Transcendentalism - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

About This Presentation
Title:

Transcendentalism

Description:

Transcendentalism Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. Civil Disobedience Henry David ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:217
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 42
Provided by: DanaH152
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Transcendentalism


1
Transcendentalism
2
What is Transcendentalism?
  • Transcendentalism was a literary movement that
    flourished during the middle 19th Century (1836
    1860).
  • It began as a rebellion against traditionally
    held beliefs by the English Church that God
    superseded the individual.

3
What does transcendentalism mean?
  • There is an ideal spiritual state which
    transcends the physical and empirical.
  • A loose collection of eclectic ideas about
    literature, philosophy, religion, social reform,
    and the general state of American culture.
  • Transcendentalism had different meanings for each
    person involved in the movement.

4
Where did it come from?
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson gave German philosopher
    Immanuel Kant credit for popularizing the term
    transcendentalism.
  • It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian
    church.
  • It is not a religionmore accurately, it is a
    philosophy or form of spirituality.
  • It centered around Boston and Concord, MA. in the
    mid-1800s.
  • Emerson first expressed his philosophy of
    transcendentalism in his essay Nature.

5
What did Transcendentalists believe?
  • The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational
    or sensical, became the means for a conscious
    union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit
    as Atman) with the world psyche also known as the
    Oversoul, life-force, prime mover and G-d (known
    in Sanskrit as Brahma).

6
The Oversoul
The groves were Gods first temples Willam
Cullen Bryant
In the faces of men and women I see God. Walt
Whitman
7
Basic Premise 1
  • An individual is the spiritual center of
    the universe, and in an individual can be found
    the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the
    cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the
    existence of G-d, but a preference to explain an
    individual and the world in terms of an
    individual.

8
Basic Premise 2
  • The structure of the universe literally
    duplicates the structure of the individual
    selfall knowledge, therefore, begins with
    self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's
    dictum "know thyself."

9
Basic Premise 3
  • Transcendentalists accepted the concept of
    nature as a living mystery, full of signs nature
    is symbolic.

10
Basic Premise 4
  • The belief that individual virtue and
    happiness depend upon self-realizationthis
    depends upon the reconciliation of two universal
    psychological tendencies
  • The desire to embrace the whole worldto know and
    become one with the world.
  • The desire to withdraw, remain unique and
    separatean egotistical existence.

11
Who were the Transcendentalists?
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Amos Bronson Alcott
  • Margaret Fuller
  • Ellery Channing

12
Transcendentalist Authors
13
Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • 1803-1882
  • Unitarian minister
  • Poet and essayist
  • Founded the Transcendental Club
  • Popular lecturer
  • Banned from Harvard for 40 years following his
    Divinity School address
  • Supporter of abolitionism

To be great is to be misunderstood.
14
Henry David Thoreau
  • 1817-1862
  • Schoolteacher, essayist, poet
  • Most famous for Walden and Civil Disobedience
  • Influenced environmental movement
  • Supporter of abolitionism

... Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth.
15
Amos Bronson Alcott
  • 1799-1888
  • Teacher and writer
  • Founder of Temple School and Fruitlands
  • Introduced art, music, P.E., nature study, and
    field trips banished corporal punishment
  • Father of novelist Louisa May Alcott

16
Margaret Fuller
  • 1810-1850
  • Journalist, critic, womens rights activist
  • First editor of The Dial, a transcendental
    journal
  • First female journalist to work on a major
    newspaperThe New York Tribune
  • Taught at Alcotts Temple School

17
Ellery Channing
  • 1818-1901
  • Poet and especially close friend of Thoreau
  • Published the first biography of Thoreau in
    1873Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist

18
Walden, orLife in the Woods
  • Henry David Thoreau

19
Walden, or Life in the Woods
  • On July 4th, 1845 Thoreau began his experiment
    in essential livingliving simply, studying the
    natural world, and seeking truth within himself.
  • On land owned by Emerson near Concord,
    Massachusetts, Thoreau built a small cabin by
    Walden Pond and lived there for more than two
    years, writing and studying nature.

20
  • 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.

21
  • Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
    your affairs be as two or three, and not a
    hundred or a thousand.

22
  • Still we live meanly,
  • like ants.
  • Our life is frittered away
  • by detail.
  • Why should we live with such hurry and waste of
    life?

23
Ants Marching Dave Matthews Band
  • He wakes up in the morning/Does his teeth, bite
    to eat and hes rolling/Never changes a thing/The
    week ends, the week begins
  • Take these chances/Place them in a box until a
    quieter time/Lights down, you up and die

24
  • Driving in on this highway/
  • All these cars and up on the sidewalk/
  • People in every direction/
  • No words exchanged/
  • No time to exchange

25
  • All the little ants are marching/ Red and black
    antennae waving/ They all do it the same/ They
    all do it the same way

26
Walden(continued)
27
  • Heaven is under our feet as well as over our
    heads.

28
  • It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we
    fall into a particular route, and make a beaten
    track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week
    before my feet wore a path from my door to the
    pond-side and though it is five or six years
    since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.

29
  • It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
    into it, and so helped to keep it open. The
    surface of the earth is soft and impressible by
    the feet of men and so with the paths which the
    mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be
    the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
    tradition and conformity.

30
(No Transcript)
31
  • 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.

32
  • 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
    which he hears, however measured or far away.

33
  • 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.
  • 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.

34
  • Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
    Money is not required to buy one necessary of the
    soul.

35
Civil Disobedience
  • Henry David Thoreau

36
Civil Disobedience
  • Thoreaus essay urging passive, nonviolent
    resistance to governmental policies to which an
    individual is morally opposed

37
Civil Disobedience
  • That government is best which governs leastThat
    government is best which governs not at all.
  • I ask for, not at once no government, but at
    once a better government.
  • I cannot for an instant recognize that political
    organization as my government which is the
    slaves government also.

38
  • If the injustice is part of the necessary
    friction of the machine of government let it
    gobut if it 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 a
    counter friction to stop the machine.

Click on the photo for more information.
39
(No Transcript)
40
  • Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
    the true place for a just man is also a prisonIt
    is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
    prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead
    the wrongs of the race should find them..

41
(No Transcript)
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com