How Transcendentalism Works

kind of got into it. Okay. I discovered these guys at age like fourteen and was super into him for a while. Could make headser tails of a lot of the stuff they were talking about, but I just something about it just hit me just right. So I think I caught like the the ethos of it, but not necessarily the intellectual aspect of it. But I was into him big time. They actually um led me away from church. Oh yeah, that's good. I met the train, I met

the Chance and Donallysta. That was it for me in church. I started going to to the woods on Sunday mornings instead. Yeah, I mean, this is one that hits home for me because, as everyone knows, I love being in the woods and I love camping and I love my camp. Um. By the way, we got a bear. Did I see me the picture? No? You go like chained up at your

campground or something. No. I have a trail cam set up, which is emotion activated camera that you just strapped to a tree and hunters use them a lot and stuff. But I got one and pointed it towards my like my camp area. Uh. And we've been calling it crow cam because we've gotten four pictures of crows since I set it up. Uh. And every once in a while, I'll get a picture come through at night the next morning and I'll be really excited because like maybe a

box or a raccoon, never anything. And the other morning I woke up and it gives a little thumbnail, and I saw a little thumbnail. I saw a large creature, and I freaked out to like rush to the app to unto embig in it. And it's a bear, dude, pretty net a little blackie. I'm gonna texted to you right now, just wandering through the camp and there was something about it that just thrilled me to no end to know that I'm sharing the woods with this squeezy

little bear. That's pretty cool. Chunk and He's not gonna attack me. Don't worry people, he is archie. Uh. There's never been a bear fatality in Georgia, and I think only two in the history of the Southeastern United States. Great, that's a cute looks like you could take that bear anyway if you wanted to. Do you see him? Yeah, it's cute bear. Isn't that crazy? I'll looking for a

picnic basket, I guess so. Um, But a long way of saying that I love the woods and so Transcendentalum and transcend Dentalism in college is something that kind of hit home. And then for a little while I was kind of like, but wait a minute, is this just a bunch of who lazy people in a bunch of I hate to say, mental masturbation, but like, what do they actually do? But then this made me feel a lot better about it, because the Transcendentalists led to a

lot of great progressive reforms. Yeah, totally, Yeah, that's definitely phase two of being into transcendentalism is hating the Transcendentalist and like, I think it's really resenting them for who they were and all that. But this brought me back to it for sure as well. I'm a big time friend of Thorows. Now again, I used to think he was just a complete useless waste who just dropped out and probably lived off his parents money or something like that and did what did his own thing. It was

not like that at all. And I think we owe Thorow an episode. Frankly, I think he's a pretty cool dude. Yeah, a lot of myths and legends around Thorow um and real quick before we dive in, I did post that picture on my Instagram at Chuck the podcaster, very nice shout.

That was some good social means promotions. All right, So we're talking about the mid eighteen thirties and this idea that these people came forward with very anti establishment ideas where they basically said, uh, everybody has the light of the divine truth, and we should all be self reliant. We should all look within ourselves define that light, and we should be self reliant in anyway, spiritually self reliant or maybe you want to go out into the woods

and live and be self reliant on yourself. But basically everyone is entitled to freedom in this country or back then supposedly and still the case supposedly, but it led to a lot of great things later on with these progressive movements, but initially and throughout the sort of the heyday of Transcendentalism, it was just a lot of thought in talking about and writing about this, these thoughts. Yeah,

it was a philosophical movement. It was a philosophical movement associated with action and doing things um as much as it was about sitting down and writing things out and figuring out arguments and theories to root these things too. And actually that's where the trans Andelists tripped themselves up is they took something that was very pure and didn't really need any rooting in in in um in theory. It could just be like walking through the woods is good in and of itself. It doesn't need a theory

that explains why it's good in and of itself. And so when they did try to do that, they actually kind of shot themselves in the foot because they couldn't do it. And that's one reason why you know, you start to hate the Transcendentalists after you really start liking them, because a lot of it is just kind of WHOEI when they tried to explain it, because it didn't need explaining, I saw somebody describe it that they it didn't need theory anymore than an airplane needs wires to hold it up.

