American Transcendentalism, Or “New England & Eighteen-Hundred
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Michael Draxlbauer (Inst. f. Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Wien) American Transcendentalism, or “New England & Eighteen-hundred-forty-dom” 1) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), from “The Transcendentalist” (1841): “It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth. They had as lief hear that their friend was dead as that he was a Transcendentalist …” 2) some exemplary definitions, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 1989): “Transcendental” was, in the 17th century, usually “synonymous with metaphysical, something beyond experience (and thus, implicitly, something beyond explicability)”, in the philosophy of Kant it meant “Not derived from experience, but concerned with the presupposition of experience; pertaining to the general theory of the nature of experience or knowledge, a priori”, and the term was later “Applied to the movement of thought in New England of which Emerson was the principal figure”. “It is well known”, Emerson said in 1841, “that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg”. Accordingly, “Transcendentalism” is defined as Kant’s philosophical system, “also, the idealism of Schelling”, and as “The religio-philosophical teaching of the New England school of thought represented by Emerson and others”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 called the use of the term “for a movement of thought which was prominent in the New England states from . 1830 to 1850” “pseudo-philosophic”: “Its use originated in the Transcendental Club (1836) founded by Emerson, Frederic Henry Hedge, and others” [this is incorrect]. “Transcendentalism” is also broadly defined as “that which is extravagant, vague, or visionary in philosophy or language”. Thus Thackeray, in his review of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837), wrote that the book “teems with sound, hearty philosophy (besides certain transcendentalisms which we do not pretend to understand)”. 3) Theodore Parker, from “Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man”(1865): “To my religious eye, even if uncultivated by science, the world is the theatre of God’s presence. I feel the father. I see the beauty of His thought in the morning red, in the mists that fill up the valleys, in the corn which waves in the summer wind, ... in the stars which look down on the mists of the valley, on fields that wave with corn . I see the moon, filling her horns with loveliness, pouring out such a tide of beauty as makes the farmer’s barn seem almost a palace of enchantment – the thought of God, which is radiating its silver sheen over all the world, and changing it to a wondrous beauty.” 4) Emerson, from “An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society”, August 31, 1837 (the title was changed to ”The American Scholar” in 1849): “Mr President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, - free and brave . .The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. The world is nothing, the man is all. it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy?” 5) Emerson, from “The Chardon Street Convention”, written for The Dial III (July 1842): “Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers [Dunkards, German Baptists], Muggletonians, Come- outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, men of every shade of opinion from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only.” 6) Charles Dickens, from American Notes (1842): “The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption. Out of the rottenness of these things there has sprung up in Boston a set of philosophers known as the Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.” 7) George Ripley, from his farewell sermon, March 28, 1841: “I cannot behold the degradation, the ignorance, the poverty, the vice, the ruin of the soul, which is everywhere displayed in the very bosom of the Christian society in our city, while men idly look on, without a shudder. I cannot witness the glaring inequalities of condition, the hollow pretensions of pride, the scornful apathy with which many urge the prostitution of man, the burning zeal with which they run the race of selfish competition, with no thought for the elevation of their brethren, without the sad conviction that the spirit of Christ has wellnigh disappeared from our churches, and that a fearful doom awaits us.” 8) from letter from Ripley to Emerson, November 9, 1840: “Our objects are to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest moral freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.” 9) Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), journal entry of April 9, 1841: “The true reform can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors. It calls no convention. I can do two thirds the reform of the world myself . When an individual takes a sincere step, then all the gods attend, and his single deed is sweet.” 10) Thoreau, journal entry of March 5, 1853: Now, though I could state to a select few that department of human inquiry which engages me, and should be rejoiced at an opportunity to do so, I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing-stock of the scientific community to describe or to attempt to describe to them that branch of science which especially interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. The fact is that I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. Now I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.” .