Representative Men

Plato

Emerson presents Plato as a patrician Athenian who abandoned war for Socrates, then spent ten years as his scholar before carrying that fire into Egypt, Italy, and the Academy. What fascinates Emerson is not the biography — Plato left none — but the way his writings have preempted every school, church, and poet, making him seem not ancient but perpetually modern. He matters because he embodies the philosopher type at its fullest: a man whose intellect is always moral, and whose poetic gift serves an ulterior purpose.

Emanuel Swedenborg

To his contemporaries Swedenborg looked like a visionary and an elixir of moonbeams, yet Emerson insists he led the most real life of any man then living. He was a scholar from childhood, a favorite of Charles XII, a working scientist of mines and smelting works — until 1743, when his illumination began and he abandoned science for voluminous theological writing at his own expense. He matters because he represents the mystic type: a man of large calibre whose eccentricity and madness, like Pascal's or Newton's, help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

William Shakespeare

Emerson places Shakespeare among the poets who console men for the meannesses of labor and traffic, feeding thought and imagination from an intellectual kingdom. He is a Platonist when he writes that nature is made better by no mean but nature makes that mean, and Hamlet is a pure Platonist — yet the sheer magnitude of Shakespeare's proper genius keeps him from being classed as merely the most eminent of that school. He matters because he shows the poet type at its most contemplative and least institutional: a mind that soars where Plato only theorized.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Emerson describes Napoleon as a pattern democrat who superadded insight and generalization to mineral and animal force, so that men saw the natural and intellectual powers combined as if sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. He was a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, embarrassed by no scruples, with a hand of iron immediately connected to his head. He matters because he represents the man of the world — the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century — and the question of what such force, without moral aim, can finally build.

Michel de Montaigne

Emerson treats Montaigne as one of those rare persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions we have not skill to put — a man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought and sees things in true light and large relations. His service is indirect: he is great because he is what he is from nature, and never reminds us of others, satisfying expectation and falling into place. He matters because he represents the skeptic type, showing how a man in his place is constructive, fertile, and magnetic, making his own channels like a river making its shores.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Emerson sets Goethe against Napoleon as the representative of the century's inner life: where Bonaparte embodies its popular external aims, Goethe embodies its poet, a man impossible at any earlier time. He appears when general culture has spread and smoothed down all sharp individual traits, when there is no poet but scores of poetic writers, no Columbus but hundreds of post-captains with transit-telescope and barometer. He matters because he shows what the scholar or writer can still be in an age without heroes — and whether such a man can carry the power and duties of literature without the heroic frame that once sustained it.