What is Transcendentalism in American literature? Transcendentalism is defined by the definition in the Encyclopedia of philosophy.
The early 19th century was a time when the movement of Transcendentalism was centered around the thinker, theologian, and political theorist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.Frederic Henry Hedge, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker are some of the important transcendentalists.The new era wasStimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume.They criticized their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity and urged each person to find an original relation to the universe.This relation was sought in solitude by both of them.By the 1850s, they were involved in the social experiments of Fruitlands, as well as in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
The liberal New England Congregationalists, who deviated from orthodox Calvinism in two respects, believed in the importance and efficacy of human strive, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity.Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was inferior to God the Father but still better than human beings, and a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley who held the same.The leading preacher of the Unitarians, William Ellery Channing, portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment.The sermon "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) denounced the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians and helped give the Unitarian movement its name.He proposed in "Likeness to God" that human beings may achieve a growing likeness to the Supreme Being.
The accounts of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for the truth of religion, which is why the Unitarians tried to reconcile Locke's empiricism with Christianity.The transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism on this ground.They were persuaded that no empirical proof of religion could be satisfactory because they admired the idea that human beings can become more like God.In his freshman year at Harvard in the 17th century, he wrote letters to his Aunt Mary Moody, and in his journals of the early 1820s he discussed with approval the Dialogues on Natural Religion and his critique of necessary connection.We don't know of a Creator because we have no experience of one.
The idea that the Bible was a product of human history and culture was introduced by the publication of an English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher.Fifty years after its initial appearance in Germany, the publication of James Marsh's translation of "spirit of Hebrew poetry" was equally important.Herder questioned the authority of the Bible and suggested that texts with equal authority could still be written.In the first paragraph of Nature, Emerson asked, "Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us?"The individual's "revelation," or "intuition," was to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean skepticism.
Frederic Henry Hedge was an important source of German philosophy for the transcendentalists.Hedge attended the Harvard Divinity School after his father sent him to Germany at the age of thirteen.Hedge wrote a long review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work for the Christian Examiner.He complains that Coleridge did not make the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience.Hedge takes up the task of introducing the transcendental philosophy of Kant.The supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without will not answer, he explains.Hedge suggested to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young clergy.The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial.Hedge was a champion of women's rights in the 1850s, but he was also a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.
Germaine de Stal was one of the sources for the knowledge of German philosophy.In a survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Stal praises Locke's devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume.She sees an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and ends with Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.
The president of the University of Vermont, James Marsh, was a graduate of Andover.German philosophy was believed to be the key to a reformed theology.The American edition of Aids to Reflection introduced a version of the work that was much indebted to Schelling.The Imagination may be defined as the use which the Reason makes of the material world.
German philosophy and literature was championed by Thomas Carlyle.The idea of action along with nature and the mind of the Past is important to human education.Along with his countrymen Wordsworth and Coleridge, Carlyle embraced a "natural supernaturalism," the view that nature, including human beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to an independent deity.
William Wordsworth had a main theme of Piety towards nature.Wordsworth's depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping power of the mind that Samuel Taylor Coleridge traced to Kant.Wordsworth has a more receptive mode as well, in which he calls for a heart that watches and encourages each of us to build our own world.The currents of the universal being circulate through me.
One of the defining events of transcendentalism was his delivery of an address at the Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838, because of his sense that men and women are in ruins.The contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an eastern monarchy of a Christianity that had become an "injuror of man" was portrayed by Emerson.Jesus was one of the true race of prophets, whose message is not so much their own as the greatness of man.The Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of Christianity is a mistaken view of the nature of religion.
The Harvard Divinity School was known as the "Unitarian Pope" due to the angry response from AndrewsNorton in "The New School in Literature and Religion" (1838).
There was a scandal surrounding the publication of Amos Bronson Alcott's Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels.A series of schools was established by Alcott to draw out the intuitive knowledge of children.There was anticipation of his views about a priori knowledge in the writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection for the idea that idealism and materiality could be reconciled.Alcott left a central space in his classrooms for dancing and replaced the hard benches in the common schools with more comfortable furniture that he built himself.Evidence for the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of children's thought, according to The Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels.There were frank discussions of conception, circumcision, and childbirth in Alcott's book.The publication of the book caused many parents to withdraw their children from it, and the school, like many of Alcott's projects, failed.
