Literature
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement in the 19th century that emphasized the inherent goodness of people and nature, as well as the importance of self-reliance and individual intuition. It rejected traditional religious and societal norms, advocating for a spiritual connection with the natural world and the pursuit of personal truth. Key figures associated with Transcendentalism include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
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11 Key excerpts on "Transcendentalism"
eBook - PDFCross-Cultural Affinities
Emersonian Transcendentalism and Senghorian Negritude
- Manyaka Toko Djockoua(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
131 5 Transcendentalism, Negritude and Literature This chapter will have an insight into both writers’ literary and cultural tenets. It will study the second set of essays which includes Emerson’s “Literary Ethics,” “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” “Literature,” “Culture,” “The American Scholar,” “The Young American,” “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” “Art,” “Goethe; or, the Writ- er,” “New Poetry,” “The Poet,” and “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” as well as Senghor’s “L’Afrique s’interroge: subir ou choisir?,” “La littérature africaine d’expression fran- çaise,” “Le problème de la culture,” “Le message de Goethe aux nègres-nouveaux,” “L’esthétique négro-africaine,” “La poésie négro-américaine,” “Lamine Niang, poète de la négritude,” and “Stierlin ou le poète-prophète.” Transcendentalist and Negritudinist Cultural and Literary Ethics More than philosophical and religious, Transcendentalism is a literary move- ment whose enduring impact is perceptible in present day literary circles. This contention is coeval with Buell’s argument, “I would argue, however, that the spirit of the Transcendentalist movement is best understood by taking a literary approach toward what the Transcendentalists had to say about the issues which preoccupied them, because their way of looking at those issues is markedly po- etic rather than analytical and because they attached great value to creativity and self-expression.” 327 Transcendentalist writers focused more on imagination and its role in literary creativity. To the logic and analytical approach of the philosopher and scientists, they opposed imagination. Buell’s remark about Transcendentalism is similar to that which Michel Hausser has made about Negritude, “The abysmal riches of Negritude figure in its eagerness for a poetic expression.
eBook - PDF- John P. Miller(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
Yet, governments and world leaders refuse to seriously address the problem. In contrast to the current vision schooling, the Transcendentalists offer an inspiring vision of education that focuses on wholeness and wisdom. Its aim, as Emerson states, is to produce “great-hearted” individuals. It does not deny the spiritual and provides a language and approach to spirituality that is inclusive. WHAT WAS Transcendentalism? Most of the people who are identified with the word Transcendentalism did not use this word much or refer to themselves as part of a movement. They tended to be very individualistic and not oriented to group endeavors. Still Emerson did write an essay on Transcendentalism and the name stuck. A Trancendental Education 5 The Transcendentalists argued for a nondogmatic and more universalis-tic perspective that still resonates today. Buell (2006) notes that they were the first group of American thinkers who seriously examined nonwestern spiritual traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism. Both Emerson and Thoreau read the Bhagavad-Gita ; Paul Friedrich (2008) has recently written book on The Gita within Walden . Emerson wrote, “Can anyone doubt that if the noblest saint among the Buddhists, the noblest Mahometan, the highest Stoic of Athens, the purest and wisest Christian, M[a]nu in India, Confucius in China, Spinoza in Holland, could somewhere meet and converse together, they would find themselves of one religion?” (Buell, p. xx). Gandhi (1980) echoed the same idea when he stated “The forms are many, but the informing spirit is one. How can there be room for distinctions of high and low where there is this all-embracing fundamental unity underlying the outward diversity? For that is a fact meeting you at every step in daily life. The final goal of all religions is to realize this essential oneness” (p. 63).
- Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, Steven T. Katz(Authors)
- 1988(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson and The American Transcendentalists SYDNEY E. AHLSTROMt Transcendentalism is the single most provocative spiritual movement in American history. In proportion to its size and duration it has stimulated a body of literature that is probably unequalled in detail, interest, and profundity. At its centre stands the serene, enigmatic and challenging figure of Emerson - the poet, prophet and seer who more than any other personi- fied its central impulses, propounded its most troubling paradoxes, and stimulated the diverse reformers who constituted the movement. From almost the outset Emerson has been the object of very contradictory interpretations. He has repeatedly been seen as at once an other-worldly mystic and a practical Yankee; as an uncritical celebrant of American culture and as one of its most penetrating critics. As early as 1907 George Woodberry spoke of 'the double image on the mind that has dwelt long upon his memory. He is a shining figure on some Mount ofTransfiguration; and he is a parochial man.' 1 He has been seen as a child of the eight Puritan ministers in his ancestry, and as a blasphemous champion of Romantic extravagance. Emerson himself is at least partly to blame for the difficulty of interpreting his published work. There are very few writers who have indulged less in self-disclosure, whether in public or to friends. Not only did he refuse to explain himself, he constantly and deliberately deepened the mystery by planting misleading clues for the gullible to find. Crucial to our understand- ing of his thought, therefore, are the immensely voluminous notebooks which he maintained assiduously from his college days on. They constitute a vast oeuvre in themselves, a record of his activities, his reading and above all the multiple dimensions of his inner life. So rich and fascinating are these notebooks that many scholars have been seduced into doing less than justice to the published works.
