Transcendentalism

1
Transcendentalism
2
What is Transcendentalism?

• Transcendentalism was a literary movement that
  flourished during the middle 19th Century (1836
  1860).
• It began as a rebellion against traditionally
  held beliefs by the English Church that God
  superseded the individual.

3
What does transcendentalism mean?

• There is an ideal spiritual state which
  transcends the physical and empirical.
• A loose collection of eclectic ideas about
  literature, philosophy, religion, social reform,
  and the general state of American culture.
• Transcendentalism had different meanings for each
  person involved in the movement.

4
Where did it come from?

• Ralph Waldo Emerson gave German philosopher
  Immanuel Kant credit for popularizing the term
  transcendentalism.
• It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian
  church.
• It is not a religionmore accurately, it is a
  philosophy or form of spirituality.
• It centered around Boston and Concord, MA. in the
  mid-1800s.
• Emerson first expressed his philosophy of
  transcendentalism in his essay Nature.

5
What did Transcendentalists believe?

• The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational
  or sensical, became the means for a conscious
  union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit
  as Atman) with the world psyche also known as the
  Oversoul, life-force, prime mover and G-d (known
  in Sanskrit as Brahma).

6
The Oversoul
The groves were Gods first temples Willam
Cullen Bryant
In the faces of men and women I see God. Walt
Whitman
7
Basic Premise 1

• An individual is the spiritual center of
  the universe, and in an individual can be found
  the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the
  cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the
  existence of G-d, but a preference to explain an
  individual and the world in terms of an
  individual.

8
Basic Premise 2

• The structure of the universe literally
  duplicates the structure of the individual
  selfall knowledge, therefore, begins with
  self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's
  dictum "know thyself."

9
Basic Premise 3

• Transcendentalists accepted the concept of
  nature as a living mystery, full of signs nature
  is symbolic.

10
Basic Premise 4

• The belief that individual virtue and
  happiness depend upon self-realizationthis
  depends upon the reconciliation of two universal
  psychological tendencies
• The desire to embrace the whole worldto know and
  become one with the world.
• The desire to withdraw, remain unique and
  separatean egotistical existence.

11
Who were the Transcendentalists?

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Amos Bronson Alcott
• Margaret Fuller
• Ellery Channing

12
Transcendentalist Authors
13
Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 1803-1882
• Unitarian minister
• Poet and essayist
• Founded the Transcendental Club
• Popular lecturer
• Banned from Harvard for 40 years following his
  Divinity School address
• Supporter of abolitionism

To be great is to be misunderstood.
14
Henry David Thoreau

• 1817-1862
• Schoolteacher, essayist, poet
• Most famous for Walden and Civil Disobedience
• Influenced environmental movement
• Supporter of abolitionism

... Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth.
15
Amos Bronson Alcott

• 1799-1888
• Teacher and writer
• Founder of Temple School and Fruitlands
• Introduced art, music, P.E., nature study, and
  field trips banished corporal punishment
• Father of novelist Louisa May Alcott

16
Margaret Fuller

• 1810-1850
• Journalist, critic, womens rights activist
• First editor of The Dial, a transcendental
  journal
• First female journalist to work on a major
  newspaperThe New York Tribune
• Taught at Alcotts Temple School

17
Ellery Channing

• 1818-1901
• Poet and especially close friend of Thoreau
• Published the first biography of Thoreau in
  1873Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist

18
Walden, orLife in the Woods

• Henry David Thoreau

19
Walden, or Life in the Woods

• On July 4th, 1845 Thoreau began his experiment
  in essential livingliving simply, studying the
  natural world, and seeking truth within himself.
• On land owned by Emerson near Concord,
  Massachusetts, Thoreau built a small cabin by
  Walden Pond and lived there for more than two
  years, writing and studying nature.

20

• I went to 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 had
  to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
  that I had not lived.

21

• Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
  your affairs be as two or three, and not a
  hundred or a thousand.

22

• Still we live meanly,
• like ants.
• Our life is frittered away
• by detail.
• Why should we live with such hurry and waste of
  life?

23
Ants Marching Dave Matthews Band

• He wakes up in the morning/Does his teeth, bite
  to eat and hes rolling/Never changes a thing/The
  week ends, the week begins
• Take these chances/Place them in a box until a
  quieter time/Lights down, you up and die

24

• Driving in on this highway/
• All these cars and up on the sidewalk/
• People in every direction/
• No words exchanged/
• No time to exchange

25

• All the little ants are marching/ Red and black
  antennae waving/ They all do it the same/ They
  all do it the same way

26
Walden(continued)
27

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

28

• It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we
  fall into a particular route, and make a beaten
  track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week
  before my feet wore a path from my door to the
  pond-side and though it is five or six years
  since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.

29

• It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
  into it, and so helped to keep it open. The
  surface of the earth is soft and impressible by
  the feet of men and so with the paths which the
  mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be
  the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
  tradition and conformity.

30
(No Transcript)
31

• I learned this, at least, by my experiment that
  if one advances confidently in the direction of
  his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which
  he has imagined, he will meet with a success
  unexpected in common hours.

32

• 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
  which he hears, however measured or far away.

33

• However mean your life is, meet it and live it
  do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not
  so bad as you are.
• The fault-finder will find faults even in
  paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may
  perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious
  hours, even in a poorhouse.

34

• Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
  Money is not required to buy one necessary of the
  soul.

35
Civil Disobedience

• Henry David Thoreau

36
Civil Disobedience

• Thoreaus essay urging passive, nonviolent
  resistance to governmental policies to which an
  individual is morally opposed

37
Civil Disobedience

• That government is best which governs leastThat
  government is best which governs not at all.
• I ask for, not at once no government, but at
  once a better government.
• I cannot for an instant recognize that political
  organization as my government which is the
  slaves government also.

38

• If the injustice is part of the necessary
  friction of the machine of government let it
  gobut if it 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 a
  counter friction to stop the machine.

Click on the photo for more information.
39
(No Transcript)
40

• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
  the true place for a just man is also a prisonIt
  is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
  prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead
  the wrongs of the race should find them..

41
(No Transcript)