Transcendentalism

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Transcendentalism

• American Literature I
• Fall 2007

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Transcendentalism

• A form of idealism
• A philosophical romanticism
• Based on doctrines of European philosophers
  Kant, Goethe, Coleridge
• Started in America by Emerson

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Transcendentalism

• A reliance on the intuition and the conscience
• Transcendental
• Going beyond ordinary experience

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Transcendentalism

• BASIC PREMISE
• Man is the spiritual center of the universe
• Only in man can be found clues to nature,
  history, and ultimately the cosmos itself

Universe
MAN
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Transcendentalism

• Individuals virtue and happiness depend upon
  self-realization
• Self-realization depends upon the blending of
• Self-transcending impulse of the self
• Desire to embrace the whole world and become one
  with it
• Mans desire to withdraw to be responsible only
  to himself

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Transcendentalism

• Believed in living close to nature
• Taught dignity of manual labor
• Believed every persons relationship to God was
  to be established directly by the individual
  rather than through a ritualistic church
• Held to the doctrine that human beings were
  divine in their own right
• Believed in democracy and individualism

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Transcendentalism

• Were to practice self-trust and self-reliance at
  all times
• To trust self was really to trust the voice of
  God speaking intuitively within

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Transcendentalism

• Ultimately, the belief that
• Human beings can intuitively transcend the limits
  of the senses and of logic and directly receive
  higher truths denied to more boring methods of
  knowing.

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Transcendentalism

• Emerson
• Thoreau
• Whitman
• grounds for ultimate hope

• Hawthorne
• Melville
• Draw tragic irresolution