Transcendentalism

► Transcendentalism, in philosophy and literature,

belief in a higher reality than that found in sense
experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than
that achieved by human reason.
► Nearly all transcendentalist doctrines stem from
the division of reality into a realm of spirit and a
realm of matter.
► Such a division is made by many of the great
religions of the world.
 Transcendentalism

► http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm
1. A literary and philosophical movement, associated
with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller,
asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality
that transcends the empirical and scientific and is
knowable through intuition.
2. The quality or state of being transcendental.
(http://www.bartleby.com/61/47/T0314700.html)
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► The philosophical concept of transcendence was developed
by the Greek philosopher Plato.
► In its most specific usage, transcendentalism refers to a
literary and philosophical movement that developed in the
U.S. in the first half of the 19th century.
► While the movement was, in part, a reaction to certain
18th-century rationalist doctrines, it was strongly
influenced by Deism, which, although rationalist, was
opposed to Calvinist orthodoxy.
► Transcendentalism also involved a rejection of the strict
Puritan religious attitudes that were the heritage of New
England, where the movement originated.
► In addition, it opposed the strict ritualism and dogmatic
theology of all established religious institutions.
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► More important, the transcendentalists were
influenced by romanticism,
► especially such aspects as self-examination,
► the celebration of individualism,
► and the extolling of the beauties of nature
and humankind.
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► Consequently, transcendentalist writers expressed
semireligious feelings toward nature, as well as
the creative process, and saw a direct connection,
or correspondence, between the universe
(macrocosm) and the individual soul (microcosm).
► In this view, divinity permeated all objects,
animate or inanimate, and the purpose of human
life was union with the so-called Over-Soul.
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► Intuition, rather than reason, was regarded
as the highest human faculty.
► Fulfillment of human potential could be
accomplished through mysticism or through
an acute awareness of the beauty and truth
of the surrounding natural world.
► This process was regarded as inherently
individual, and all orthodox tradition was
suspect.
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► American transcendentalism began with the
formation (1836) of the Transcendental Club in
Boston.
► Among the leaders of the movement were the
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and
social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher
Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the
philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the
author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
TRANSCENDENTAL LITERATURE
► The Transcendental Club published a magazine,
The Dial, and some of the club's members
participated in an experiment in communal living
at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts,
during the 1840s.
► Major transcendentalist works of the American
movement include Emerson's essays “Nature”
(1836) and “Self-Reliance” (1841), as well as many
of his metaphysical poems, and also Thoreau's
Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which is an
account of an individual's attempt to live simply
and in harmony with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
 Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)

