Essay on Emersons Transcedentalist Beliefs

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a transcendentalist in my eyes because of his consistent promotion of free thought, personal insight, and individuality. Transcendentalism is the combination of the beliefs of nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, and importance of nature. When I looked further into its meaning I came to realize it encompasses the growth and renewal of the individual, revolt against conformity, and basically promotes all sorts of reformation. Transcendentalism is really just a collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social reform, and the generalizations on culture. It is the kind of concept that exists on a sliding scale because it has different meanings for each person who interprets it. I feel like Emerson really advocates many of these ideas and thoughts throughout all of his works, he speaks about individuality, promoting intuition as a sign of higher thinking. Emerson constantly reinforced that free thought was an advantage that not everyone was able to use for themselves, for example he says "A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think." (1862). This is his way of expressing that there is power and privilege in those that can and will think for themselves, that they have the upper hand in comparison to those who just fall in line with what society wants. Overall he seems to be a transcendentalist author considering how the many elements of the concept are constantly reiterated throughout every

Emerson, himself was a Transcendentalist and he influenced other people to be one as well because he believed everyone should create their own ideas and not fall to be just another person in a society, take a leap of faith. “The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried” (Self-Reliance 774). Emerson was able to consider himself a Transcendentalist because he took a leap of faith and always made his very own context as to what he was against, and what he viewed as a current situation. The overall reason Emerson was a transcendentalist is because he created a different view for society and went outside of the norm to create ideas people had yet to even contemplate. Therefore, by creating a new idea for the society, people were able to expand their knowledge and build from Emerson’s ideas. All in all, Emerson believed in his own thoughts so he shared them with the public. As emerson stated as well as lived by, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men” (Emerson

Transcendentalism is an American literary, political and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ideologically speaking, the movement is not simply to define since its philosophical and religious ideas are marked with a certain mysticism, which defies concise explanation. As well, the transcendentalism had been approached and interpretated by its followers in different ways and these differences embroil generalizations about the movement as a whole. Along Ralph Waldo Emerson, other important transcententalists were Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Henry Hedge, Amos Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Regarding the world from a radical perspective, the transcendentalists found their inspiration

"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."(Emerson 196). These two lines written by Ralph Waldo Emerson exemplify the whole movement of transcendentalist writers and what they believed in. Though to the writers, transcendentalism was a fight for a belief, unknown to them they could have been fighting for the betterment of human health. The transcendentalist writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson have directly affected the health of modern society through the idea of transcendental meditation.

Between the 1840s and 1860s, the movement known as Transcendentalism surfaced and soared. The Transcendentalist movement began as a physiological movement, which then influenced the literature of those who studied it, including its American literary founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism took place at the end of the Romanticism era and the beginning of the Realism time period, but it had its own distinct characteristics.

Transcendentalism was an early philosophical, intellectual, and literary movement that thrived in New England in the nineteenth century. Transcendentalism was a collection of new ideas about literature, religion, and philosophy. It began as a squabble in the Unitarian church when intellectuals began questioning and reacting against many of the church’s orthodoxy ways regarding all of the aforementioned subjects: religion, culture, literature, social reform, and philosophy. They in turn developed their own faith focusing on the divinity of humanity and the innate world. Many of the Transcendentalists ideas were expressed heavily by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essays such as “Nature”, “Self Reliance”, and also in his poems such as “The

Henry David Thoreau was also a key figure in the Transcendentalist movement, who shared many qualities akin to Emerson. Emerson guided Thoreau after he took interest in Emerson as a young student. Emerson is the one who suggested that Thoreau keep a journal. The writings in the journal at Walden Pond became on of Thoreau’s signature texts on Transcendentalism and individuality.

Emerson's views of the world are best enshrined through his speeches, lectures, publications, poems, and essays. Many of these works attacked formal religion, government, and society for their inherent flaws. Some of his writings could be described as pretenses to modern anarchism, as described in another one of his essays, “Hence, the less government we have, the better,- the fewer the

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American writer who and a leader in a movement that helped changed the way people thought. He preached about the importance of self reliance and how our lives must not rely on others of society. Like other famous transcendentalists he had ideas that were extremely bold for his time period. Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei were people who shared similar qualities to Emerson and without them our world would not be the same as it is today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a was an essayist, philosopher, lecturer and a transcendentalist poet of the 19th century. He is best known for his essays the self-reliance, nature, experience, and the poet. He wrote numerous subjects on individualism and freedom. Emerson took a more pantheist approach to rejecting views of God as separate from the world. He translated abstract ideas into ordinary language. He influenced many other famous writers. Emerson is important because he is the spokesman of transcendentalism. He led that transcended movement in the mid 19th century. His philosophy is characterized by its reliance on an institution as the only way to comprehend reality. Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture.I chose Ralph Waldo Emerson for this project because I wanted to know more about his philosophy, and his essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1803, to a clergyman. He attended Boston Latin School followed by attending Harvard where he graduated in 1821. Emerson became known as “The American Scholar,” which was the foundation of a lecture he gave in 1837, resulting in American authors finding their own style of nature and self-reflection, rather than following their previous forerunners. He believed that it was the role of the American writers to confront the issues of the day in through their writings, such as slavery. Emerson became the leading figure of the philosophy of Transcendentalism in this time period, which is a loose set of ideas that looked to nature for inspiration and insights, he belief influenced many individuals

Emerson’s writing of Nature was a compilation of his sermons and writings and talked of his self discovery in the field of the wild outdoors. His ideas were based religiously and spoke somewhat on the creator. “We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.”(Nature 3.1) God, in Emerson’s writings, is the perfect creator and made no mistakes in the formation of the earth we live in. The questions we have will be answered by the natural order of things. There is always an answer that relates directly to the way we already know this world. “In this way, Emerson opens his essays with a sweeping dismissal of those tools of insight based on the past, and a demand to understand the world - that is, God and nature(two sides of the same coin for him) - instead through our own personal, direct relationship to and revelations about the world.”(Anderson) Nature is more than an idea to be protected in his stories, it is a function that has all the answers and writes the script of how we live. “As the title of his essay suggests, he grounds his approach to understanding the world in Nature, which

Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned for his writings and contributions towards the transcendentalist movement. He once gave lectures as many as eighty per year around various subjects for forty years. In fact, most of his works of literature centered around his interpretations and experiences throughout his life. However, one must ask, how did his ingenuity and life’s experiences influence his astonished writings?

The American history of transcendentalism is often attributed to the struggles of a single man. In early 1831, Boston pastor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had his faith tested when his wife passed. With the industrial revolution in full swing it had seemed that individuals did not matter. Emerson had believed that “the human mind is the most important force in the

The theme of individualism is present in several of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works. It was also his philosophical views on how to live life. He believed that human beings had remarkable capabilities, more than they can possibly identify. With these capabilities a person should govern themselves, not be governed by a society. Emerson also believed that nature played a large role in how man should act and to follow nature’s actions of growing without obstruction (“Nature”). This is why he lead the Transcendentalism movement in the nineteenth century, along with Theodore Parker, Frederic Henry Hedge, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau (Lewis). This philosophy was not only significant then, it was imperative throughout times in history.