What is transcendentalism?

Introduction

Transcendentalism was a philosophical, political and literary movement which almost flourished in U.S. between 1836 and 1860. It began as a reform movement within the Unitarian Church that sought to extend the application of the thought of William Ellery Channing on the God within and significance of subconscious thought. It was based on "a monism holding the unity of the world and God and the immanence of the world". For the transcendentalists, the soul of each is identical to the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. The Transcendentalists worked with the feeling that the advent of a new era was at hand. These were critical of contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged each to seek, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "an original relation to the universe" (Gura, Philip, pp. 7-8).

Thesis Statement

Influential men are those kinds of people that can influence others by their acts and believes.

Discussion

Henry David Thoreau's Transcendental Beliefs in Walden

Walden or Life in the Woods (native title Walden, or, Life in the Woods) is a story published in 1854 by the American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The novel tells the life that Thoreau spent in a cabin for two years, two months and two days in the forest belonging to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, adjacent to the Walden Pond (Walden Pond), near its friends and family who lived in Concord in Massachusetts (Ljunquist, Kent, pp. 15).

Late 1844, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau's friend and mentor, purchased land around the Walden Pond (located at Concord, in Massachusetts, the United States) and makes available. Thoreau wants to withdraw because quiet to write, although it does not remain always alone, and many friends (including William Ellery Channing who stays with him in the fall of 1845), as well as his admirers, frequently visit. According to Michel Granger, Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond as it sought to disappear from the life of Concord, his hometown. With his friend Edward Hoar, in March 1844, he has indeed set the fire accidentally in some of the nearby forest. Moreover, also the desire to become respectable, "the strongest motivation for Thoreau was historical: he wanted to reconstitute his" remains in the condition it was three centuries ago "before the arrival of man White on American soil”. However, according to Leo Stoller is an intelligent distaste for physical society, and particularly for the residents of Concord, Thoreau, which leads to "deny their existence busy to continue the daily subsistence, perverting of their freedom in despair” (Gura, Philip, pp. 7-8).

The choice of Thoreau is doing so on the Walden Pond, because it is a place not too far away or too close to the world of men. In addition, he is aware from his childhood and the pond remains a mysterious place for him. He retired then into a clearing on its banks, "place through both immured" (Walled-in in his words) and large enough that it has a protective margin, but is not ...