Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

David LaRocca’s chapter resituates Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits within Emerson’s transatlanticism, as well as within his intellectual, cultural, and historical moment. In particular, it analyzes and contextualizes Emerson’s comments on race in English Traits in relation to the formation of British and American national mythologies. As LaRocca argues, in contrast to less generous critics, Emerson is indeed egalitarian, his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England. What is more, Emerson’s interest was, in part, personal. He made English Traits a public statement that justified questions about his family tree and, in a larger domain, the way that New England was formed and informed by England, even while he pursued a broader view of human history – of whatever vintage – as inseparable from natural history.

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

Concerned with Emerson’s aging and the authorial integrity of his later works, critics traditionally discounted the compositions Emerson delivered or published after 1860. Important editorial scholarship, however, has opened new prospects for reconsidering the intellectual vitality of late Emerson, now accessible in The Later Lectures and in the publication of the final volumes of the Collected Works, including Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Building upon the critical reconsideration of Emerson’s considerable engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, this chapter identifies Emerson’s rhetoric as a significant concept in, and creative context for, the sometimes collaborative and often iterative “recomposition” of the later work. Three rhetorical figurations of Emerson’s late styles – metonymy, analogy, and translation – are traced across works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and the unfinished Natural History of Intellect.