In “Self-Reliance” (1841), one of Emerson’s most important works, he

expressed his optimistic faith in the power of individual achievement
and originality. He also considered the overarching need to discover
and develop a relationship with nature and with God.
 Websites of the week
1. http://www.emersoncentral.com/ Emerson
central
2. http://eserver.org/thoreau/thoreau.html
The Thoreau Reader
 Ralph Waldo Emerson
► Emerson pp. 496-499, 500-504, 509-513, 524, 551,
552, 557, 562-567
 Importance
ƒ Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882),
American essayist and poet, a leader of the
philosophical movement of transcendentalism.
ƒ Influenced by such schools of thought as
English romanticism, Neoplatonism, and Hindu
philosophy, Emerson is noted for his skill in
presenting his ideas eloquently and in poetic
language.
 Boston, Harvard
► Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts.
► Seven of his ancestors were ministers, and his father,
William Emerson, was minister of the First Church
(Unitarian) of Boston.
► Emerson graduated from Harvard University at the age of
18 and for the next three years taught school in Boston.
► In 1825 he entered Harvard Divinity School, and the next
year he was sanctioned to preach by the Middlesex
Association of Ministers.
► Despite ill health, Emerson delivered occasional sermons in
churches in the Boston area.
 Europe
► In 1829 he became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of
Boston. That same year he married Ellen Tucker, who died 17 months
later.
► In 1831, his wife, Ellen Tucker, died tragically young from tuberculosis,
leaving Emerson a legacy that allowed him to spend the rest of his life
traveling, lecturing, and writing.
► In 1832 Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment because of
personal doubts about administering the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper.
► On Christmas Day, 1832, he left the United States for a tour of Europe.
► He stayed for some time in England, where he made the acquaintance
of such British literary notables as Walter Savage Landor, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth.
► His meeting with Carlyle marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
 Concord
► After nearly a year in Europe Emerson returned to
the United States.
► In 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and
became active as a lecturer in Boston.
► His addresses—including “The Philosophy of
History,” ”Human Culture,” ”Human Life,” and “The
Present Age”—were based on material in his
Journals (published posthumously, 1909-1914), a
collection of observations and notes that he had
begun while a student at Harvard.
 Nature, 1836
► His most detailed statement of belief was reserved
for his first published book, Nature (1836), which
appeared anonymously but was soon correctly
attributed to him.
► The volume received little notice, but it has come
to be regarded as Emerson's most original and
significant work, offering the essence of his
philosophy of transcendentalism.
► This idealist doctrine opposed the popular
materialist and Calvinist views of life and at the
same time voiced a plea for freedom of the
individual from artificial restraints.
 "The American Scholar," 1837
► Emerson applied these ideas to cultural and
intellectual problems in his 1837 lecture “The
American Scholar,” which he delivered before the
Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard.
► In it he called for American intellectual
independence.
► A second address, commonly referred to as the
“Address at Divinity College,” delivered in 1838 to
the graduating class of Cambridge Divinity College,
aroused considerable controversy because it
attacked formal religion and argued for self-
reliance and intuitive spiritual experience.
 Phi Beta Kappa Society
► Phi Beta Kappa (Society), from phi + beta +
kappa, initials of the society's Greek motto
philosophia biou kybernētēs (philosophy the
guide of life)
► a person winning high scholastic distinction
in an American college or university and
being elected to membership in a national
honor society founded in 1776
 Essays, 1841
► The first volume of Emerson's Essays (1841)
includes some of his most popular works.
► It contains “History,” ”Self-
Reliance,” ”Compensation,” ”Spiritual
Laws,” ”Love,” ”Friendship,” ”Prudence,” ”Her
oism,” ”The Over-Soul,” ”Circles,” ”Intellect,”
and “Art.”
► The second series of Essays (1844) includes
“The Poet,” ”Manners,” and “Character.”
 Essays, 1841
► In it Emerson tempered the optimism of the first volume of
essays, placing less emphasis on the self and
acknowledging the limitations of real life.
► In the interval between the publication of these two
volumes, Emerson wrote for The Dial, the journal of New
England transcendentalism, which was founded in 1840
with American critic Margaret Fuller as editor.
► Emerson succeeded her as editor in 1842 and remained in
that capacity until the journal ceased publication in 1844.
► In 1846 his first volume of Poems was published (dated,
however, 1847).
 Representative Men, 1850
► Emerson again went abroad from 1847 to 1848 and
lectured in England, where he was welcomed by Carlyle.
► Several of Emerson's lectures were later collected in the
volume Representative Men (1850), which contains essays
on such figures as Greek philosopher Plato, Swedish
philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, and French writer
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
► While visiting abroad, Emerson also gathered impressions
that were later published in English Traits (1856), a study
of English society.
► His Journals give evidence of his growing interest in
national issues, and on his return to America he became
active in the abolitionist cause, delivering many antislavery
speeches.
 The Conduct of Life, 1860
► The Conduct of Life (1860) was the first of his books to
enjoy immediate popularity.
► Included in this volume of essays are
“Power,” ”Wealth,” ”Fate,” and “Culture.”
► This was followed by a collection of poems entitled May
Day and Other Pieces (1867), which had previously been
published in The Dial and The Atlantic Monthly.
► After this time Emerson did little writing and his mental
powers declined, although his reputation as a writer spread.
► His later works include Society and Solitude (1870), which
contained material he had been using on lecture tours;
Parnassus (1874), a collection of poems; Letters and Social
Aims (1876); and Natural History of Intellect (1893).
 Poems
Ralph Waldo
Emerson_Complete.Poems.pdf
 BRAHMA
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
 BRAHMA
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
► Brahma, one of the trinity of Hindu gods
(with Vishnu and Shiva), was the creator of
the universe
 CONCORD HYMN
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
 CONCORD HYMN
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
 Quotes
► Nothing great was ever achieved without