And yet they they tried that because I think they wanted to explain it and they wanted to be taken seriously. Emerson definitely considered himself a philosopher. Whether he was or not, I think a lot of people would consider him a philosopher. But when they tried to ground it in philosophy, it kind of got screwed up, like trying to nail jello

to the wall or something like that. Uh. It has been called the first sort of distinctive American philosophy, like truly American philosophy, and it was influenced by a lot of things though, um like kind of any movement, and this one starts out with the Puritans who came over, who said that, you know, they were very much individualists, and it's sort of that root of individualism that helped

sort of inform the early Transcendentalists. Thoughts, Yeah, the Puritans took I guess they we actually kind of talked a

little bit about it that Protestant work ethic. They also brought within the idea of self reliance of of like you know, Um being able to make your own way in the world, and it took it took shape for them in the form of religion, where there was this idea that you know, if you were a good Christian and studied your Bible, you know, religiously, um, you could be as close to God as as if you were you know, some Catholic in in Italy who you know, had to go through a priest and a cardinal and

a bishop in the pope to get to God. That that's not how it worked. The individual was able to connect with God as well. And that was, you know, a big difference in puritan Um thought. And that was one of the big things that that grew out of it when they arrived here in America was the idea of self reliance in the individual and and that very much Um influenced the Transcendentalists. Yeah, European Romanticism certainly played

a part two they were. That was sort of the first emo movement where feelings, uh, there were feelings mattered, basically, an emotion mattered. It wasn't all about reason and order

like it was in the Enlightenment. And things really took a turn after the Paris Peace Treaty of eighteen fifteen, because previous to that, during the American Revolution and the War of eighteen twelve, the Napoleonic Wars, you couldn't really go to America, or I'm sorry, Americans really couldn't go to Europe, and didn't even have a lot of great

access to the literature of Europe. But after that Paris Treaty in eighteen fifteen, the travel floodgates opened and a lot of um, sort of scholarly literary types went over to Europe and started studying Gerta and Byron and Shelley and Wordsworth, and it became, um, it was like lighting a fire basically, yeah, which I mean like they missed out on a you know, the beginning of Romanticism, which was a big response to like the French Revolution, which

was in a larger way of response to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment changed everything. You know, we had a really good episode about that, if I do say so ourselves, um, but it placed an emphasis on reason and rationality and facts.

And then the French Revolution came along and the people took control and they weren't able to uphold the ideas or the ideals of the of the um, the enlightenment of things like free speech and you know, freedom of thought, and instead turned into like bloody fascists who killed forty

people in a year or two um. And so that that led to this recoiling being repulsed by the idea of just cold rationalism and an adherence to facts, and instead it turned into that romanticism that basically said, you know, imagination, beauty, goodness, these are the important things. These are the true things that are there. Are there the eternal truths of the

universe that bring you to godliness. Forget facts. Facts are stupid. Basically, Yeah, I find myself the more we've done the show, become really interested in, like what causes movements to happen, whether it's uh, a philosophical movement or or you know, knows to the grindstone, you know, get out and do something movement. I just think it's really interesting because it's it's about a bunch of like minded people coming together in a very specific time and place, or or it could fall

apart very easily. And in the mid eighteen thirties in Boston, Massachusetts, a minister named George Ripley got some people together who were thinking along the same lines as him, who are inspired by these same literary grates of Europe and the Romantics, and UH formed the Transcendental Club and they eventually started publishing a three time annually literary paper called The Dial. I think they had about three hundred subscribers at its peak.

It costs three dollars and they published it in four volumes for about four years, and they said poetry and prose and literary and music criticism, and it was, you know, it was a literary magazine like we think about today,

but it was happening way back then in Boston. Yeah, and it kind of UM was focused on beauty and imagination UM and transcendental ideals, which was basically that that that if you had imagination, that that was the thing that kind of brought you to UM, to like a communion with the universe or God, the divine, whatever, whatever higher experience you were looking for, it was going to be through imagination. And one of the ways I saw it Puit Chuck was not that they didn't like facts.

