Long 19th c. · 1803–1882
Who influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Influences and legacy
Self-reliance made a philosophy: trust yourself, read Nature, obey the Over-Soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was influenced by Michel de Montaigne, and went on to influence William James and Friedrich Nietzsche. That is 3 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Josiah Johnson Hawes, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Ralph Waldo Emerson led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. His essay Nature (1836) first set out its philosophy, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called his 1837 address "The American Scholar" America's intellectual Declaration of Independence. He wrote most of his essays as lectures, collected in Essays: First Series and Second Series, with "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul" among them.
He championed individualism and warned against the pressure to conform. He held no fixed doctrine, writing instead about individuality, freedom and the relation of the soul to the world. Nietzsche thought him the most gifted of the Americans, Walt Whitman called him his master, and he was a mentor and close friend of Henry David Thoreau.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?
1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.
- Michel de Montaigne 1533–1592
Who did Ralph Waldo Emerson influence?
2 thinkers on this map draw directly on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- William James 1842–1910
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
The line of teachers behind Ralph Waldo Emerson
The longest documented line of influence ending at Ralph Waldo Emerson runs 12 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from Ralph Waldo Emerson
Indirect influences
- Through Michel de Montaigne: Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Erasmus
The second generation
Contemporaries of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with no direct line between them.
- Ludwig Feuerbach 1804–1872
- Aleksey Khomyakov 1804–1860
- Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859
- Gustav Fechner 1801–1887
- John Stuart Mill 1806–1873
- Max Stirner 1806–1856
- Ivan Kireyevsky 1806–1856
- Harriet Taylor Mill 1807–1858
Ralph Waldo Emerson by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 1
- Direct followers
- 2
- Thinkers upstream
- 34
- Thinkers downstream
- 32
- Wikipedia languages
- 91 — #13 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Who influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson?
- Michel de Montaigne.
- Who did Ralph Waldo Emerson influence?
- William James and Friedrich Nietzsche.
- When did Ralph Waldo Emerson live?
- 1803–1882. The map files Ralph Waldo Emerson under the long 19th century.
- How rare is the Ralph Waldo Emerson card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Ralph Waldo Emerson in 91 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 19th-century philosophers
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855