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 1830’s that
established a clear “American voice”.
• Emerson first expressed his philosophy in
his essay “Nature”.
• 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.
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.
Transcendentalism: The tenets
• 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
The First Transcendentalists
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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”
“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.”
Individuality
“How deep the ruts of tradition and
conformity.”
“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 urging passive, nonviolent resistance to governmental policies
to which an individual is morally opposed.
• Influenced individuals such a Gandhi,
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.”