Did Transcendentalists believe in following society's rules?
History of the United States (1815–1849)
Did Transcendentalists believe in following society's rules?
Imagine you're at a family dinner, and everyone expects you to conform to traditional expectations. You want to express your own beliefs and values, but you're afraid of going against the norm.
Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau championed self-reliance and intuition over societal norms and religious dogma. They believed in trusting one's inner voice and personal experiences as the source of truth.
Example
At the dinner, instead of agreeing with the family's traditional views, you share your own thoughts and feelings, trusting your intuition.
Remember this
The key insight is that Transcendentalists valued personal intuition and self-reliance over conforming to societal expectations.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related concepts
Milton's Paradise Lost reimagines
Paradoxical hero challenging Heaven's rule
Goethe's concept of Bildung means
Goethe's Bildung: Self-cultivation through experience, central to German humanism
Dialectical materialism
How does our mind evolve to understand the world better?
The Acharnians
Aristophanes' The Acharnians won first place at the Lenaia festival
Whitman's Leaves of Grass celebrates
Can freedom and equality be captured in verse?
The Land (poem)
Did T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land predict Europe's spiritual crisis?
Swipe through 100 ML concepts daily
Open Pocket Polymath