They were kind of slaves to facts, because the fact was, there's there's badness in the in the world, there's badness in the universe, and they just couldn't account for that that, like, they just couldn't make heads or tails of it um because they were so focused on good. But they they preferred imagination over effects because they considered imagination, the imagination

of the individual, to be more powerful than facts. Like facts were that Plato died a couple of thousand years ago and you will never get to meet him because you're separated by time and space. Imagination is that you can go wrestle, have a tickle fight in a meadow with Plato if you want, and that can make you happy. You can go experience that if your imagination is is

fine tuned enough. And then doing that that kind of starts to make you question reality, like just how real or unreal was that tickle fight you just had with Plato? And your imagination is what took you to overcome those facts.

So to them, society was becoming increasingly industrialized and preoccupied with money and economy and stuff like that, and it was losing its way, it was losing its imagination, and this was a big response to that, and that was a huge ideal of the transcendentalist that it was the imagination of the individual that could make you a happier person, more tuned to beauty and goodness, and that if you were off doing that, you're going to connect more fully

with other people. And if enough people did that, then you would have a much better society. That was ultimately the first goal of Transcendentalism, the earliest, um kind of goal of the movement was that. That's right and little known fact, Plato's tickle spot was his thigh inner thigh, upper inner thigh. It was a thigh like a like a horse eating corn. Yep, exactly, there's a birthmark there to guide the way. Even. All right, let's take a break.

Then we'll talk a little bit about Walden Pond and Thoraux and whether or not he was who we think he was. Right after this, all right, Henry David Thurreau one of the one of the all stars of the Transcendentalist movement. Enthusiast. He's uh, he was a chin beard. He was one of these guys. He went to Waldon, to Walden to live deliberately, went to the woods to live deliberately, as he said, and built a cottage on Walden Pond near Conquered Mass for a couple of years.

And this is one of those where if you have someone who doesn't like Thorow, they will be very quick to point out a lot of things, like, you know, he was only a half a mile from the main road, and he went into town all the time, and he was less than two miles from his main house, and he ate dinner Emerson's all the time, and his mother and his ster would bring him baked goods and donuts

every weekend. And those are all true things. So I think it bears saying that over the years, the idea that Thorow was this luddite who just went to live completely by his own resources, all alone in the woods like the Great History Channel uh survival competition show. Uh. And that is not true. And I don't think he

ever purported that to be true. He wrote about the interesting aspects of being out there alone and his thoughts and his books, and I think people got that confused and just said, oh, well, that's all he did out there, and he never saw people. He had parties, and there were people everywhere. He walked into town just about every day. That wasn't the whole point of it all was that he was going to go be self reliant and as

a survivalist or anti social. He wasn't like turning his back on society now and he liked some technologies too. So throw is misunderstood. And think not because of his own hand and writings. I think because people have romanticized this idea of this like hermit basically, and this is not the case. Yeah, no, I mean the facts are this. He did build himself a one room house on some of Emerson's property right alongside on the shores of Walden

pond Um. He spent his time writing UM, reading everything from the Greek philosophers to um religious texts, whatever he could get his hands on UM. And then more than anything, walking in the woods, like spending his time out in nature UM and just enjoying it on its face, like finding the beauty in nature and seeing absolutely everywhere and letting it like increase the his spirit and and lift his spirits. And that that's all he wanted to do

in life. And then when he needed money, he would go work as a surveyor or maybe make some pencils in his family's pencil factory. Apparently they made the finest in the country at the time UM. And then he would make that money and then go back and go go live by doing what he wanted to do. It wasn't necessarily to tell people how to live. That's how he wanted to live. And he went and did it.

And however you feel about thorow Man, I mean, like just the fact that he did that, how many people do that, you know, and do it not because the CIA's after them or the government's listening in on their affairs or trying to keep them off of the pastor land. If this guy did it for his own purposes. He wanted to like go live a life that he found fulfilling like that, and he went and did it. And

it's hats off to anybody who does that. Yeah, And if you're I don't know, if you're maybe a little bit younger as a listener, and you think, well, that didn't sound that radical and there are plenty people who do that kind of thing today, it's true, but that's not how worked in eighteen forty five. Like, if you were a grown, n able bodied man, you like you were expected to have a job and contribute to society and work. You didn't spend time reading and writing and

