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?
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2 comments:
The Transcendentalist movement and the authors, who gave it momentum, in my opinion, are men and women who truly understood how the human mind works in relation to his/her soul. Throughout their works of literature, Thoreau and Emerson bring up the subject of one's conscience and its harmony with the owner’s actions. I believe that this is very important especially when finding who you truly are. Someone's conscience is based off what they know; without knowledge how can you make adequate decisions about your life and the decisions that present themselves?
Arielle, I very much agree with you. I love your phrase "men and women who truly understood how the human mind works in relation to their soul. I think that the Transcendentalists, for all their "fluffiness" were truly the first Americans who took time to nurture the human soul (with thoughts, music, education, etc.) and I appreciate the shift from the negativity of believing that we are born dead in sin and without any free will to believing that we have a certain measure of grace within us, a certain amount of possibility and promise. I don't know if I would want assume as much as Thoreau does about man's inate ability to choose what's right, but it's nice to think that we could try such an experiment! There were those in his time who did. If you follow this link, you can read about one such experiment. It failed, but I would like to see what could happen with today's resources available!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brook_farm
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