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American Transcendentalism. “ It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, always do what you are afraid to do.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism. Emerson first expressed his philosophy in his essay “Nature”.
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American Transcendentalism “ It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, always do what you are afraid to do.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism • Emerson first expressed his philosophy in his essay “Nature”. • Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early-to mid-19th century. • Though the transcendental movement was relatively short, its influence on the American culture is vast
The First Transcendentalists • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Margaret Fuller • Henry David Thoreau • Bronson Alcott
Core Beliefs • Human senses are limited; they convey knowledge of the physical world, but deeper truths can be grasped only through intuition (gut feeling). • The observation of nature shows the truth about human beings. • God, nature, and humanity are united in a shared universal soul, or Over-Soul. • No political or religious institution is as powerful or important as the individual.
1. Human senses are limited; they convey knowledge of the physical world, but deeper truths can be grasped only through intuition (gut feeling). • “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” • “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
2. God, nature, and humanity are united in a shared universal soul, or Over-Soul. • Unlike Puritans, they saw humans and nature as possessing an innate goodness. “In the faces of men and women, I see God” -Walt Whitman • Opposed strict ritualism and dogma of established religion.
3. No political or religious institution is as powerful or important as the individual. “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation in suicide…” “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think…” “…to be great is to be misunderstood” “Self-Reliance”--Emerson
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
4. The observation of nature shows the truth about human beings. --Thoreau • Thoreau began “essential” living • Built a cabin on land owned to Emerson in Concord, Mass. near Walden Pond • Lived alone there for two years studying nature and seeking truth within himself
“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately,to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it has to teach,and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“Still we live meanly like ants.”“Our life is frittered away by detail.”“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand.”
“Civil Disobedience”--Thoreau • Thoreau’s essay urging passive, non-violent resistance to governmental policies to which an individual is morally opposed. • Influenced individuals such a Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez.
“[If injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be the friction to stop the machine.”
