮卡-内克拉森（Annika Neklason）是《大西洋》杂志的前助理编辑。