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

Transcendentalism

• A literary movement in the 1830’s 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.

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.

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

The first transcendentalists

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

“Self-reliance” - essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is a time in every man’s 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”

“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

“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

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over

our heads.”

“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.”

Individuality

“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”

“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.”

“Civil Disobedience”

• Thoreau’s 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

“[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.”

Do Not confuse with “Uncivil Disobedience”Cedarfest 2008

Transcendentalism in your Community

State News Green Jobs