Assignment 3 : Transcendentalism : 22401 Paper 108 : The American Literature
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
(From 'Walden; or, Life in the Woods)
- Henry David Thoreau
Transcendentalism : History & Development : The word 'Transcend' derives its etymological meaning from the Latin roots : (1) 'trans' meaning 'across' and (2) 'scandere' meaning 'climb.' So the word literally means to 'climb across' or to 'go beyond.'
The Oxford Dictionary of English Language defines the term 'Transcendentalism' as a movement as follow :
'an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.'
Transcendentalism has its origin roots in the early 1800s in New England when the 'New Light' theologians who endorsed the emotional experience of God against the rational approach of the 'Old Light' theologians who advocated the empirical experience of Divine. The conflict brought 'Unitariansim' and then as a corollary movement - Transcendentalism.
The Milestone Events in the Development of Transcendentalism Movement :
》Transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism.
》They believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity.
》They emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.)
》Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority.
》The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name.
Key Features of Transcendentalism as Spiritual Renaissance :
(1) Individualism :
As one of the most important beliefs for transcendentalists, individualism means seeking truth through one's own experience rather than relying on the view or opinion of anyone else. For the transcendentalists, this even meant not relying on the ideas and thoughts of other writers and philosophers, despite the fact that most of them were scholars who read many other books. One quote which demonstrates the idea of individualism comes from Emerson's Self-Reliance:
"A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace."
This quote demonstrates individualism because it describes how people can only feel happy and at peace by working on the work which is most important to them, and that outside of that there can be no peace or true satisfaction. It highlights the idea of thinking for oneself and trusting their own self to do the best work possible for their own growth.
Another excellent quote which expresses the importance of individualism comes from Henry David Thoreau. Another advocate of transcendentalism, Thoreau spent two years living alone on Walden Pond, taking long walks through the woods and living a simple life in a small cabin. In his long essay, Walden, he writes:
"I went to 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 had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Here, Thoreau explicitly describes why he believed spending so much time alone was so important to him. Only by himself, away from the rest of society and learning and growing as an individual, would he be able to really discover truths about life.
(2) Idealism :
The second characteristic of transcendentalism is somewhat connected to individualism. Idealism means that one's own perception and ideas about reality are undoubtedly a part of reality itself. It promoted imagination and innovation in poets and thinkers and painting the world in new ways. Just as individualism meant finding truth through one's own intuition, idealism is the belief that every person has an independent view of the world, and that each independent view is important for determining ideal truths and ways of living in life. This characteristic grew from the American Romanticism movement, which, too, occurred in response to the Age of Reason. The American Romantics valued beauty and individual creativity in their writing, which are the same values which transcendentalists held as well.
(3) Nature as a Medium to Attain to Salvation or God :
Ralph Waldo Emerson begins his essay 'Nature' with the following poem :
'The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.'
The coherence of Nature, Men, and God is considered the topmost ripened form of Transcendentalist movement. The Nature is deemed as direct medium through which one can attain to God or Salvation. No mediatorship of Pundit, Mulla, Pope, Father, Nun, or anyone was required to get engaged to God and God's direct realization through His mercy.
(4) Break off from the Social Collectivism :
The inevitability of individual's aloofness from collective unconscious modes of social customs and convictions is the cornerstone feature of Transcendentalist movement. As Thoreau has stated in his 'Walden; or, Life in the Woods' (1854) :
"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."
Thoreau has staunch focus on individual experience through Nature,
"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
He in further course breaks the class-difference of rich and poor by stating the equality of Nature for every living entity on the planet Earth :
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace."
Seminal Transcendentalists :
(1) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) :
Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the American transcendental movement, setting out most of its ideas and values in a little book, Nature, published in 1836, that represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature, and in his First Series of essays.
