Emerson

1. Ralph Waldo
Emerson
If You Have No Idea What He
Means, You’re Doing It Right.

2. Tenets of
Transcendentalism
Get Ready. It’s Going to Get Weird.

3. The Individual
– Is important
– Has free will
– Is inherently good
– Is born with a conscience, a deep
morality, and intuition

4. The Basic Truth
– Existence and human kind’s place in the universe lie beyond the knowledge we
obtain from our senses
– INTUITION is the tool we must use to transcend sensory knowledge and
perceive these basic truths

5. God & Stuff
– Within each individual is a genius that is
connected to God
– God is considered to be the universal
soul (the Over-Soul), present through
Nature
– God is everywhere
– We are divine; God is within us and we
are God
– To find our genius and God, go to Nature
– In Nature, we are self-reliant and
uncorrupted

6. BUT THEN…
– Society & conformity corrupt (we
don’t need laws!)
– Materialism is worthless and
unhealthy
– Technology only causes more
problems and ends up running us
– Focus on the here and now

7. The Hard Stuff
(Isn’t this all hard?)

8. Intuition
– What is it?
– a thing that one knows or
considers likely from
instinctive feeling rather
than conscious reasoning.
– All people are inherently
good – your individual
intuitive response will be
the right thing to do.

9. The Transparent Eyeball
Standing on the bare ground, — my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite spaces, — all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eye-
ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents
of the Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or particle of God.

10. The Over-Soul

11. Conversations

12. How Would the Puritans React?

13. How Would a
Rationalist/Enlightenmentist Respond?

14. How would Emerson React?

15. WWES? (What Would Emerson
Say?)

16. WWES? (What Would Emerson
Say?)