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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 7 page research paper that discusses the stance of Henry David Thoreau on slavery and how this stance coincides with this transcendental idealism. The writer argues that examination of this issue in Thoreau's life shows a slow evolution from passive resistance to open admiration for the action taken by violent abolitionists, such as Brown, and within the context of this evolution, Thoreau's stance on slavery was in perfect keeping with his transcendentalism. Bibliography lists 5 sources.
Page Count:
7 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khthosl.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
citing Thoreaus essay, "Civil Disobedience" (Riley, 2005). How then does one reconcile Thoreaus much more virulent views on slavery and his defense of John Brown with his transcendental idealism? Examination
of this issue in Thoreaus life shows a slow evolution from passive resistance to open admiration for the action taken by violent abolitionists, such as Brown, and within the context
of this evolution, Thoreaus stance on slavery was in perfect keeping with his transcendentalism. Thoreaus transcendentalism From the time that he was a student at Harvard, Thoreau perceived that
the United States was beginning the process of breaking free from its intellectual subservience to Europe (Bruno, 2005). He took the philosophy of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, which was
embodied in Emersons work "Self-Reliance," and he used this as his foundation for his own philosophical stance, along with the tenets of transcendentalism (Bruno, 2005). Transcendentalism was an intellectual movement
that "celebrated heightened consciousness, the power of inspiration, and the divinity of the individual," combined with a concern for the environment, abolitionism, and anti-materialism (Bruno, 2005, p. 125). In
his writing, Thoreau frequently advised his readers to retreat to nature in order to forget about "politics," which he viewed as annoying as the "cigar smoke of a man" (Hyde,
2002, p. 125). As this suggests, philosophically, Thoreau carried little for the present and his aspiration was for his writing and perception to shift through the vagaries of
time and place and "stand on unchanging ground" (Hyde, 2002, p. 125). It mattered intensely to Thoreau that Homers description of a snowstorm in Book 12 of the Iliad described
a scene that he recognized as familiar because of winter storm he had endured in his home in Concord, Massachusetts (Hyde, 2002). As this suggests, Thoreau felt that it was
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