Post 1: Transcendentalism

What is Transcendentalism?
Transcendentalism is a movement that changed many people's traditional ideas of previous thinkers. They started to propose ideas that reality is just a figment of our imagination and that we need to think beyond the learning of our past. Within the texts of the time the followers of this movement, including Emerson, and Thoreau, explore these ideas and how they think that they will be able to reach the ideals set in this movement. One of such ideals is that we must think above a bar which has been set by society and our past learning. To rise above this bar, as Emerson says in Nature, "To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me" ( Emerson 180). In this quote he describes how although it may seem that he is alone, he truly is not because people of his past have taught him how to do so many things.

To be truly alone, a man must not think of his past learning and rise above that to think in a new way that has not been thought of in the past. Henry David Thoreau approaches the idea of idealism in his Civil Disobedience, when he talks about how he was put into jail and he doesn't think that it is a bad thing. He says "I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn-a wholly new and rare experience to me.(Thoreau 216). In this he is describing how he learned more about his town from a night in jail than living in the town for so many years. In another one of Thoreau's works Walden, he describes his experiences of his year in the woods and the reason he went there in the first place. He says "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,... when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (Thoreau 204). This describes the transcendentalism idea of individualism because he separated himself from society to live and find himself without outside influence.