TRANSCENDENTALISM

1. TRANSCENDENTALISM

2. PERIOD BETWEEN 1830 AND 1850 • IN THE NORTH -- ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGES • Industrialization • Urbanization • Factories with poor working conditions, wage labor, first unions • A new breed of materialism • IN THE SOUTH -- old, almost feudal social order (a few extremely wealthy plantation owners ruled)

3. HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT • Presidency of ANDREW JACKSON • Period marked by TERRITORIAL EXPANSION, growing NATIONAL SELF-AWARENESS, and increasing POLITICAL, SOCIAL and REGIONAL POLARIZATION • The addition of territory through war with Mexico -- inflamed slavery/antislavery tensions

4. RELIGIOUS CONTEXT • AMERICAN UNITARIANISM -- belief that God is one being instead of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit • The Unitarians believed in human capacity for spiritual, moral, and intellectual improvement, denied the Calvinistic concept of innate depravity and the doctrine of predestination. • A fundamentally optimistic view of human nature -- God extends salvation to everyone

5. RATIONAL SCIENTIFIC MATERIAL EMPIRICAL Belief in PROGRESS, IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIETY and of the INDIVIDUAL TOLERANCE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT18th CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT

6. JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)(one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers) • Postulated that the human mind at birth was devoid of conscience, moral understanding and intuition (TABULA RASA), all of which developed through EXPERIENCE • Insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which had not previously been in the experience of the SENSES

7. ROMANTICISM • Marked by a reaction against classical formalism and extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment • HUMANISTIC political and social outlook • INDIVIDUAL -- at the center of the universe • Against DEHUMANIZATION, MATERIALISM, INDUSTRIALIZATION

8. INTUITIVE • SPIRITUAL • SELF-RELIANCE • INDEPENDENCE • INDIVIDUALITY • Emphasizes EMOTION rather than REASON • IDEAL rather than REALITY

9. MOTIFS IN ROMANTIC LITERATURE • Individual REBELLION • The symbolic interpretation of the historic PAST • Subjects from MYTH and FOLKLORE • Glorification of NATURE, faraway settings • SENTIMENTALISM • Nobility of the uncivilized man and simple life • GOTHIC themes – supernatural, mysterious

10. LITERARY PERIOD • American literature came of age in the 1850s, the period we call AMERICAN RENAISSANCE (three generations after the country achieved its political independence) • American renaissance literature is almost exclusively romantic literature

11. TRANSCENDENTALISM • Religious, philosophical and literary movement 1830s – 1850s • Mostly New Englanders (mainly around Boston, Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts) • Wanted to create American literary independence (authentic American literature)

12. TRANSCENDENTALISM = a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the SPIRITUAL over the MATERIAL and EMPIRICAL • The term coined by IMMANUEL KANT as a response to the philosophy of LOCKE. • According to Kant, there are some ideas and aspects of knowledge which are beyond what the senses can perceive, but are INTUITIONS of the mind itself – he named them TRANSCENDENTAL FORMS

13. The TRANSCENDENT is the fundamental reality • The ultimate truth transcends the physical world • Transcendentalists were not a cohesive organized group • Ralph Waldo EMERSON, Henry David THOREAU, Walt WHITMAN, Amos Bronson ALCOTT, MartinVAN BURREN, Margaret FULLER

14. The more PESSIMISTIC stream of American Romanticists (should be differentiated from the Transcendentalists) • Edgar Allan POE, Herman MELVILLE, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW • Transcendentalism, on the other hand, incorporated the Romantic emphasis on the individual and the Unitarian belief in the goodness and perfectibility of man.

