The Path to Divine Wisdom
Throughout history different segments of society have struggled for such liberties as personal freedom and eternal happiness. For centuries man has attempted to "find" himself, posing the questions "Who am I?" and "Who do I want to be?" People tend to express themselves physically, spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally in order to promote their image, their sense of identity and individualism. During the late 1820's and 1830's, Transcendentalism emerged as the defining American philosophy. A movement which intertwined the study of truth, religion, and literature, stressing the value of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature and Henry David Thoreau's Walden both express insights into the divinity of the human person transcending material possessions and conformist ways of thinking.
Emerson's transcendental philosophy allowed him to experience harmony and understanding by broadening his horizons and seeing what others could not see, or even imagine. His literary masterpiece Nature explores the direct relationship between God and nature. Emerson suggests that the presence of a divine spirit in both nature and the human soul creates a direct understanding of God as well as the perception of fundamental truths. He describes his experience: "Standing on the bare ground-my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (www.jjnet.com/emerson/nature1.htm). He emphasizes that nature is a creation from God's hands and exists to fortify human souls with the purity of immorta...
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...ugate intuition and the passion to achieve divine wisdom. What people wore and owned became more important than what they thought, how they felt, and how they reflected the rhythm of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature and Henry David Thoreau's Walden provide a window into the mind of a Transcendentalist-a mind which prized the divinity of nature, individuality and rejection of materialism. Both men were able to recognize the divinity which is inherent in both humanity as well as nature. Their brilliant insights intrigued many minds and encouraged further generations of writers and poets to explore their own sentiments. The popularity of their works throughout the ages is a testament to the truth of their insight. This unique blend of philosophy, religion, and literature is perhaps idealistic to the materialist, yet it offers the true path to divine wisdom.
The essay "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson implements the use of many transcendentalist ideas through the use of strong rhetorical language. The core belief of transcendentalism is self-reliance and independence, and it stresses the importance that people need to do things on their own. Emerson uses irony to point out many latent truths about the concept. He also uses personification to show that the world around someone can have qualities of a human. Metaphors are also used heavily in the essay as catalysts to help the reader better understand Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson conveyed strong, specific viewpoints on the world through their writing. The transcendentalist ideals differ vastly with the lives lived by most of the modern world today. Firstly, the two differ on views of self-reliance. Secondly, they have different outlooks on the government and organized groups. Lastly, transcendentalist and modern American views vary by the way they view nature. These differences between transcendentalism and life today are essential in understanding life then, as well as life now.
In this essay, I will compare the philosophies of transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism through the writings of Thoreau and Emerson vs. Melville. In Thoreau’s excerpt of “Walden”, he tested the transcendentalist philosophy through experience. Emerson’s transcendental writing style is displayed in “Nature”. In Melville’s excerpt of Moby Dick, he exhibits anti-transcendentalism in his work.
Transcendentalism as a whole can be condensed to the core belief that nature, pure and untainted by man, is inherently good and transcends human boundaries. In history, the true idea of transcendentalism is often clouded by numerous conflicting beliefs and definitions. Some believe that merely existing is transcendental in itself, whereas others believe that a person must work towards the spiritual aspect of transcendentalism (Buell 3). Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, are perhaps the most influential poets of the transcendentalist era, an idealistic philosophical and social movement that developed in New England around 1836. To transcendentalist authors like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, nature plays a very important role and is the often looked at with sharp investigation. In the poems and essays by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, nature can be thought of as building blocks by which the foundation of human character is constructed. This foundation can be constructed through ones struggle against the natural world or their correlation with it. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman are different from most spiritual writers of their time because of the way in which each author gathers his beliefs and ideas. Instead of deriving their thoughts from the foundation of
According to the transcendentalism, if God exists, He can be found through human intuition. In the book “Anthology of American Literature,” it mentions that “Emerson believed in a correspondence between the world and the spirt, that nature is an image in which humans can perceive the divine” (939). If a puritan was to read this, they would assume he was an atheist because it goes against Gods will, which they called predestination. Anything that was related to nature was against predestination, but Emerson didn’t agree with the puritans. Emerson believed that thru nature you still find God because he created the world. In his writing “Nature,” he says, “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship” (Emerson 962). He believed the more you emerge yourself with nature the more divine you will be, because God made nature as art. He also bring up the argument of if you don’t associate with nature then you don’t understand your surroundings just like you won’t understand God. In the writing “Nature,” he says “We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us…Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you canton freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging
An influential literary movement in the nineteenth century, transcendentalism placed an emphasis on the wonder of nature and its deep connection to the divine. As the two most prominent figures in the transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau whole-heartedly embraced these principles. In their essays “Self-Reliance” and “Civil Disobedience”, Emerson and Thoreau, respectively, argue for individuality and personal expression in different manners. In “Self-Reliance”, Emerson calls for individuals to speak their minds and resist societal conformity, while in “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau urged Americans to publicly state their opinions in order to improve their own government.
