Conduct of Life -

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Résumé :
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1860 book, The Conduct of Life is among the gems of his mature works. First published in the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President, this work poses the questions of human freedom and fate. The book, here newly edited from the original 1860 edition and fully annotated to illuminate and trace Emerson's references, is a great classic of American philosophy and literature....

Biographie:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's intellectual Declaration of Independence.
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays Self-Reliance,[7] The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet, and Experience. Together with Nature,[8] these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's nature was more philosophical than naturalistic: Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Emerson is one of several figures who took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.
He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement,[10] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. In all my lectures, he wrote, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.[11]Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.
Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803,] a son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarianminister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood...

Sommaire:
Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1860 book, The Conduct of Life is among the gems of his mature works. First published in the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President, this work poses the questions of human freedom and fate. The book, here newly edited from the original 1860 edition and fully annotated to illuminate and trace Emerson's references, is a great classic of American philosophy and literature....