Friday, December 21, 2012

Transcendentalism

            Transcendentalism is one of the most influential American intellectual movements. It is a set of ideas that no American author from the nineteenth century could escape from, either to criticise it or to accept it.
People from around the world started talking about it. Americans were proud about that fact. It is an obscure movement, mixing literature, religion and philosophy. Especially interesting is their view of God. They redefined their idea of Him, of man and of the relationship between the two.
The Transcendentalists had the concept of the oversoul (“what there is”). The oversoul may be divided into two: man and nature. 
And the place God (the divinity; it did not necessarily refer to a human-like being) takes is everywhere, in man and in nature. They considered him far from being a figure removed from man. The divinity was not the most important thing, not more so than man or nature. There was no way to reach the divinity, but there are two things that may be done to understand it better: understand, explore oneself and nature.
Transcendentalism occurred when the main philosophical ideas were Pragmatism, Empiricism and Utilitarianism.
The name of this movement is very self-explanatory: it means to go beyond; beyond material reality, towards the truth. To go beyond material reality one has to either be a poet or use reason.
A poet is the one who has the ability to cross reality with a special insight, and who is able to communicate it to other people. The poet works with intuition.
Reason was used then to refer to what we now know as intuition (or what Emerson called understanding) or instinct.
The most important transcendentalist poets were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau.
                                                  


To know more about these poets, I give you some interesting webs, in which you can see texts (how they used languange) , their biographies and more.
http://www.emersoncentral.com/
http://www.thoreausociety.org/

Source: 
http://www.alcoberro.info/imatges/thoreau.jpg
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