enthusiasm. (Essays "Circles")
► A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do. (Essays
"Self-Reliance")
 Success
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
(1803-1882) to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
 Essays, Lectures
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Nature.etext.pdf / Ralph Waldo Emerson_
Nature.notes.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Self-Reliance.etext.pdf / Ralph Waldo
Emerson_ Self-Reliance.notes.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ The American Scholar.etext.Complete.pdf /
Ralph Waldo Emerson_ The American Scholar.notes.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Circles.etext.pdf / Ralph Waldo Emerson_
Circles.notes.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ The Poet.etext.pdf / Ralph Waldo Emerson_
The Poet.notes.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Representative Men.etxt.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Study Guide_ Critical Commentary.pdf
►Ralph Waldo Emerson_ Introduction.Monarch.notes.pdf
 P 496
► Read the introduction to “Nature”
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres
of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and
criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God
and nature face to face; we, through their eyes.
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation
to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry
and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and
a religion by revelation to us, and not the history
of theirs?
 496
► Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods
of life stream around and through us, and invite
us by the powers they supply, to action
proportioned to nature, why should we grope
among the dry bones of the past, or put the living
generation into masquerade out of its faded
wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is
more wool and flax in the fields. There are new
lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand
our own works and laws and worship.
 497
► All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory
of nature. We have theories of races and of
functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to
an idea of creation. We are now so far from the
road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and
hate each other, and speculative men are
esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound
judgment, the most abstract truth is the most
practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will
be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain
all phenomena.
 497
► Philosophically considered, the universe is
composed of Nature and the Soul.
► Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences
unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the
leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with
the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue,
a picture. But his operations taken together are so
insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching,
and washing, that in an impression so grand as
that of the world on the human mind, they do not
vary the result.
 497-98 Chapter I Nature
► To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much
from his chamber as from society. I am not
solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is
with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look
at the stars. The rays that come from those
heavenly worlds, will separate between him and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere
was made transparent with this design, to give
man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime. Seen in the
 498
► streetsof cities, how great they are! If the
stars should appear one night in a thousand
years, how would men believe and adore;
and preserve for many generations the
remembrance of the city of God which had
been shown! But every night come out
these envoys of beauty, and light the
universe with their admonishing smile.
 499
► The greatest delight which the fields and woods
minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation
between man and the vegetable. I am not alone
and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to
them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is
new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and
yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a
higher thought or a better emotion coming over
me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing
right.
 p 500 Beauty
►A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely,
the love of Beauty.
► The ancient Greeks called the world {k"smos},
beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or
such the plastic power of the human eye, that the
primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree,
the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves;
a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and
grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself.
The eye is the best of artists.
 Three aspects of Beauty
1. the simple perception of natural forms is a
delight
2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the
spiritual element is essential to its
perfection.
3. There is still another aspect under which
the beauty of the world may be viewed,
namely, as it become s an object of the
intellect.
 P 504 Language
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of
particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
 P 509 Discipline
► Nature is a discipline of the understanding
in intellectual truths.
► Sensible objects conform to the
premonitions of Reason and reflect the
conscience. All things are moral; and in their
boundless changes have an unceasing
reference to spiritual nature.
 513 Idealism
► Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and
practicable meaning of the world conveyed
to man, the immortal pupil, in every object
of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all
parts of nature conspire.
► Transcendentalism
 518
► Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the
whole circle of persons and things, of actions and
events, of country and religion, not as painfully
accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an
aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which
God paints on the instant eternity, for the
contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul
holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic
study of the universal tablet.
 518
► It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in
the means. It sees something more important in
Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical
history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very
incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not
at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it
accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it,
