Transcript American Transcendentalism

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
• A literary movement in the 1830s that
established a clear “American voice”
• Emerson first expressed his philosophy in his
essay “Nature” (1833).
• A belief in a higher reality than that achieved
by human reasoning
• Suggests that every individual is capable of
discovering this higher truth through intuition.
Principle: Observation of Nature
Shows the
nature of
human
beings . . .
• 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.
Principle: Human senses are limited—although they
convey knowledge of the physical world, intuition is
needed to grasp deeper truths.
More principles of Transcendentalism:
• Believed in living close to nature/importance
of nature. Nature is the source of truth and
inspiration.
• Taught the dignity of manual labor
• Advocated self-trust/ confidence
• Valued individuality/non-conformity/free
thought
• Advocated self-reliance/ simplicity
Emerson:
God, nature, and
humanity are united
in a shared universal
soul, or Over-Soul
The first transcendentalists
•
•
•
•
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Bronson Alcott
“Self-reliance” -Emerson
“There is a time in every man’s education when
he arrives at the conviction that envy is
ignorance; that imitation is suicide…”
“Trust thyself…”
“What I must do is
all that concerns me,
not what people think…”
“…to be great is to be misunderstood”
Emerson:
“A foolish
consistency
is the hobgoblin
of little minds.”
“Nature”
• 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.”
“Heaven is under our
feet as well as over
our heads.”
“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.”
“I left the
woods for
as good a
reason as I
went there.
Perhaps
. . . I had
several
more lives
to live, and
could not
spare any
more time
for that
one.”
Individuality
“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity…”
“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may
rise this year higher than man has ever known it,
and flood the parched uplands . . . .”
“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.”
“Civil Disobedience”
• Thoreau’s essay urged passive, non-violent
resistance to governmental policies to which
an individual is morally opposed.
• Influenced individuals such as Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., Ghandi, 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.”
Finally, Transcendentalists believed
they should . . .
• “Be an opener of doors
for such as come after
thee.”