Who was Ralph Waldo Emerson and what was/is transcendentalism?
The transcendentalists were literary rebels. The term Transcendentalism was derived from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who called “all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects.” The Transcendentalists as most typically see them were a generation of well-educated people who lived in the decades just before the American Civil War and the national division; that their movement both reflected and helped to create. They were some of the first American advocates of social change (i.e. Challenging slavery, the current scriptural philosophies, old and new testament etc.). 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.” – Each author, poet, orator of the transcendentalism movement was unique in thought, in the same way the beat authors of
