Essays on Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is the great fight between one’s identity and the oppressive conformity of the world. Throughout history, Transcendentalists preached that being “Self reliant” was the greatest quality a man could hold. A person’s intellectualism and spirituality wasn’t corrupted by these oppressive conformists if they followed their own self. Transcendentalism argues against the ideal that the American Dream insists on an individual’s passage upward in status and class, hence that individual ...

Marcus Aurelius Flores Period-5 AP English Summer Reading 2019 Into the Wild (Page 3) 'In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name turned out to be Christopher ...

Transcendentalism asserts the inherent goodness of man for "to the good, (and) to the perfect, he is born" (Divinity School Address 10). His origin is divine and so is his destiny. As he goes through life, he progresses the ladder of divinity. As man continues to make choices to remain virtuous, and beautiful, his nature tends toward transcendental divinity. This transcendentalist tenet goes contrary to Calvinistic doctrine, which posits man's innate evil and proclivity to sin. Ralph Waldo ...

Charles Manson and various members of his “family” brutally killed several people from the Tate and LaBianca family on two separate occasions. The purposes of these killings are misunderstood by today's society, when ignoring Manson's philosophy. Although Manson never killed anyone, he went to prison in 1969 for masterminding the operation. Today's society has labeled Charles Manson as a mass-murderer who had no purpose through his cause. However, society overlooks the goal of Manson's plan, ...

Society is founded on monotony and security, and it is nearly impossible for its innocent youth not to be drawn into its façade. As they journey into the world, young adults seek solace in the confines of conformity and are soon drowning in superficiality. The recognition of value is stripped from their minds and replaced with the predisposition to “carelessness, ignorance wastefulness” (Eighner 150). While Lars Eighner’s On Dumpster Diving exemplifies the profligate nature of America’s ...

The Puritans of New England called their home, “A city upon a hill”. They put themselves on a pedestal, and this depicts Puritan values and characteristics. If someone lives “upon a hill”, they are watching everyone around them. In Puritan society, people were aware they were constantly being watched and judged. They valued having a perfect and upstanding image in the eyes of society. This value system was common but was fundamentally different from the dogma that succeeded it: ...

Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are names that are often linked to powerful writing. The writing of Thoreau and Emerson often revolved around transcendentalism which was a progressive social movement in the early 1800’s. The common theme of transcendentalist writing is self-reliance. Thoreau displays this theme in Life in the Woods, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and Emerson in his essay Self-Reliance, and another transcendentalist thinker Margaret Fuller uses it in her essay ...

Texts are cultural snapshots representing their era - they reflect and develop the values, ideas and attitudes of their context. Two texts, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s (EBB) suite of Petrarchan form sonnet’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist novel “The Great Gatsby” explore the transformative nature of love and also the desire of an individual for a transcendental love. Both authors draw on their own interpretations of love and infuse the context of their time ...

"Our life is frittered away by detail." As individuals, we center much of our consciousness on the materialistic aspects of life which renders us blind to its more salient features. We need to live in a simplified manner in order to perceive all that living has to offer. Thoreau contemplated the theory that we require nature and being near it within his works. The essays from Walden reflect the ideas of Transcendentalism in the way that they put emphasis on spiritual development and ...

Self-discovery is defined as “the act or process of achieving self-knowledge”(Merion Webster). Every story has a beginning and an end, but in between, the characters all have different types of experiences. From an experience, a character often comes to a realization/revelation about their journey/ life. These revelations can influence the characters thoughts, actions, and beliefs or in other words, they can change the character into a completely different person. In the book’s The Great ...

Subjective certainty is different in that it is based on the size of the inductive gap relative to all information gained by the system at a given point. Subjective certainty is sufficient for most pragmatic applications. Particular sense data are information, not truths, because they form no relations on their own. Rationalist philosophers believed that it is possible to uncover truths about the world by way of reason and reflection only. Descartes who thought he could arrive at philosophical ...

Nations as a concept run on ideologies. Capitalism vs Socialism, Communism vs Democracy and much more. One such unnoticed comparison is the Idealism vs Realism debate, which influences several policies, but is not given much importance. It may seem convenient to place idealism and realism in the context of international relations in a simple optimism v/s realism binary. However, doing so is reductionist as it is much more than that. To understand these ideologies we need to not look at them as ...