eBook - PDFTheology in America
Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War
- E. Brooks Holifield(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
‘‘Disgusted with the materialistic work-ing of ‘rational’ religion,’’ she explained, ‘‘they become mystics. They quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough.’’ Fuller suspected that litera-ture and the arts would be more effective media of cultural reform than a purified theology, but she agreed that Christianity had suffered because its adherents ‘‘received it on external grounds.’’ She sympathized with the revolt against externals, whether rituals or evidences, and cheered the turn inward to ‘‘the fountains of holiness in the soul.’’ ≥ Transcendentalists had little agreement about what such an inward turn should mean, and they had little interest in defining their aims with any great precision. Emerson described the movement in 1842 simply as ‘‘Idealism as it appears in 1842.’’ He associated it with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who he thought had discovered ‘‘a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which expe-rience was acquired, . . . intuitions of the mind itself.’’ But none of the tran-scendentalists were Kantians in any strict sense of the term; their confidence in the reach of intuition had little resemblance to Kant’s sober sense of the limits of reason. They also contradicted each other at every turn. James Freeman Clarke conceded that ‘‘no two of us thought alike.’’ ∂ Yet most of the transcendentalists did share an excitement about the pos-sibility that their rediscovery of intuitive rationality would correct the errors of a theology too intimately aligned with Lockean empiricism. Insofar as they retained a Christian identity, which some did more than others, they continued to rely on the internal evidences and to that extent embraced the evidential tradition, but they launched the first sustained effort to replace Lockean rea-son with an intuition that no longer relied on external proofs.
eBook - PDFRalph Waldo Emerson
The Major Prose
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Belknap Press(Publisher)
The Transcendentalist 00 The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as 1 the transcendentalist [ 165 ] his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illu-sions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us as-sume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern.
eBook - PDF- Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann, Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
of Boston and first advertised in the Boston Daily Advertiser on 9 September 1836, is commonly regarded as the founding docu-ment of the most important manifestation of Romanticism in the US: Transcendental-ism. Indeed, the book is usually referred to as the manifesto of thirty-three-year-old Emerson (1803 – 1882), who was soon identified as the central figure of the new move-ment. In July 1836, Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge were already organizing a small “ symposium ” of idealistic Unitarian ministers to freely discuss the current state of and new ideas in philosophy and theology. Emerson was at work on what became Nature , for he wrote to Hedge on 20 July that he had written “ a Chapter which I call ‘ Nature ’” and that he “ wish[ed] to write another chapter called ‘ Spirit ’” (1939, 1990 – 1995, 2: 29 – 30). What became known as the Transcendental Club met for the first time at Willard ’ s Hotel in Cambridge after Harvard ’ s bicentennial festivities on 8 September 1836, the day before Nature was first advertised. The thirty-odd club meetings held at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110592238-015 various members ’ homes over the next four years drew a growing and more diverse number of progressives, including Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Henry D. Thoreau. Historians generally agree that, except for reform movements in which Transcendentalists were variously engaged, the only other tangible expression of Transcendentalism as a “ movement ” was The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philoso-phy, and Religion , edited by Fuller and Emerson from 1840 to 1844. Greeting the reader in the first issue, the editors echoed Emerson ’ s prospective outlook in Nature , welcom-ing the recent “ strong current of thought and feeling ” that was rejecting “ that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone, [...] and holds nothing so much in horror as new views and the dreams of youth ” ( The Dial 1961, 1: 1 – 2).
eBook - PDFThe uses of observation
A study of correspondential vision in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman
- Christopher Collins(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The Transcenden-talist filled his journals with the suggestive phenomena of the world. Let us not underrate the value of a fact, wrote Henry Thoreau; it will one day flower in a truth. In his journals he held the factual world in the service of his soul and demanded that it reflect as yet undiscovered truths of his inner self. The Transcendental journals, e.g., those of Emerson and Thoreau, were much more autobiographical than those of the Puritans only because they were about the adventures of the self - its struggles to comprehend its destiny by means of the fluctuating power of its inborn imagination. With heroic faith in the universal relevance of this internal monologue, 6 Emerson declared in his essay, Spiritual Laws, He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Again, like the Puritans, the Transcendentalists believed that art should be useful. The universal relevance of the Transcendental monologue depended on how effectively it was able to arouse 5 American Renaissance, p. 40. 6 On the Emersonian monologue see Constance Rourke's American Humor , pp. 134-35. 114 TRANSCENDENTAL CORRESPONDENCE the imaginative powers within others. It was created to be useful to the imagination, and not, as in the case of Puritan erudition, to the rational understanding. Yet in both aesthetics, art was used to implement the journey, the pilgrimage of the soul from a state of blindness and chaos to a state of illumination, power, and tranquillity. In these ways the Transcendentalists adopted the superannu-ated framework of Puritan culture and developed with it a native American Romanticism. This framework, first of all, consisted in a vaguely visualized geography: a city which the traveller escapes from, a road of exile and questing, and another city, a trans-figured city at the end of the wilderness.
