American Transcendentalism The term Transcendentalism was derived from the philosopher Kant, who called all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects. The roots of the American philosophy ran deep into German and English Romanticism. From German philosophers such as Fichte and Herder, it received its mystic impulse; from Goethe, Novalis, Jean-Paul, Heine, and the other great German Romantic poets it acquired its imagistic language and themes. Acquaintance with German thought, by and large, filtered through English translations--Coleridge and Carlyles among the best--and acquaintance with these and the work of other English Romantics such as Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron enriched the Americans perspectives as well. Walt Whitman in 1891. In his 1841 address delivered at Bostons Masonic Temple , which was later reprinted in THE DIAL, Emerson attempted to define the philosophy in simple terms as What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. In reality it was far more complex collection of beliefs: that the spark of divinity lies within man; that everything in the world is a microcosm of existence; that the individual soul is identical to the world soul, or Over-Soul, as Emerson called it. This belief in the Inner Light led to an emphasis on the authority of the Self--to Walt Whitmans I , to the Emersonian doctrine of Self-Reliance, to Thoreaus civil disobedience, and to the Utopian communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands. By meditation, by communing with nature, through work and art, man could transcend his senses and attain an understanding of beauty and goodness and truth. Transcendentalism dominated the thinking of the American Renaissance, and its resonances reverberated through American life well into the 20th century. In one way or another our most creative minds were drawn into its thrall, attracted not only to its practicable messages of confident self-identity, spiritual progress and social justice, but also by its aesthetics, which celebrated, in landscape and mindscape, the immense grandeur of the American soul.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 13:30:37 +0000