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RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S TRANSCENDENTALISM
Before exploring Emerson’s transcendentalism, let us to have a look at the one occurred in the United States in the nineteenth century.
American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature flourishing from about 1836 till 1860. ... Channing’s views on an indwelling God and the importance of intuitive thought. ...
According to Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986)
Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy …
William H. Channing (1810-1844) holds "Transcendentalism … was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. ... "
Another viewpoint on the Internet posits “Transcendentalism, like other romantic movements, proposes that the essential nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature, human beings would seek the good. ... … Transcendentalism also takes the Romantic view of mans steady degeneration from childhood to adulthood as he is corrupted by culture.”
Reading Emerson’s essays “Nature” (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), and "Self-Reliance", we facilely find out that the soul of each individual is identical with the world – a microcosm of nature, and of the “Over-Soul” (“Outline of American Literature”). ...
To that extent, therefore, one possesses God’s virtues “He must be an university of knowledges. …the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; … it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all” (“The American Scholar”)
Apprehending this, Emerson daringly advocates individualism – individual differences. ... He/She will get away from Dualism to retrospect Monism, as Emerson suggests in “Self-Reliance”
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. ... Even though Ralph W. Emerson praised books as the best type of the influence of the mind in the Past “great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page”, he concentrates more on the active and creative spirit:
I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Approximate Word count = 1922
Approximate Pages = 7.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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