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Transcendentalism

and Anti-Transcendentalism

Opposite Approaches to Romanticism

Three main points...

Dark Romanticism and the Gothic

Anti-Transcendentalists, or

Dark Romantics

Top Two Transcendentalists

  • Nature is indifferent, unforgiving, and inexplicable
  • People possess the potential for evil as much as (if not more than) for good
  • Ultimate truths are difficult if not impossible to determine

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Herman Melville)

Edgar Allan Poe

The Dark Romantics liked to make their point with dark, spooky stories that drew on the Gothic tradition. Just as the Transcendentalists focused on the effects of optimism, hope, joy, and brotherhood, the Dark Romantics explored the effects of pessimism, despair, sorrow and fear.

  • Considered the first and foremost Transcendentalist

Focus on the limitations and potential destructiveness of the human spirit rather than on its possibilities.

Henry David Thoreau

  • Student, follower, and friend of Emerson
  • Believed in the importance of intuition and integrity
  • Privileged background and naivety show through in writing

Insanity, blood, skulls, monsters, murders, the strange, the terrifying, the bewildering - these are the tools the Anti-Transcendentalists used to show the Dark Side.

  • Popular writer and lecturer, despite controversial stances
  • Passionately impractical...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • ...but an important influence on later activists

So what is Transcendentalism?

In keeping with the emotional nature of their work, Anti-Transcendentalists worked mostly in fiction and relied on symbol and allegory to convey their points.

  • A belief that God=nature
  • A belief that nature is the doorway to the spiritual world
  • A belief in the divinity of human individuality

Philosophies Before Transcendentalism

  • A belief that humans are good, and evil an illusion
  • Puritanism: God controls everything directly, and God is revealed only in the Bible
  • A belief that all share a universal soul
  • Enlightenment: God left the world to run by itself, and the world must be understood scientifically

Transcendentalism

  • Unitarianism: The world is a divine miracle which proves God's existence

A 19th-century philosophy which believes that matters of ultimate reality transcend human experience

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