...ed to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority” (American 1). The major players in the transcendentalist movement are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They shared ideas such as self-reliance, and ideas about how there is a divine being that controls every person. They influenced many other writers and they even had an effect on the American society, then and now. Transcendentalism was a philosophy and a way of life. It will continue to be this as long as we have access to the great minds of the transcendental movement.
Thoreau wrote, “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.” The words transformed people’s lives to think more of the why in life and live with a purpose not just do what they are told, which was a driving idea within the Transcendentalist movements. Transcendentalist were hard to define, but perhaps one of the fathers of transcendentalism Ralph Waldo Emerson defines it most gracefully in a speech he gave, “The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine, He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power: he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy”. As Emerson’s key student and self-proclaimed Transcendentalist Thoreau fulfilled these requirements to help further this movement of higher
Transcendentalism is a religious, philosophical, literary, and social movement of the nineteenth century. Essentially, this movement was based upon the ideals of the “sixth sense,” nature, and non-conformity, as well as individualism, intuition, idealism, imagination, and inspiration. A few of the works and writings featured in the transcendental unit include Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, The Beatification of Chris McCandless: From Thieving Poacher into Saint by Craig Medred, and Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The primary focus of this essay is to provide an opinion on a strikingly debatable topic; Whether or not Christopher McCandless, hero of Krakauer’s Into the Wild, was a true transcendentalist. Despite the bold actions of Chris McCandless on his daring Alaskan odyssey, he turned out to be far from a true transcendentalist, failing to meet the definition of transcendentalism, being solely concerned with himself, and acting out of revenge rather than seeking self discovery - nothing more than a childish suicidal rebel.
In his essay, "Nature", Ralph Waldo Emerson describes man's relationship to nature and to God. Early on, he describes himself as a "transparent eyeball." In this passage, he expresses his view that nature is purity. Emerson believes being in pure nature brings mankind closer to the way God intended life to be. Through nature man and God are brought together.
Emerson's essay, Nature is essentially one that seeks show a new form of enlightening the human spirit and urges the establishment of a stronger link between man and the Universal Spirit through. Emerson sees nature as this inspiration to people and catalyst for a deeper understanding of the spiritual world.
Thoreau, among the most heralded writers of the North American continent, may have lived on his little as possible, but the grandeur of his writing style suggest quite the opposite. This does coincide with a key part of Transcendentalism - putting matters of the mind and spirit far above any materialistic preference. Chapter 5 of Thoreau’s memoir Walden explains his reasonings for isolation through several rhetorical strategies that emphasize the splendor of aloneness and nature.
A transcendentalist values the natural world compared to the obsession of the synthetic values of those before them. Among the well respected Transcendentalists are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Henry David Thoreau. A common dream world consists of simplicity, admiration, and individualism, and there hasn’t been a clear line drawn regarding the connection between transcendentalism and utopian thinking. A future ‘utopia’ should be founded on transcendentalist philosophies in order to restore the value of nature and one's own individual spirit, due to the qualities shared by a 21st century ‘utopia’ and transcendental ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882), the leader of the Transcendentalism in New England, is the first American who wrote prose and poem on nature and the relationship between nature and man Emerson's philosophy of Transcendentalism concerning nature is that nature is only another side of God "the gigantic shadow of God cast our senses." Every law in nature has a counterpart in the intellect. There is a perfect parallel between the laws of nature and the laws of thought. Material elements simply represent an inferior plane: wherever you enumerate a physical law, I hear in it a moral rule. His poem The Rhodora is a typical instance to illustrate his above-mentioned ideas on nature. At the very beginning of the poem, the poet found the fresh rhodora in the woods, spreading its leafless blooms in a deep rock, to please the desert and the sluggish brook, while sea-winds pieced their solitudes in May. It is right because of the rhodora that the desert and the sluggish brook are no longer solitudes. Then the poem goes to develop by comparison between the plumes of the redbird and the rhodora . Although the bird is elegant and brilliant, the flower is much more beautiful than the bird. So the sages can not helping asking why this charm is wasted on the earth and sky. The poet answers beauty is its own cause for being just as eyes are made for seeing. There is no other reason but beauty itsel...