15. Transcendentalism was more of a call to action than a precise, logical line of thought. It urged people to break free of the customs and traditions of the past and to listen to the spirit of God inside them • Most of the transcendentalists became involved in SOCIAL REFORM MOVEMENTS (anti-slavery, women's suffrage, Native American education and rights, world peace)

16. INFLUENCES ON THETRANSCENDENTALISTS • PLATO and English NEO-PLATONIC WRITERS -- belief in the IDEAL state of existence – emphasis on INDIVIDUALITY, primacy of intellectual thinking over material reality (PLATO – this world is a copy of the ideal world where forms exist in absolute reality) • BRITISH ROMANTICISM = primacy of the INDIVIDUAL over the community (COLERIDGE, CARLYLE, WORDSWORTH)

17. GERMAN ROMANTICISTS: • SCHILLER, GOETHE and NOVALIS • GERMAN PHILOSOPHERS: • KANT, FICHTE, SCHELLING and HEGEL • Swedish philosopher and mystic EMANUEL SWEDENBORG • Belief in the absolute unity of God – not Trinity • CONFUCIUS • HINDU sacred texts (Vishnu Purana and Bhagavadgita)

18. MAJOR TENETS OF T. • All institutions (social, political, economic, religious) -- suspect as being false, materialistic • Emphasized personal INSIGHT, INDIVIDUALITY and INTUITION • The affirmation of the right of individuals to follow truth as they see it, even when contrary to established laws or customs

19. Importance of a direct relationship with God and with Nature • ONENESS = GOD + NATURE + MAN • OVERSOUL = the divine spirit or mind that is present everywhere, an all-pervading supreme mind. A kind of a cosmic unity between man, god and nature. • In each manifestation of God man can discover all universal laws at work.

20. PUBLIC ACTIVITY • Transcendentalists gave numerous PUBLIC LECTURES • During the period between about 1825 and the Civil War, there was a proliferation of institutions designed to enrich the average person and to promote self-culture. • THE LYCEUM (an organization for public lectures, concerts -- grew out of the Enlightenment ideal of making knowledge available to all), the social library, public library movement, museums

21. Transcendentalist periodical “ THE DIAL“ • Established experimental living communities (FRUITLANDS at Harvard, BROOK FARM at West Roxbury, Thoreau's cottage at Walden Pond)

22. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803 – 1882)

23. “SELF-RELIANCE” • The need for each man to think for himself, not to give up their freedom as individuals to constricting beliefs and customs, to common values, to established institutions • Importance of an individual’s resisting pressure to conform to external norms

24. He refuses to support morality through donations to organizations rather than directly to individuals • It makes no difference to him whether his actions are praised or ignored. The important thing is to act independently • The self-reliant individual should be able to live in the world and improve it, not be just another product of it.

25. Universe is an all-encompassing whole embracing man, nature, matter and spirit • the ultimate source of truth is within ourselves.

26. QUOTES • The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. • What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think . . . the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

27. Your gifts - whatever you discover them to be - can be used to bless or curse the world. • None of us alone can save the world. Together - that is another possibility. • Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members • Insist on yourself; never imitate. • Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.

28. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. • Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. • Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will • Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I all men's.

29. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817 – 1862)

30. “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” • Having developed the image of the government as a machine that may or may not do enough good to counterbalance what evil it commits, he urges rebellion. The opponents of reform, he recognizes, are not faraway politicians but ordinary people who cooperate with the system. • Although Thoreau asserts that a man has other, higher duties than eradicating institutional wrong, he must at least not be guilty through compliance. The individual must not support the structure of government, must act with principle, must break the law if necessary.

31. WALDEN • He points out the forces that dull and subjugate the inner man, materialism and constant labor in particular. • The reform of society rests within the individual. Each man is a microcosm. If he works at improving himself, he reforms the world more effectively than can any philanthropic scheme or organization.

32. POSSESSIONS COMPLICATE LIFE • Thoreau emphasizes the crushing, numbing effect of materialism and commercialism on the individual’s life. Property ownership and technological progress consume men before they have a chance to consider how they might live. The author encourages his contemporaries to be content with less materially. • To Thoreau, the cost of something is not so much its actual cost in dollars and cents, but the amount of life that must be exchanged for it.

33. REPLICA OF THOREAU’S CABIN

34. PATH LEADING FROM THE CABIN SITE TO THE POND

35. Each man must search for his own path, and the search must take place within himself. • What is moral, what is right, must be found in the heart of each individual person. • Truth lies within the individual • Awareness of the importance of the PRESENT moment

36. QUOTES • Man is rich in proportion to the things that he can afford to let alone. • I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

37. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation – SLAVES TO THEIR OWN DESIRES AND POSSESSIONS