"The Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson -an essay expressing Transcendentalist ideas

Transcendental Knowledge

Transcendental knowledge defines as a prior knowledge; it is considered as a metaknowledge. Immanuel Kant pretended that transcendental argument is new concept of grounding the certainty of philosophy, science, and mathematics.
Kant argued that knowledge is possible; his main questions turned around what conditions make knowledge possible. What must the world be like? And what must the function of our minds be like, if human knowledge is to be possible¹?
Kant pretended transcendental aesthetic among those conditions of knowledge. Here the mind is the main composition which orders sense experience into a spaciotemporal sequence, and transcendental analytic; here the mind imposes classes like substance and reason onto experience. Thus transcendental knowledge allows understanding that the world is a form of series situated in time and place, related to causal relationships through one another.
Transcendental knowledge has a connection with metaphysics which is “the knowledge of nature of reality or being”; the intuitive sense should be present in a different form of knowledge which has distinctive bodies that contain the trappings of professional disciplines it can found in divisions in universities, schemes of libraries, and bookstores.( Blachowicz 09).

1.4.1. Individualism

The term Transcendentalism contains lot of ideas that affected American society in the 19^th century, and one of its fundamental and essential ideas is “individualism”, this term insists that a human being must have his own personality without being under the influence of society, individualism emphasizes that actions and thoughts of a person must be independent. Among transcendentalists that were well known with the context of individualism are Emerson Ralph Waldo with his essay Self-Reliance, and Henry David Thoreau with his essay Resistance to Civil Government. They were considered as individualists; they acted against the social, religious, and cultural influence on individuals, to push them to be aware and deserve to be more important than everything, and to face and to act against government¹.
In 1830’s, many people in New England saw that the religion they adopted from their puritan ancestors had become too strict and impersonal. That’s why Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance comes into the picture, he supported that man should be responsible for his decisions and his personal life and encouraged people to rely on themselves, to be independent and free, he gave them a platform freedom to talk, live, and think. Emerson tried to make changes in society through new ideas, he believed that society prohibits people to express themselves and that their power was neglected, as a result people lost their self-confidence in expressing their own ideas; he stated that:
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (Emerson 31).
Thoreau was a student of Emerson; he was influenced by his way of thinking, they shared the same ideas; especially at the point of individualism. Thoreau adopted the same ideas of Emerson, but he focused more on the government and considered it as an obstacle for the dreamers, because society compels men to behave as machines in order to serve it under its strict orders. Thoreau struggled against government that obliged people to stay on the conformity’s circle. Thoreau’s main goal in his essay Resistance to Civil Government is that citizen must reacts against the unjust authority he stated that:
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong, which I condemn².
Emerson and Thoreau considered that men have the right to do whatever they want and neglect what people think about them, they should be responsible for themselves and do not wait for the protection from the state, Emerson and Thoreau were supported by many thinkers, especially transcendentalists like: Emily Dickinson, Edwin
Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. In addition to political leaders like Martin Luther king Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, their way of thinking influenced not only society, culture, and literature, but also politics in the United States.