Transcendentalist Philosophy

[Commander-K25]

Interested in transcendentalist philosophy? Do Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau makes sense? Then post quotes, essays, poetry and discussions here. Transcendentalism is as relevant today as it was over 150 years ago. We still face many of the same issues only in different forms.

Here are some good quotes:

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Work is victory.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is only when we forget our learning, do we begin to know.
-Henry David Thoreau

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
-Henry David Thoreau

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
-Henry David Thoreau

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
-Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
-Henry David Thoreau

Still we live meanly, like ants... Our life is fritted away by detail... Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand... simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
-Henry David Thoreau

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We are accustomed to say that the truth makes men free. It does nothing of the kind. It is the knowledge of the truth that creates freedom. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
-Ernest H. Cherrington

People need a freedom seldom mentioned. Freedom from intrusion. We need a little privacy quite as much as we need Vitamins, exercise, praise and understanding.
-Phylis Mcginley

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
-Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator, 1890 (last words)

The proverb warns that "you should not bite the hand that feeds you." but maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding your self.
-Thomas Szasz

Politicians are the same every where. They promise to build a bridge even when there's no river.
-Nikita Khrushchev

Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
-George Bernard Shaw

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That's the essence of inhumanity.
-George Bernard Shaw

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
-Elie Wiesel.

If I had three hundred men who feared nothing but God, hated nothing but sin, and were determined to know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, I would set the world on fire.
-John Wesley

[G-Hawk]

Well, in order for Trancendentalism to be valid, it has to mean that each and every one of us are inherently good inside....

...yeah, right.

[Venom-Xavier]

lol, they cool

[Commander-K25]

At 2/2/02 02:04 AM, G-Hawk wrote: Well, in order for Trancendentalism to be valid, it has to mean that each and every one of us are inherently good inside....

...yeah, right.

Not necessarily good but simply that there is essential truth within oneself that one must embrace.

"I wanted...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[m0rc]

"You like to quote people alot dont you?"
-Me

At 2/2/02 02:44 AM, Pungee wrote:
"You like to quote people alot dont you?"
-Me

Heh. This stuff confuses me.

[Commander-K25]

At 2/2/02 02:44 AM, Pungee wrote:
"You like to quote people alot dont you?"
-Me

Not necessarily.

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

[Lycanthropy]

At 2/2/02 02:04 AM, G-Hawk wrote: Well, in order for Trancendentalism to be valid, it has to mean that each and every one of us are inherently good inside....







...yeah, right.

Unfortunately you are very correct. Most people think in a selfish manner. Finding someone who is inherently good is hard to find much less a group.

[EntropicOrder]

Someone please explain transcendentalism to me, as I am not familiar with the term, although I love philosophy.

If it assumes that there is inherent good in all people, then I wouldn't really go with it because I don't believe in right and wrong. We are capable of all things human, and none of these are evil or riteous to anything other than humans.

[Commander-K25]

At 2/2/02 02:59 AM, EntropicOrder wrote: Someone please explain transcendentalism to me, as I am not familiar with the term, although I love philosophy.

If it assumes that there is inherent good in all people, then I wouldn't really go with it because I don't believe in right and wrong. We are capable of all things human, and none of these are evil or riteous to anything other than humans.

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The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough.

German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the religious and philosophical thinking about reason and religion.

This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion.

The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?

Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in the West, translated, and published so that they were more widely available. The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.

And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

(from www.transcendentalism.com )
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Transcendentalism doesn't assume that all people are good, even inherently. It is a search for truth and meaning that states that the foremost aspect of the truth begins within yourself. Look into yourself for your own answers and inspiration rather than take them second hand from somebody else. That is what Emerson meant when he wrote of self-reliance in his famous essay.

[EntropicOrder]

At 2/2/02 03:15 AM, Commander-K25 wrote: Look into yourself for your own answers and inspiration rather than take them second hand from somebody else..

Ok, I believe that we should know ourselves, because we are the only thing we can truly control in this world. Also, I think there is a universal truth, but the only relevant truth is the one we know ourselves. This is because planets don't think about what they do, they just exist. We do think about what we do though, so it "matters" to us.

I don't, however, think we each have some magical truth within us that is a small revelation of the universal truth. I think it is highly possible, and widely incidental that people trick themselves into believing something that is not real or true at all. It's called psychosomatics, mind over body.

Maybe I don't fully understand this, but I don't think you have to think outside of reason to find any truth that is out there. Emotions are not outside the realm of reason, btw.