American Transcendentalism
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Transcript of 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
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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.
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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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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
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“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”
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“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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“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
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“Heaven is under our feet as well as over
our heads.”
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“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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Individuality
“How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”
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“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.”
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“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
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“[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 Disobedience”Cedarfest 2008
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Transcendentalism in your Community
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