taking walks in the woods for pleasure. It just that's just not how things were back then. So it was a very radical thing back then to do. Um. It was also very radical to say, you know what, I don't want to pay my taxes because you enslave people here in the United States and we're in a very uh awful war against Mexico, and so you know what, I'm not gonna fund this stuff anymore with my what little money I make. So you can stick that in

your pipe and smoke at u S government. They came after him, they arrested him, He spent a night in jail. Someone paid off his debt. Even who that was, No, he still didn't he never knew it was a real and anonymous relative, and he was not very happy about that at all, right, because he didn't want to like

just have someone pay it. That was the whole point, right, Yeah, he and they forced him out of jail the next day and he was like, no, like, I'm trying, I'm I'm trying to do something here and it didn't work, right. But his very famous essay Civil Disobedience kind of grew from this experience, and he has a really great quote here that kind of hits home to me. Uh in anyone who thinks they might can change things or can't.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step towards obtaining it. Again, just not necessarily a blueprint for uh An action, although there was plenty of action later, but just sort of a thought like something to ponder. Yeah, and on on that poll tax um, I think it was a head tax um, which yeah, and he did. He hadn't paid it for years. Um he was inspired by another transcendentalist, Amos Alcott, Louis and May's father, who

was a big Transcendentalist thinker. Um, and he hadn't paid poll taxes for several years because the slave as well. But then with the Mexican American War of I think eighteen thirty six, when um Thureau started organizing protests against it and calling for other people to not pay their text, that's when he was finally arrested, sought out and arrested. Um and I was reading a little bit about that

war and why he and others protested against it. It was apparently an extraordinarily unjust and unprovoked war where a lot of American volunteers went down and committed war crimes and atrocities against Mexican civilians for basically basically unprovoked um And there was a lot of reason for people to oppose it, But that didn't mean that there was a lot of people opposing it. It's just that you can really kind of look back historically and and find yourself

siding with the people who protested against that war. But at the time it was pretty radical too to protest against It was a fairly popular war until the press started reporting from the front lines and people started finding out what was going on down there. Like the people in America were whipped up into like this anti Mexican fervor at the time, and we invaded Mexico, you know, at the behest of the public. So to stand in the way of that was a it was a very

brave thing to do. And that's pretty typical of what Thorow and the Transcendentalists were into. They would look at something and say, this is morally wrong, this is not okay. I'm going to stand up against it. Maybe it'll inspire other people are not to do that, but at the very least I will have done what I think is moral. And I found another quote Chuck from civil disobedience. I thought kind of got that point across really well too.

It said that um uh Thorreau believed it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any even the most enormous wrong. He may still properly have other concerns to engage him, but it is his duty at least to wash his hands of it and not give it practically his support. So in that sense, he was like, I'm at the very least not gonna pay taxes to support this. If I I might not be able to keep the U S out of the war, but I'm not going to

give you money to go fight that war. I don't want to pay Texas anymore either, you know. I mean, it goes to a lot of fun, savory stuff. So there you go. If only were that easy, maybe some benefactor would pay my fine, right right, But then that's supposed to take you off because that means that they didn't get your point. Now, they'd be fun with me,

all right. So I guess we should talk a little bit about some of the activism that sprung from this movement, because all these cool hippie dippie philosophical thoughts and usings are great, but action is what is really interesting to me. And um, that's something like again, that's something that I don't think we talked a lot about in college. It was more just sort of an English class, right, yes,

type of thing. They should not just be taught in English class or even just philosophy class, like they should be taught in cystrics in history. Yeah, it's I felt like that that really does them in disservice. And I never put my finger on until you just said that. So thank you, thank you. I'm gonna change the educational system. And that's where they started to The Transcendentalists knew that education was the key. They thought it should be free.

