"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."



sagacious beast. i have always admired emerson from afar. snippets of his writings have sunk to me and i've read them, processed them and sometimes shared them with others. and now i have discovered the rest of his writings and the world of the transcendentalists. but jon you say, are you not an accredited philosophy major? complete with infinite knowledge of all things philosophical? surely you've touched upon transcendentalism in some of your classes. to those people i say "look, do i ask you econ majors about supply and demand when we wait in line at the drive through? no." i don't know shit okay? actually, i don't really contest the infinite knowledge part, although that might seem contradictory. but the point is, i am a philosophy major on paper only. and remember that i studied to regurgitate, i did not study to soak.



but now in my own spare time, i'm ready to soak. this is what happens with most of my philosophy books: i read them only once to get the highest grade possible in the shortest time possible (hello Cs and Ds, welcome welcome, make yourself comfortable) and then keep everything for afterwards knowing full well that i will somehow, someway, somewhere down the line, need them again. whoever said foresight was not in my bag of tricks was lying. anyway. on to transcendentalism. what i am about to say is gleaned from a very very once over of the ideas behind transcendentalism so as i read more, i could gain a better understanding. or i could just read more, fall asleep, and miss the final i already failed three years ago. either way.



transcendentalism is really tricky to spell by the way. it's taking a herculean effort to make sure i'm spelling it right.



"asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition." that is the dictionary definition of transcendentalism. the important word for me here is "intuition." we often hear the phrase "i have a woman's intuition" or the more honest but less impressive "i have a retard's intuition." in my simple world i have always associated intuition with spiderman's spider sense -- if i have to tell you what a spider sense is, we are not having this conversation. intuition should be something that sets your mind a-tingling and leads you to do the right thing. this sounds like emotion to an extent but there is a big difference. i am a big critic of emotion but i try to trust intuition. intuition is not emotion and it should lead you to safer planes without the benefit of actual documented experience. emotions can lead you every which way, sometimes good, sometimes bad. boo emotion. still, this faith in intuition is in direct contrast to what i believe since intuition is defined as: the act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition. no rational processes? kill me with a spoon.



the transcendentalists value the intuition above reason (i'm unsure about the validity of my statement). they think that there are some things that you can learn without the benefit of experience first. they believe that ideas can come directly from the mind and not from the senses. these ideas are intuitions. i am not sure if i agree with this idea. however, when i read the ideas stemming from this idea, i agree wholeheartedly with the way emerson thinks. if you follow. so i'm not really in agreeance with the premise, but all the conclusions make sense. which leads me to believe that either my premises are wrong, or their premises are wrong. or that we're both right. seeing as he's an accredited genius and i am barely accredited, i'm willing to open my mind to his side. for now. because there are definitely many times when you just feel like something is right. and what do you attribute that to? experience or spider sense?



and heavens, if we trust intuition, what if we happen to have a misguided or faulty spider sense? then doc oc and sandman might actually kill us. and then we would lose mary jane forever.