Theodore was the son of a farmer who attended Harvard and went on to become a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist.He published a long critical essay on David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, and also translated a book by Friedrich Martin Leberecht de Wette, which cast doubt on the single author of the Bible.He was no longer welcome in many pulpits after the publication of his "A Discourse Concerning the Transient and Permanent in Christianity" and was invited to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers.He argued that Christianity had nothing to do with the person of Jesus and that the human nature had never been attributed to him.Although nature and religious truth are permanent, any merely human version of such truth is not.There are stunning reversals in religious doctrine so that men are burned for denying.
New views are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of idealism, according to a philosophy account by Emerson in his 1842 lecture.It is not a skepticism, but an anti-skeptical one.
The human mind forms, the existence of mental operations is a counter to skepticism, and Transcendental is not a synonym for contempt.There is a strong resemblance of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism in Emerson's work.As opposed to the mundane understanding, Reason is thought of as a faculty of vision.1, 413).The term "transcendentalism" represented nothing more than an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind's powers.The transcendentalist believes in miracles because they are conceived as the permanent openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power.
Even though he was regarded as the leading transcendentalist at the time, he kept his distance from them in his essay, speaking always of what they say or do.He notes that the transcendentalists are not good members of society and that they do not work for the abolition of the slave-trade.He closes the essay with a defense of the critique of a society in which there is a spirit of compromise and seeming indifference, which leads to a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.This critique is from the writings of Emerson, such as "Self- Reliance" and "The American Scholar", and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the "Economy" chapter of Walden.
After the furor over the "Divinity School Address", The Western Messenger in St Louis was taken over by the Boston Quarterly Review.Margaret Fuller was the first editor of The Dial, which was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental Club.The magazine had a new editor for the last two years.The writing in The Dial was not flawless, but it was published in the four years that it existed.The Dial published a series of translations from Chinese and Indian works.
Margaret's father was a congressman from Massachusetts and he provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and German.Barbara Packer calls her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress, and she became friends with many of the transcendentalists.A series of popular and influential "conversations" for women were held in Boston in the winters of the 19th century.In the summer of 1843, she traveled to the Midwest and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes.The editor of the New York Tribune invited her to write for him after her publishing success.For example, she criticized Carlyle for his attraction to brutality, as well as Longfellow's poetry, abandoning her previous ornate and pretentious style.He sent hundreds of pages back to the Tribune.On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a storm off the coast of New York.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a revision of her manifesto in The Dial.There is no wholly masculine man or purely feminine woman in this picture.There are differences between the Apollo and the Masculine in classical mythology.The male is more inclined to classification than the feminine genius.Women are treated as dependents and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them.The most important thing they want is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom necessary for the renovation of society.For periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of distraction andbecility, and a return only after "the renovating fountains" of individuality have risen up, is what Fuller calls for.The proper constitution of marriage requires individuality.She says that "Union is only possible to those who are units".Most marriages are forms of degradation, in which the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him.
At Harvard, Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish and heard "The American Scholar" as his graduation address.He first published in The Dial when he was commissioned to review a series of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but after it failed, he cast about for a literary outlet.His first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers, was completed in 1845 after he moved to Walden Pond.The first draft of Walden was written by him.
It followed by eighteen years, but Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden.This tree, this bird, the state of the pond on a summer evening, or the winter morning are now nature's subjects.The man is receptive.He learns to live in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he can sit because he finds himself suddenly neighbor to.While the farmer is focused on feeding his family and expanding his operations, he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction.
Plato asked what are life's real necessities in The Republic, and in the opening chapter of the book, the author considers the trade-offs we make in life.He wants a "life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust" like Marcus Varro.He finds that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.A life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today.A kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that will never come again, is what Thoreau counsels simple frugality for.He writes that the true economy is about improving the nick of time.
On July 4, 1845, on the anniversary of America's declaration of independence from Britain, he went to Walden Pond to proclaim his own independence.He values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets and welcomes visitors who speak reservedly and thoughtfully.During his time at Walden, he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town.He was arrested for tax avoidance when he went to pick up a mended shoe.
