Transcendentalism

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Transcendentalism
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The Transcendental View

• The universe and the individual are all connected
  in one Universal soul with people and human
  nature as good and pure.
• Everything in the world, including human beings,
  is a reflection of the Divine Soul.
• People can use their intuition to behold Gods
  spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.

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The Transcendental View, continued

• Self- reliance and individualism must outweigh
  external authority and blind conformity to custom
  and tradition.
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior
  to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

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The Transcendental View, continued

• Transcendentalism was based partly on the
  philosophy of Idealism, which dated back to
  ancient Greece.
• It was based also on the ideas of American
  thinkers ranging from the Puritans to the
  nineteenth-century Romantics.
• Transcendentalists viewed nature as a doorway to
  a mystical world holding important truths.

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Transcendental Beliefs

• Man is inherently good.
• Critical of government.
• Were progressive thinkers of their time in terms
  of equality and rights.
• Favored imagination, creativity, and the human
  spirit.

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Transcendental Beliefs

• Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense
  and plain dealing.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Transcendental Beliefs

• Very early, I knew that the only object in life
  was to grow.
• Margaret Fuller

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Transcendental Beliefs
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Transcendental Beliefs

• 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. I did not wish to live what
  was not life, living is so dear nor did I wish
  to practise resignation, unless it was quite
  necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
  the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
  Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not
  life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
  drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
  lowest terms.
• Henry David Thoreau

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Transcendental Beliefs

• It is easy in the world to live after the
  world's opinion it is easy in solitude to live
  after our own but the great man is he who in the
  midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness
  the independence of solitude.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo EmersonNature

• God is always near.
• He reveals Himself everywhere and at all times in
  nature.
• In nature, we are able to find the perpetual
  presence of the sublime.
• In His presence we feel real delight in spite of
  sorrow.
• Nature gives us better, higher thoughts and
  emotions.

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Lets Figure This Out
Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
spaces, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eye-ball I am nothing I see all.
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Transparent Eyeball

• To put it simply, the transparent eyeball is a
  metaphor for him seeing everything as a part of
  everything instead of as himself looking out.
  Emerson placed an emphasis on being one with
  nature and so as a transparent eyeball, he sees
  everything and exists as everything else exists
  around him. 

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"Transparent Eyeball" In photography Walker Evans
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The Transcendental View

• How are you affected by nature? Do you find
  comfort in it? Do you reflect the moods of
  nature?
• What is the role of nature in your life?
• What is meant by an individual's spiritual side?
  How to you define it?
• Is there a connection between the individual's
  spirit and nature? If so, what is that
  connection?
• What does it mean to know something intuitively?
  For example, has a parent or a sibling ever known
  something was wrong with you without having
  talked with or seen you? What do we mean when we
  say "I just know it"?
• How do you demonstrate that you are an
  individual? Do you think independently of others
  or do you follow the crowd?