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Emerson Discussion Journal
Transcendentalism was a nineteenth-century movement in the Romantic tradition, which held that every individual can reach ultimate truths through nature, spiritual intuition, emotion, and imagination. Transcendentalism emphasized living a simple life and encouraged optimism, self-reliance, and individualism. The Americans who called themselves Transcendentalists were idealists, but in a broader, more practical sense. Like many Americans today, they believed in human perfectibility, and they worked to achieve this goal.
The Transcendental movement was centered in Concord, Massachusetts, the home of its leading exponents, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson, through his lectures and writings, was a primary force behind the flowering of American culture. He helped inspire numerous reform movements aimed to improve public education, end slavery, elevate the status of women, and generally ease rough social conditions of the time. In 1840, Emerson remarked that every man who could read had plans in his pocket for a new community. Thoreau, acting on his Transcendentalist beliefs, lived for two years in a cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts to rediscover the grandeur of a simple life led close to nature. In his book Walden, a journal of his time there, Thoreau encourages his readers to fight conformity, something he did in his own life by refusing to pay state poll taxes (as a protest against the Mexican War and slavery) and by helping those escaping slavery make their way to Canada.
PART 1
Read the excerpt from Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”. Working with your partner, come to a consensus and complete the discussion questions below.
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
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-Don’t have to be a specific religion to be a moral person
-No imitation
-Be confident
-Be individual
-Prefers to live in solitude
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1. Confidence
2. Non-conform
3. Importune
4. Be individual
5. Don’t have to be part of a religion
6. Live in solitude
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Self confident a reliance characteristic
No Imitation, self actualization
The man should lot be limit by something
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1) Society is working together to stop this men from being man.
2) Be your own judge, then
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