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Home , New England, The Transcendentalist

AMERICAN

1: a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality 2: a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and transcendental over the material and empirical 3: the quality or state of being transcendental; especially : visionary

Dictionary

American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian church, extending the views of on an indwelling God and the significance of

intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism holding to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford Companion to 770). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.

Overview

Transcendentalists wanted to rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and supernatural light," imparted immediately to the soul by the spirit of God.

Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986) "Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence" (46).

Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism (1842) "That belief we term Transcendentalism which maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate

Definitions inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world. . . ." , Nature (1836) "Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (996). See also Emerson's essay "The Transcendentalist."(1842)

Reaction against New England Reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism

Reaction against Lockean empiricism Emerging ideal of American Emphasis on feeling; divinity and creative impulse in nature Sources The Romantic movement, especially Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the English romantics Eastern philosophy

Transcendentalism affirmed Kant's principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses. According to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, "Kant had confined the expression 'transcendental knowledge' to the

wledge cognizance of those forms and categories--such as space, time, quantity, causality-which, in his view, are imposed on by the constitution of all human minds; he regarded these aspects as the universal conditions of sense-experience. Emerson and others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way whose validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other truths that

Intuitive Kno Intuitive transcend the limits of human sense-experience" (216).

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