Born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister, from a long line of ministers, and a quietly devout mother, Waldo--who dropped the "Ralph" in college--was a middle son of whom relatively little was expected. His father died when he was eight, the first of many premature deaths which would shape his life--all three brothers, his first wife at 20, and his older son at 5. Perhaps the most powerful personal influence on him for years was his intellectual, eccentric, and death-obsessed Puritanical aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Yet Emerson often confessed to an innate optimism, even occasional "silliness."
In 1851 he began a series of lecture which would become The Conduct of Life, published in 1860. He was vigorous in middle age, traveling frequently, but was increasingly aware of his limits and failing energy. He had become quite famous, a major figure in the American literary landscape, a celebrity which brought both adultation and satire. He had been a profound inspiration for many writers, especially Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. He continued his speeches against slavery, but never with the fire of Theodore Parker. In 1857 he wrote an essay on "Memory" but ironically, in his later years, his own memory would falter, especially after his beloved house burned in 1872. He died quietly of pneumonia in 1882.
Ann Woodlief, Virginia Commonwealth University
(2) Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) :
Margaret Fuller was born Sarah Margaret Fuller on May 23, 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. She was a very intelligent, even precocious, child who received an intense education from her father, Timothy Fuller, learning Greek and Latin at a very early age. Her father was a prominent lawyer and later a Congressman. She attended several schools and continued to educate herself, learning German and Italian, and would soon do translations of Goethe and Bettina von Arnim. Her father's death brought financial problems for the family, and she became responsible for the education of her younger siblings. She taught school, especially at Bronson Alcott's Temple School and the Green Street School in Providence, RI, for two years, but that gave her too little time for her writing.
In 1844, after an extensive trip west, she published Summer on the Lakes. Charmed by the book, Horace Greeley asked her to join his newspaperpaper, the New York Tribune as book review editor, and she became quite successful, branching into art and cultural reviews. In 1845 she expanded her Dial essay and published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which became a classic of feminist thought.
In 1846, as foreign correspondent for the Tribune. Fuller traveled to Europe and sent back articles about letters and art in Europe, meeting many well-known European writers and intellectuals. Once she got to Italy, in 1847, she became involved in the revolution and decided not to return to America for a while. She fell in love with Marchese Giovanni Angelo d'Ossoli, a much younger man of the petty nobility and a fellow revolutionary. They had a child a year later, a son named Angelo, and perhaps married the following year. During the of Revolution of 1848 and during the siege of Rome by the French forces, Fuller assumed charge of one of the hospitals of the city, while her husband took part in the fighting. When the revolution failed, they decided to sail to America, in May 1850, although her friends--who had just learned of her husband(?) and child--wondered how well the "new" Margaret would fit into her old world. She told them she was carrying the manuscript of a book on the Italian revolution, but she left her large collection of letters, especially those with Emerson, with friends in Europe. Her premonitions of disaster proved true; the ship's captain died of smallpox, and his less accomplished replacement ran the ship aground in a storm off of Fire Island, New York, on July 19, 1850. Although in sight of land, she, Ossoli, and Angelo drowned as the ship went down. Her friends sent Thoreau to the wreckage, looking for her manuscript or any other remains, but they were lost to the sea and scavengers.
(3) Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) :
Henry David Thoreau was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau’s work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau’s philosophy.
If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau’s philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than awareness. He attests to the importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (Walden, IV). This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” (Walden, II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity—not to mention, an embodied practice. Thoreau portrays himself not from a presumably neutral or impersonal vantage point, “but from an embodied point of view” in which his somatic sensory experience puts him “knowingly in touch with” his surroundings (Goodman 2012, 36). For such reasons as these, he has sometimes been interpreted as a “philosopher of the senses” (Mooney 2009, 195), who offers an original response to the central problem of modern philosophy as a consequence of recognizing that knowledge is “dependent on the individual’s ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).
Conclusion : Transcendentalism is indeed a watershed socio-religious-cultural-spiritual movement which brought the splattered strands of 'Truth' together and woven a fine rosary of the spiritual value which was on the verge of extinction due to overpowering nature of various belief systems, religions, cultures, civilizations, and what not! Thus Transcendentalism remains as celebrated as the spirituality all across the world.
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