American Transcendentalism

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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

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Transcendentalism

• A literary movement in the 1830s 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.

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• 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.

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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

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The first transcendentalists

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Margaret Fuller
• Henry David Thoreau
• Bronson Alcott

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Self-reliance -Emerson

• There is a time in every mans education when he
  arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance
  that imitation in suicide
• Trust thyself
• What I must do is
• all that concerns me,
• not what people think
• to be great is to be misunderstood

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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

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• 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.

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Heaven is under our feet as well as over our
heads.
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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.
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Individuality

• How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.

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• 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.

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Civil Disobedience

• Thoreaus 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

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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.
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