"The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right"

We are currently reading the Transcendentalist writers. Some of the concepts we have discussed are:

§Reject Authority
§Be an Individual
§Live simply, in harmony with nature and others
§Currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel with God.

The Transcendental concepts of simplicity and reverence for nature are pretty easy to understand, right. We can also probably see a continuum in history from Patrick Henry who led the Virginians in revolution against a tyrannical king, to Thoreau's hatred for slavery and unfair taxes, down to Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism in the 1960's.

But what about this?
Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience, "The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right." Emerson, likewise, said that "The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it." By "constitution", Emerson meant the aggregate of your personality. In other words, he was saying that if something went against your better judgment, your intuition, if it didn't feel right to you, then it was almost like physically hurting yourself to participate.

A. W. Tozer wrote in response to Thoreau and Emerson: "If that were true, there would be as many codes as there are human beings and each one of us would be our own witness, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer! "

What do you think about this? What problems could an attitude such as the Transcendentalist authors took lead to? Or, conversely, what do you like about this attitude?

A Sense of Place...

A SENSE OF PLACE

I'd love for you to reflect here on your museum experience. A thorough reflection that connects the trip to the concept of a sense of place would make a great journal entry for your final product for this unit. Here are some sample questions you could address: How have artists featured at the PMA experimented with different visual arts to express important ideas? (Try to connect those ideas to something we have read in class). How did the composition, color and execution of a particular piece of art that you remember from the PMA inform the narrative implicit therein? (In plain English, how did the piece tell it's story?) Did any of the artist works you observed at the PMA look closely at nature and beyond to understand themselves? In "Moosehunt" or "Walden" did Thoreau do that, too? Did any of the visual art you saw at the PMA have parallels with the Romantic/Transcendental period? Have fun, and remember that if you answer thoughtfully, your answer can count twice for you; once as a blog entry for extra credit, and also as a journal for the mini multi-genre study for this unit!