Representative Men
Emerson's 1850 collection of seven biographical-philosophical essays on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe — American transcendentalist engagement with the great figures of Western thought
Tradition: American transcendentalism
Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe — Emerson's engagement with the great figures of Western thought as representative types of human possibility
Representative Men (1850) is Emerson's collection of seven biographical-philosophical essays based on lectures he had delivered in 1845-46. The essays treat Plato (the philosopher), Swedenborg (the mystic), Montaigne (the skeptic), Shakespeare (the poet), Napoleon (the man of the world), and Goethe (the writer), with an opening essay on "Uses of Great Men." Emerson's framework: great men are "representative" — they incarnate possibilities that exist potentially in every human, and to study them is to discover what we ourselves might be. The book is the American transcendentalist counterpart to Carlyle's On Heroes (1841), with which it is in conscious conversation.
Author
Editions cited
- Representative Men (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850); modern critical edition in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 4 (Belknap/Harvard UP, 1987)
School Embodiments
Major statement of American transcendentalist engagement with the great figures of Western thought.
"Use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bacon, are but the names of mental qualities." (Uses of Great Men)
The framework of great men as representative types instances Emerson's broader idealism — particular individuals as expressions of universal potentialities.
"The chemist finds that not the most active drugs are the most effectual, but that there is some action which is more efficacious." (Uses of Great Men)
The functional analysis of great men — what they do for us — anticipates pragmatist attention to the use of ideas.
"Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works." (Uses of Great Men)
The framework of multiple religious-philosophical sources of human wisdom (Plato, Swedenborg, Shakespeare) is foundational liberal-religious comparative thought.
"Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought." (Plato, in Representative Men)
The representative-individual framework anticipates existentialist analyses of the particular life as the bearer of universal possibilities.
"The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history." (Uses of Great Men)
Despite the idealist framework, Emerson's engagement with each particular figure is carefully informed and historically realist.
"Napoleon's memoirs, if his own, are a record of an extraordinary career." (Napoleon, in Representative Men)
The Plato essay is one of Emerson's most extended engagements with the Platonic tradition; the volume's general framework is Platonic in its sense that particular figures incarnate universal forms.
"Plato is philosophy, and philosophy is Plato." (Plato, in Representative Men)
The "representative" framework identifies what each individual's situation produces — type as the social-historical disclosure, not just individual achievement.
"Every great man is a unique." (Uses of Great Men)
Internal Tensions
Representative Men is less politically charged than the lectures-on-reform period, and some readers have found it more conservative than the earlier essays. The "great man" framework has been variously assessed in light of subsequent critiques of heroic-individualist history.
I. Time
The long historical time across which the six representative figures lived; the present moment of Emerson's lectures.
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II. Space
The historical-cultural spaces of Athens, Stockholm, Périgord, London, Paris, Weimar.
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III. Matter
The embodied lives of the six figures; the books they wrote, the deeds they did.
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IV. Observer
Emerson as the comparative-philosophical observer; the American audience.
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V. Energy
The historical-cultural energies that each representative figure embodied.
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VI. Information
The biographical-historical content; the philosophical framework of representative individuality.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Representative Men resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.