as the pure and awful form of religion in the world.
 518
► It is not hot and passionate at the
appearance of what it calls its own good or
bad fortune, at the union or opposition of
other persons. No man is its enemy. It
accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its
lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer,
and it is a doer, only that it may the better
watch.
 524
► So shall we come to look at the world with new
eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the
intellect, -- What is truth? and of the affections, --
What is good? by yielding itself passive to the
educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my
poet said; "Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit
alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or
bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to
pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.
 524
► Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its
house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven.
Know then, that the world exists for you. For you
is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that
only can we see. All that Adam had, all that
Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called
his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his
house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler¡¦s
trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a
scholar¡¦s garret. Yet line for line and point for
point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though
without fine names. Build, therefore, your own
world.
 524
► Asfast as you conform your life to the pure
idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
proportions. A correspondent revolution in
things will attend the influx of the spirit.
 551 Self-Reliance
► There is a time in every man’s education
when he arrives at the conviction that envy
is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that
he must take himself for better, for worse,
as his portion; that though the wide
universe is full of good, no kernel of
nourishing corn can come to him but
through his toil bestowed on that plot of
ground which is given to him to till.
 551
► Thepower which resides in him is new in
nature, and none but he knows what that is
which he can do, nor does he know until he
has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression
on him, and another none.
 551
► Trustthyself: every heart vibrates to that
iron string. Accept the place the divine
providence has found for you, the society of
your contemporaries, the connection of
events.
 551
► Great men have always done so, and
confided themselves childlike to the genius
of their age, betraying their perception that
the absolutely trustworthy was seated at
their heart, working through their hands,
predominating in all their being.
 551
► And we are now men, and must accept in
the highest mind the same transcendent
destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing
before a revolution but guides, redeemers,
and benefactors, obeying the Almighty
effort, and advancing on Chaos and the
Dark.
 552
► Whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist. He who would gather
immortal palms must not be hindered by
the name of goodness, but must explore if it
be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you
to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage
of the world.
 557
► Leta man then know his worth, and keep
things under his feet. Let him not peep or
steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a
charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in
the world which exists for him. But the man
in the street, finding no worth in himself
which corresponds to the force which built a
tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
poor when he looks on these.
 557
► To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book
have an alien and forbidding air, much like a
gay equipage, and seem to say like that,
“Who are you, Sir?” Yet they all are his,
suitors for his notice, petitioners to his
faculties that they will come out and take
possession. The picture waits for my verdict:
it is not to command me, but I am to settle
its claims to praise.
 557
► That popular fable of the sot who was picked up
dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s
house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s
bed, and, on his waking, treated with all
obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured
that he had been insane, owes its popularity to
the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of
man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now
and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds
himself a true prince.
sot: a drunkard
 562-567 Effect of self-reliance
► It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance
must work a revolution in all the offices and
relations of men; in their religion; in their
education; in their pursuits; their modes of
living; their association; in their property; in
their speculative views.
 Some quotes
► As men’s prayers are a disease of the will,
so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
► It is for want of self-culture that the
superstition of Travelling, whose idols are
Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination
for all educated Americans.
► Travelling is a fool’s paradise.
 565
► Society never advances. It recedes as fast
on one side as it gains on the other. It
undergoes continual changes; it is
barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it
is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given,
something is taken. Society acquires new
arts, and loses old instincts.
 566
► Societyis a wave. The wave moves onward,
but the water of which it is composed does
not. The same particle does not rise from
the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only
phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their
experience with them.
 Assignment?
► Howthorne pp. 613-622 Howthorne
► Poe pp. 700-708 The
Purloined Letter 734-47
The Philosophy of
Composition 752-60
► Lincoln 782 Gettysburg
Address 1863
► Thoreau 868-966
► Walt Whitman 1001-1102
► Herman Melville 1109-
1190
Herman Melville
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AN OUTLINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY
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imeline/index.html
► PAL: Perspectives
in American Literature
- A Research and
Reference Guide
http://www.csustan.edu/
english/reuben/pal/
TABLE.HTML
 Websites of the week
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The History Net: American History

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Emerson Central
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Site of Thoreau’s cabin
Thoreau’s cabin
Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden
Pond...
 Walt Whitman

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