They thought anyone should be able to go any race, any creed, that women. It was very radical. A lot of them were teachers, and quite a few of them even founded their own, um like really forward thinking progressive schools, I think, including uh Peabody and Thorough and Bronson Alcott. Yeah, um, I think that was Amos, good old Amos Alcott was that his first name or something. I think Bronson that was his nickname because he was so tough. Hey give

me a Bunsen. So, um, yeah, they went after like they identified education as most social movements do, is like a key and and they definitely went after that. But I think also, like you said, it was in part because that was their background. They saw, you know, they had seen firsthand what needed, how how much improving it needed. And one of the things, Chuck, is like what you just described that what they thought the education system would be,

you know, pretty closely resembles what we have today. And when you see this stuff and you just take for granted with the trans and dentists for four, it really gets across like how successful they were over the course of a couple of centuries because these were the first people who were agitating for this stuff in America. You know, they were the first ones just to kind of wake up and say, wait, wait, wait, a lot of this stuff is going wrong. This could be better this way,

this could be better that way. And they ultimately, far past the times when they died, were successful in that. I think that's a great time for a break. You set us up nicely, Thank you, Thank you. All right, we'll talk about more activism right after this. M So one of the one of the big ones that the Transcendentalists were involved in from the outset was abolition of slavery.

They was fervent uh anti slave activists and not just like writing lectures and sermons and letters and um, you know, speaking out against slavery and against is the eighteen thirties, maybe the eighteen forties. This is not like there were a lot of people who are still totally cool with slavery in the United States at the time, and these were some of the first people speaking out about it.

But these people also put their money where their mouths were in A lot of including Threaux, who was if if you were a whole home about throw before um was a personally a conductor on the underground railroad. That's right. He got in there, got his hands dirty. A lot

of the anti enslavement movement were women of the Transcendentalist movement. Um. One of the rock stars of the Transcendentalist movement was a woman named Margaret Fuller who um she was never apparently super comfortable being sort of tagged as a Transcendentalist. She hung out in that crowd, but she was not religious. She was by all accounts probably agnostic, maybe even atheists, sort of danced on the fringes of the Unitarian Church. But um, religion, it was not a part of her

sort of mindset. So that's where she kind of differed some in transcend from the standard transcendentalist. But she was for a little while, I think for two of the three years she was the editor two of the four years the Dial, big friend of Emerson. Um. She wrote a book in eighteen forty five called Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and it was really one of the first sort of proto feminists Tombs and Um. She was way ahead of her time. She went to women's prisons to

interview them. She was a literary critic and an editor and a writer, and advocated for women to have not just jobs, but like any job. She's like, go out and be a ship captain if you want to. Um. Really really forward thinking woman was Margaret Fuller. Yeah. She started i think at age twenty nine the these things called the Conversations, which was a series of discussions and talks that were super feminist, which was again really radical

at the time because we're talking the eighteen thirties. And Um. She she like the Row. She actually died young. She died at age forty, and so we remember Margaret. Yes, it was astounding. So Margaret Fuller went to Italy to become part of the Italian revolution. Right, this is how she spent her last couple of years. The revolution fell. It wasn't successful, um, but she fell in love with a younger revolutionary, had a child, and they sailed back

to America. Right. And then, yes, almost almost all the way back to America, they had a shipwreck I think about fifty yards from shore and died. Um. Some people weren't even like. Apparently the rescue attempt, even though they were so close to shore, was just um, not strong. I don't know why. I'd like to look a little bit more into it, but apparently Thureau grabbed Emmerson and they were like, let's you know, I don't know how much longer it was after the shipwreck, but let's go

try and find her at least body. And I'm not sure if they ever recovered her, but very tragic de Yeah, she, her her son, and her husband all drowned. Um, I know. And and again she was aged forty. So it's pretty astounding and remarkable that we remember her because her productive years were just an eleven year period from age twenty nine to age forty. But it just goes to show you what a powerhouse she was. I mean she went

and fought in the Italian Revolution. That's it. That's just super b. A yeah, And it seemed like any job that she had, like, she just did great. Like Emerson, when The Dial was founded, he that was the first person he thought of. He was like, well, I need to go get Fuller on this because she's a crack writer and editor. And uh, I think she was supposed to make like two dollars a year doing that, but never got paid a dime. Um. The Dial, like you know, was not a big money maker. I don't think they

even paid the contributor. So it didn't last that long, but very forward thinking literary magazine and Margaret Fuller was a big reason why it happened to begin with. UM. So so obviously feminism and women suffrage and equal rights for women UM were huge parts of the Transcendental movement, as was abolition UM. And I looked to see like

how Transcendentalism ended UM, and apparently it was. It was like a um No, it was like a sparkler, like it burned really bright for a very short amount of time. So like the whole transcendel movement lasted maybe to the eighteen fifties. One of the big things that that that took it down was, you know, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Threau too, of the really big central figures of the whole thing died fairly young. Th Road died of

