TRANSCENDENTALISM

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TRANSCENDENTALISM
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Hmmconfusing titlewhat does it mean?
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Definition

• Transcendentalism is a term associated with a
  group of new ideas in literature that emerged in
  New England in the early-to-middle 19th century.
  The major figures in the movement included Ralph
  Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman.

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What was the central idea

• that held all those authors and poets and
  philosophers together so that they deserved the
  name Transcendentalists?

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Social Movement

• The Transcendentalists can be understood in one
  sense by their context -- by what they were
  rebelling against, what they saw as the current
  situation and therefore as what they were trying
  to be different from.

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Fun Facts

• They were a generation of well educated people
  who lived in the decades before the American
  Civil War and worked for the abolition of slavery.

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Focus on American Literature

• Decades after American independence, now it was
  time for literary independence. So they created
  literature that was clearly different from
  anything from Europe.

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• Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is
  to see them as a generation of people struggling
  to define spirituality and religion in a way that
  took into account the new understandings their
  age made available.

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Pendulum Swing

• The Enlightenment had come to new rational
  conclusions about the natural world, mostly based
  on experimentation and logical thinking.

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Romanticism

• A more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational,
  more intuitive, more in touch with the senses --
  was coming into vogue.

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More Emotional Religion

• The spiritual hunger of the age gave rise, to an
  intuitive, experiential, passionate,
  more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave
  humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of
  insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such
  a gift?

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Non-Western Religions

• The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to
  read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine
  their own religious assumptions against these
  scriptures.

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• In their perspective, a loving God would not have
  led so much of humanity astray there must be
  truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it
  agreed with an individual's intuition of truth,
  must be indeed truth.

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And so Transcendentalism was born

• "We will walk on our own feet we will work with
  our own hands we will speak our own minds...A
  nation of men will for the first time exist,
  because each believes himself inspired by the
  Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What did Transcendentalists Believe?

• The inherent goodness (divinity!) of
• Man and Nature.

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Other beliefs

• The value of individualism
• That Society is the source of corruptive,
  distracting materialism

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God in Nature

• That God, the Oversoul, is the universal soul
  that permeates all being (much like "the Force")

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Ralph Waldo Emerson1803-1882

• Ralph Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the
  American Transcendental movement, setting out
  most of its ideas and values in a little book,
  Nature, published in 1836.

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Henry David Thoreau 1817 1862

• He was a poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax
  resister, development critic, philosopher, and
  leading Transcendentalist.

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Friend of Emerson

• He is best known for his book Walden, which
  details the year he spent living an isolated,
  simple life near Walden pond.
• He is also famous for the essay Civil
  Disobedience which encourages people to resist
  unjust laws.

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Memorial to Thoreau at Walden Pond
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