At the opening of the chapter on Higher Laws, Thoreau admits to once wanting to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it raw to get at its wild essence.He has given up eating meat in middle age, but he still values fishing and hunting.He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in literary works such as Hamlet and the Iliad, as well as in certain forms of society.The wild is not always uplifting.In The Maine Woods, Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world, and in Cape Cod, he records the foreignness, not the friendly nature of nature.
Although the American tradition of environmental philosophy is initiated by Walden, it is equally concerned with reading and writing.In the chapter on "Reading," Thoreau speaks of books that demand and inspire "reading, in a high sense."He calls such books "heroic," and finds them equally in literature and philosophy in Europe and Asia.The enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built, but the book he wrote.
Writing is the work of art closest to life itself, according to Thoreau.He began to understand the nature of his journal as he searched for such close proximity.They kept journals from which their published works were derived.In the early 1850s, Thoreau began to think of the journal as a work in itself, "each page of which should be written in its own season and out of doors or in it's own locality wherever it may be"A journal has a sequence set by the days, but it may have no order, or what order it has emerges in the writer's life as he meets the life of nature.It is less close to nature than the journal with its chapters on reading, Solitude,Economy,Winter, andSpring.
The society around them was so deficient that they operated from the beginning with the idea that a mass of "bugs or spawn" was what the society was all about.There are alternative life-styles such as Fruitlands, planned and organized by the Transcendental Club.The treatment of the Native Americans, the war with Mexico, and the continuing and expanding practice of slavery were all policies and actions taken by the United States government.
The ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi was the subject of a letter written by Emerson to President Martin Van Buren.The Cherokees lived in Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia.One of the more assimilated tribes had members who owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves.The children of wealthy Cherokees were sent to elite academies.The government of Andrew Jackson found a minority group to agree to move to territories west of the Mississippi after the Cherokee chief refused to sign a removal agreement.Jackson's policies continued to take effect despite the Supreme Court ruling that the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation had been violated.President Van Buren, Jackson's former Vice- President and approved successor, ordered the U.S. Army into the Cherokee Nation, where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they could and marched them west and across the Mississippi.Thousands of people died along the way.This is a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecation?
The annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the 28th state in 1845 brought about the question of its morality and entrenchment within the American political system.The address "On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies" was delivered in this context.The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament and celebrated annually in Concord.In his address, he wrote: "Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and notorious holes that can't front the day, to tell what negro-slavery has been."The producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world are our benefactors.I am very sad when I read how they are kept there.Their case was left out of their brothers' thoughts.
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she addresses American slavery directly, recalling her dread at the news that James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to Texas, had been elected the nation's 11th president.The choice of the people threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of Texas!She asked the women of her country if they had anything to do with it.You can see how the men are willing to sell to the highest bidder, their happiness, the honor of their country, and their immortality for a money market and political power.Do you feel like you can check and convince them?You wouldn't speak in vain, whether she was in her own home or in union.
The call to the individual and to individuals acting together is what characterizes theResistance to Civil Government.He meditated on the authority of the state after he was arrested for not paying his poll tax.The government is an expedient that we succeed in letting one another alone.The citizen doesn't have to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War."I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also"If people refused to pay their taxes and went to jail, slavery could be abolished.
The effects of the Fugitive Slave Law can be seen in Georgia, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and New York.All citizens of the country were required to help return fugitive slaves to their owners.The subject of Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts" was on public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U.S.Burns was chained at the ankle and left to lie in his own feces for four months, after he was placed in a notorious "slave pen" by his owner.The absurdity of a court in Boston trying a man to find out if he is not really a SLAVE was denounced by Thoreau.The original 1787 Constitution's recognition of slavery is called a "crime" by Emerson in his "Lecture on Slavery" of 1858.He holds that an immoral law is not valid.
John Brown, who killed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and attacked the federal arsenal in Virginia, was an ardent supporter of nonviolence.In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau portrays Brown as an "Angel of Light" and "a transcendentalist above all" who believed that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder.In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown's life and actions.
Civil disobedience, on religion, Kant, Immanuel, and Henry David are examples.