tuberculosis in his early forties. Um uh. Emerson remained, but um again, there was a there was a big problem in like getting across what the Transcendentalists were all about, because they would get tripped up in theory and all that stuff. And then also I saw that the the scientific method started to gain ground around the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties, and people turned their attention back to logic and reason and the Enlightenment ideals, um, which kind of

took them away from that romanticism of the transidentalysts. Yeah, and you know, I think my take away from this now re studying it all these years later, is like it it's a philosophy that doesn't have to go away completely. And I think a lot of people would argue that it's still very robust and in a lot of ways is just sort of morphed and taken on different forms. But you can have transcendentalist feelings and philosophies and also believe in science, and I don't think those things have

to be separated out. So while it did burn bright and die out, I think clearly the kids of the nineties, sixties and seventies were inspired by these people. Uh, and people like you and I and college kids still today that read this stuff for the first time. I think everyone can take a little bit of that with them if they want or not. But it's certainly not like outdated. I don't think, oh it's not, no, for sure. I

think that spirit still continues on today for sure. And people anybody who cares about social justice, environmental justice, um, those are all very much transcendental ideals. And anybody who like stops and you know, appreciates, you know, the way sunlight is filtering on a flower or something like that. You're being a transcendentalist right there. It's really easy to

over over explain. It's really easy to to um also just kind of be whatever that transcendentalist ideal was, but that that was it in nutshell, just appreciating the beauty in the world so much that you basically dedicate your life too to appreciating it and not taking it for grained,

you know. Yeah, And every time I go to the family camp and I have that cooler full of beer and my mini bike and my solar power lighting up those beautiful string lights through the woods, and I got my bluetooth speaker, playing some fleet Foxes and burning that fire from that firewood that was cut by the nice gentleman who delivers it down there and stacks it for me. I really find myself at one with nature. Very nice. You're a transfer dentalist, cut and dried like camping. Let's

just leave it at that. I like glamping. Yeah, it's it's almost glamping. Yeah, it sounds like it. You have me a bluetooth. You're still sleeping in a tent on the ground though. That's fine, that's fine. Um, you got anything else? I got nothing else. So look for a thorough episode someday, and in the meantime, go out and appreciate the beauty in the world. And since I said appreciate the beauty in the world, it's time for listener mail.

I'm gonna call this chickens an ancient rome. Remember we talked about that, which one was that that there weren't chickens anycient superstition, ancient superstitions, right, So this is and we heard from a few people about this, people that know a lot more about ancient room than we do. Romans from Mike h Yeah, exactly, Mike Traina. Hey, guys, my wife Ketura is a big fan of your podcast, and she was listening earlier today and asked me about this.

My degrees are both in Greek and Latin language and culture. Chickens were relatively rare in ancient Rome, although they did exist. Chicken was a delicacy that only aristocrats would eat, and even then only on rare occasions. The peasantry would rarely eat meat at all, except on festival days. Chickens were, however, prize for their use in divination, like we talked about with the wishbones, and we're often carried with armies into battle so that the augurs could attempt to determine the

auspices of a coming conflict. I recommend the book Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome Atkins and Atkins. The edition I have is Oxford University Press has all sorts of great info about daily life as an average Roman citizen. That sounds like a cool book. It does. I can't read, wait to read the chapter on chickens. Yeah, that's from Mike. Thanks a lot, Mike. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear, or the kind of thing I was hoping to hear when I asked for your help, So thank

you for hearing me. Um. I also blasted you with the E S P plea for requests, so maybe that's where you really were prompted to respond. Who knows. I wonder if that's an audiobook. I'd like to listen to that one. What's it called Chickens in Rome? Yeah, Mike, No, it's Handbook to Life in Ancient Room. Very nice. Uh well, and it was Mike Wup wrote in right, that was Mike. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot to Mike, and thank you to your s O for telling you that we needed your help.

And thank you to everybody out there listening in podcast land. If you want to get in touch with this, you can send us an email, wrap it up spending on the bottom Roman style and send it off to stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Heart Radio, o app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm