Name :- Riddhi H. Rathod
Roll No.: 17
Enrollment No.: 4069206420220025
Paper number: -108
Paper name:- The American Literature
Sem: 2 (Batch 2022- 2024)
Email i'd:- riddhirathod1213@gmail.com Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department
Introduction
Transcendentalism is a 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.
It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. It is an American version of English romanticism. It was influenced by German transcendentalism, Platonism and Neo-Platonism, Christian mysticism and English Romanticism.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
In contrast to the empiricists and rationalists, the transcendentalists were doubtful of knowledge from either sense- experience or logic and reason. However, they did not embrace a human skepticism, rather they claimed that intuition and personal revelation should be the source of knowledge.
Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.
These "Old Lights" became known first as "liberal Christians" and then as Unitarians, and were defined by the belief that there was no trinity of father, son and holy spirit as in traditional Christian belief, and that Jesus Christ was a mortal.
Various philosophers began to swirl around this crowd, and the ideas that would butome Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism over its perceived rationality and instead embraced German Romanticism in a quest for a more spiritual experience.
Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Hegel, poet Coleridge, ancient Indian scripture known as the Vedas and religious founder Emanuel Swedenborg.
Transcendentalism emphasizes a few key points:
• The interconnectedness of all things
⚫ The importance of nature
• The role of individual in society • Man Vs machine
Major figures in the transcendentalist movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller,and Amos Bronson Alcott.
What is Transcendentalism?
It is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.
What is Anti-Transcendentalism?
It was an opposition movement to the Transcendentalist. The Transcendentalist were writers who supported the beauty of Nature, the kindness of Humans and a distrust in government.
Transcendentalism vs Anti- Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism and Anti - transendetranscen in scarlett letter :
The Scarlett letter is written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this novel Nature is very beautifully portraits. It’s symbol of acceptance Hester by Nature. Sometime She live alone with Nature. Nature give a space for her and also for her child. She is very strong character in this novel .she is able to raise her voice against society and religion. She is facing lot's of problems and she suffering a lot from society and their rules.
Some transcendentalist
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Emerson's ideas about the significance of the individual that came under the heading of what he called "self-relience". Everywhere Emerson looked, he saw people leading lives that were based on tradition, that were limited by religious forms and social habits. No one could be themselves, Emerson thought, because they were all too busy being what they were supposed to be.
Emerson wanted to get rid of each of these burdens: the post, religion and social forms. So that each person could find out who they really were. As he puts it: "History is an impertinence and an injury; Our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us..." We must, he argued, live from within trusting noting but our own intuitions. For, as he concluded "nothing is last sacred but the integrity of your own mind".
Emerson was a "Pantheist". That is someone who believe that God exists in every part of creation, from the smallest grain of sand to the stars. But also crucially that the divine spark is in each of us. In following ourself, we are therefore not merely being fickle or selfish, we are rather, realizing a divine will, that history, society and organized religion normally hide from us. The individual as Emerson writes "is a God in ruins".
According to Emerson, mountains, grains and stars reveal an essential connection between nature, God and man. They are one. They also give Emerson a proper sense of each individual's importance, as a part of God.
Emerson emphasis on the value of the ordinary. What Emerson put forward in essays like "The American scholar" and "The Poet", was that the American every day, was a proper subject for literature. This was because for Emerson, the transcendentalist God is everywhere, and it's the poet's job to reveal this. "There is no object...", he wrote, "... so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful... Even a corpse has its own beauty." This coming from a man who had opened his first wife's tomb a year after her death to take a look.
Thoreau also viewed technology as an often unnecessary distraction. He saw the practical benefits of new inventions, but he also warned that these innovations couldn't address the real challenges of personal happiness. Thoreau believed we should instead look to nature which is full of spiritual significance. He thought of animals, forest and waterfalls as inherently valuable but for their beauty and their role in the ecosystem. We can best understand ourselves as a part of nature, we should see ourselves as nature looking into nature, rather than an external force or the master of nature.
Thoreau argued that people are morally obliged to challenge a government that uphold hypocritical or flagrantly unfair laws. So, Thoreau turned to what he called: Civil Disobedience. Peacefully resisting immoral laws in protest. Despite his time as a hermit, Thoreau teaches us how to approach a frighteningly vast, highly interconnected and morally troubling modern society. He challenges us to be authentic, not just by avoiding material life and its distractions, but by engaging with the world and withdrawing our support for the government when we believe is acting unjustly. His works endure and remind us of just how important it is to remove the distractions of money, technology and other people's views, in order to live according to our best and truest nature.
Theodore Parker
Parker, a controversial minister, was forced out of the Unitarian Church. Although he had doubts about the intellectual equality of black people, he became an enthusiastic transcendentalist and a leader of the antislavery movement. A foe of the Mexican War like Thoreau, Parker led opposition in the Boston area to federal efforts to enforce the new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, going so far as to hide an escaped slave in his home.
Even more controversially, he helped finance arms purchases that helped antislavery zealot John Brown and others fight slaveholding settlers in the disputed Kansas-Nebraska Territory and enabled Brown to launch his failed raid on a U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
Orestes A. Brownson
Born in Vermont, Brownson was a lifelong religious seeker who ultimately became a Roman Catholic. During his years as an important transcendentalist, Brownson focused on inequitable treatment of workers, both free and enslaved. A socialist and editor of his own Boston-based journal, Brownson saw the gap between the wealthy and laboring classes growing disastrously in violation of God’s law and the supposed equality promised by American democracy.
“What in one word is this American system?” he asked in 1840. “Is it not the abolition of all artificial distinctions, all social advantages founded on birth or any other accident, and leaving every man to stand on his own feet ... ?”
Bronson Alcott
Best known today as the often-absent father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, the self-educated Alcott pioneered new educational methods, some of which have continued to influence American schooling. Children, he believed, should not be forced to learn a rigid curriculum but taught ways to open their minds to a world of knowledge.
The child, he wrote, “is the Book. The operations of his mind are the true system.” Although his ideas were controversial, partly because he disdained corporal punishment, Alcott was eventually appointed superintendent of Concord’s public schools.
Less successful was Fruitlands, the agricultural community Alcott and a British friend founded in a rural Massachusetts town in 1843. It lasted just six months, done in by rules that included cold-water showers, strict vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, and opposition to animal exploitation so strict that colonists could not use horses or oxen to clear land for farming.
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