Great question. Another good one is why I am writing this blog? Well its a final for one of my classes so I don't really have a choice, do I Blake?
So what is Transcendentalism? Well I'm glad that you asked. Transcendentalism is going beyond our everyday understanding of the world and questioning how we see things and understand them in order to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It started right after the era of Romanticism and embodied some traits from that era. It really looped back to the age of enlightenment as it challenged the way people thought. The transcendentalist movement was originally inspired from a bunch of European philosophers like Plato, Locke, and Kant. Hehe Kant... I Kant handle his name... Back on track time. Transcendentalism was also influenced by eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and philosophers like Confucius, Vishnu Purina, and Bhagavad-Gita. The biggest contributors to transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson (I just love that we always call these people by their last names) wrote some influential works like "Nature" and "Self-Reliance" while Thoreau was influenced by Emerson and then trucked into the wilderness to live a transcendental lifestyle and wrote "Walden".
By now I'm sure your wondering what this stuff is actually about. Well mostly its about how you can't be truly yourself while you are being influenced and corrupted by the society that surrounds you, that man was fine until he encountered society and that is when he lost his way, but if we return to our roots in nature then we will be able to find ourselves once more in the rugged wilderness from which we once came. Now I know that's a lot but that is seriously the most dumbed down I could make it. They tend to speak in metaphors and its all very confusing if you dive into to much at once.
While writing these very long very confusing essays the transcendentalists used a few major ideals as the building blocks for their writing, which are optimism, self-reliance, individualism, and intuition. These things will be discussed in another post so I'm just going to mention them and move on.
Now since my teacher said I needed to use a transcendental quote to describe transcendentalism here is one by Emerson.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is a perfect example of transcendentalism because the transcendentalists believed in individualism and that the ever consuming woes of society always try to change us and therefore we must return to nature where we can be ourselves, as I said before.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
This one tells us that the power that we have within ourselves is far greater than anything that has or will happen. This is transcendental because it reminds of the power that we posses. We all have the power to change history and the world if we only try.
Now I know a lot of you are reading this and thinking "Well if that were really true why have I not?" And to that I say... society man. The transcendentalists were right we conform to what it wants and then we find ourselves going through the motions with some life that won't make it into history books or the news because we did what we were suppose to and we did not dare go against the flow for fear that we would stand out and drown. But we only thought that because that is what society said we would do, so I challenge you, whoever ends up reading this, to dare, to try, to go against the flow, to find yourselves, and to do something amazing because “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
P.S.
Is it just me or does it seem like whenever I say transcendentalism there should be a booing DUH DUH DUN and the font should get bigger and explode?
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