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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 – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: American Transcendentalism


1
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

2
Transcendentalism
  • A literary movement in the 1830s that
    established a clear American voice.
  • Ralph Waldo 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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4
Transcendentalists
  • Unlike Dark Romantics, 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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6
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

9
Self-reliance - essay by Ralph Waldo 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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11
Nature by Henry David Thoreau
  • 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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13
  • 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. -Thoreau

14
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our
heads.
15
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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17
Individuality
  • How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.

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19
  • 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.

20
Civil Disobedience
  • Thoreaus essay urging passive, non-violent
    resistance to governmental policies to which an
    individual is morally opposed.
  • Influenced individuals such as Ghandi, Dr. Martin
    Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez

21
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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Do Not confuse with Uncivil DisobedienceCedarfe
st 2008
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25
Transcendentalism in your Community
  • State News Green Jobs
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