No longer available |Learn moreEducating New England
The Pedagogical Experiments of the American Transcendentalists
- Franziska Schmid(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Universitätsverlag Winter(Publisher)
Education, then, was inherently related to “the continual deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural forms” (Bickman, Minding American Education 37). The Transcendentalists placed high emphasis on reforming society from within rather than forcing an institutional structure from above in order to re-create a state of wholeness. Sam M. Worley assesses Transcendentalism as an “immanent social criticism,” hich means that the immanent critic derives his authority “not from his bein in any sense ecetional, but ust the oosite: it derives from his lace in a shared culture” orley Transcendentalism is therefore not to be understood as a transcendent and elitist criticism, but as a criticism from within. The Transcendentalists speak as members of society, equally susceptible to moral corruption, but at the same time prone to moral improvement. Only a conscious effort, the constant cultivation of the self, will lead to improvement. As the Transcendentalists were, and still are, repeatedly charged with naïve idealism removed from social realities, the question arises how these ideals of educational reform were carried out in practice. Firstly, it is crucially important to determine how the Transcendentalists defined the nature of social change, and, secondly, which role the individual plays in affecting the desired change. Throughout his lectures and writings, Emerson ponders the question how the numerous evils of the present age can be lastinly remedied In “he onservative,” a lecture delivered in December 1841, Emerson holds that social change needs to be furnished from the material the reformer has at hand: “For as you cannot um from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to take away its life” CW 1: 189).
eBook - ePubFighting for the Higher Law
Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery
- Peter Wirzbicki(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
Freedom occurred, the Transcendentalists thought, in the fertile mix of the given and the willed, the dialogue between a physical reality that shapes us and our consciousness that is free to shape itself. As Emerson wrote, good thinking lay between abstract consciousness—“the thin and cold realm of pure geometry”—and raw “sensation.” He called this “the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry.” 135 Fuller agreed: a consciousness who “remains imbedded in nature” would never understand the meaning of life, but nor would one who was so self-absorbed that they ignored the beauty and divinity that nature reveals. 136 While they always emphasized the importance of the higher parts of consciousness to compensate for society’s dismissal of it, they still demanded a dialogue with the empirical world, a constant to and fro between these components of the self, an embrace of thinking as the two-in-one of a consciousness that was both observer and observed. 137 Through this doubleness, they thus avoided both the narrowness of a mechanical psychology and the self-indulgence of an idealism that would never realize itself in concrete action. Thoreau immersed himself in the sounds, sights, and animal life of Walden Pond. Emerson embraced the whims of his subconscious, the hidden wisdom found in the dark “chambers and magazines of the soul.” 138 Whitman sang of the dusty open road, the joyful solidarity of mingling with rowdy crowds and haughty citizens of the street. To think freely, then, for Transcendentalists required one to experience the world in all its bright and complex glory and then reflect on what one has learned, to open up a dialogue between the experiencing-self and the reflecting-self
eBook - ePubRalph Waldo Emerson
The Major Prose
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Belknap Press(Publisher)
The Transcendentalist 1 The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern
eBook - PDF- Herbert W. Schneider(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
— V — THE TRANSCENDENTAL TEMPER — 23 — THE FLOWERING OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT E UROPE felt the power of political and intellectual reaction after Napoleon more than did America, whose expanding power and territory during the Napoleonic struggle gave it not merely an era of good feeling but also a sense of possessing resources for indefinite development. The romantic character of American material progress stood in evident contrast to the sordid class struggles of European powers and to the persistence of feudal ideas and institutions. America also felt little of the force of the Benthamite reaction against the prin-ciples of the Enlightenment and little of the bourgeois and hedonistic variety of utilitarianism. Hence the faith in the creative power of reason and the principles of secular moralism were taken over from the Enlightenment and embodied into Transcendentalism without shock or reaction; romantic idealism was able to build its universe on the foundations, rather than on the ruins, of the romantic faith in reason. In short, the intellectual and moral situation of America after 1815 resembled that of Scotland and Prussia more than that of France, England, or Austria. Emerson was not fighting Burke's battles, but like the German Kantians, like Ferguson, Carlyle and Erasmus Dar-win in Scotland, could readily transform the faith of the Enlighten-ment into a gospel of self-culture and self-reliance, both national and individual. Even Orestes Brownson, whose disillusionment over the Enlighten-ment and flight to Catholicism most closely resembled the pattern of European reaction, was by no means a typical reactionary. For him conversion to the Church of Rome was not a return home, but a new adventure, conceived in a thoroughly romantic spirit. To his mind he was advancing from sectarian Universalism to the genuinely uni-versal, the cosmopolitan, the eternal. The French romanticists, Con-stant, Cousin, and Leroux, to say nothing of the Italian patriot Gio-
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