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Back to Subjects - Philosophy

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism The New England Renaissance brought out two distinct, yet influential movements known as transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism. The two concentrated on intuition and human nature and formed a revolt against previously accepted ideas such as Calvinist orthodoxy, strict Puritan attitudes, ritualism, and the dogmatic theology of religious institutions. Transcendentalism is a term rooted back to Plato, a Greek philosopher who first affirmed the existence of absolute goodness, which he characterized as beyond something of description and as knowable only through intuition. He laid the tracks down for others to build off of. The Scholastic philosophers were the first to add to Plato’s theory during the middle ages. They came up with the transcendental concepts, which show the capabilities of all types of things. Essence, unity, goodness, truth, thing, and something were the six that they recognized. Still the term transcendentalist needed refining. Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Edmund Husserl formed a distinction between the terms transcendent, entities that are unknown and cannot be defined, and transcendental, signifying a priori forms of thought, innate principles with which the mind gives form to its perceptions, and classified their views as transcendental. The transcendental movement began to take shape in 1836 at the Transcendental Club in Boston, in which the most influence leaders of the movement came together and published a magazine known as The Dial which was expressed their ideas and brought them to the public. Some of the attendees included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Brunson Alcott, and William Willery Channing. If there were only one word that I could use to describe transcendentalism it would be optimism, because it seemed to be the philosophy that dominated people’s minds in outlining the views to transcendentalism. The belief that basic truths of the universe lied beyond our senses was one such belief. Others included the fact that we know, through intuition, that reality lies beyond the physical world, and that everything is symbolic in spirit, making mature the place to find oneself. The groundwork for these beliefs and views can be seen in Deism (with the opposition of Calvinist orthodoxy) and in Romanticism (self-examination and individualism). As stated above, several authors led the transcendental movement, but none were as influential as Emerson and Thoreau. They are the writers that you hear about in all the definitions of transcendentalism and in the flowering of New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. He was born on May 25, 1803 and died on April 27, 1882. He graduated from Harvard in 1821 and was the youngest member of his freshmen class there at the age of 14. IN 1829, he was ordained as a Unitarian minister, and left three years later because of his differences with the religion. After traveling in Europe he published Nature, an outline of his transcendental views, in 1836. A major accomplishment of his life was the publishing of his two series of Essays, which the world-renowned Self-Reliance essay was published in 1841. “...That imitation is suicide” is a quote from Self-Reliance that shows the transcendental belief that individuality is better than conforming to society and being a follower. Another quote that shows the idea of transcendentalism, which looks at its possibilities for the human spirit and what it can achieve is, “The power which resides in him (referring to all humans) is new in nature, and non but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. The second most influential writer of the day was Henry David Thoreau, who is best known for Walden, a record of his experiences in a hand-built cabin, where he spent two years in partial seclusion at Walden Pond, near his hometown, Concord, Massachusetts. H e was born on July 12, 1817 and died on May 6, 1862. He, like Emerson, graduated from Harvard, and actually lived with Emerson from 1841 to 1843. His experiment at Walden took place from 1845 to 1847, but the collection of essays wasn’t published until 1854, 5 years after he published Civil Disobedience. Civil Disobedience was written in reaction to Thoreau’s refusal to pay poll tax during the Mexican War. In his essay, he discussed passive resistance, a method of protest later used by Mahandas Gandhi as an Indian tactic against the British, and by abolitionist leaders during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Thoreau and Emerson were actually both quite active in the civil rights movement in the United States. His work can be summed up in one famous quote, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail”, from Walden. Anti- transcendentalism, however, focused on the darkness of the human soul and was really just opposition to transcendentalism, as the name suggests. They believed that transcendentalism was just to optimistic and just overlooked the evil that plagues all men. They viewed mature as a two-sided force, having both a graceful side and a destructive side. They saw nature as unexplainable and their focus was also on the limitations of the human spirit, and stressed the idea of everyone having potential destructiveness. Like, the transcendental movement, there were two main writers that showed the beliefs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," Anti-transcendental ideas can be recognized throughout most of the story. Nathaniel Hawthorne's, "The Minister's Black Veil," deals with sin and concealed guilt, with hypocrisy, in a dark tale that shows the true insight of the Puritan conscience. His story reflects the Anti-Transcendental ideas, using a black veil covering a minister's face to symbolize human sin. He symbolized the Anti-Transcendental ideas of life's truths beings disturbing. "The subject (referring to minister) had bad reference to secret sin, and these sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our consciousness, even forgetting that the omniscient can detect them". This quote from this story is an example of the Anti-Transcendental idea that we all have sins, which we hide, and it is hypocrisy to hide those sins, because God can still see them. In the following description, it can be noticed that Hawthorne continues to show the fear of sin and also now, the sin of the Earth (Nature). "At that instant, catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking glass, the black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which overwhelmed all others. His frame shuddered, his lips grew white, and he spilled the un-tasted wine upon the carpet and rushed forth into the darkness. For the Earth, too, had on her Black Veil." Nature, as believed by the Anti-Transcendentalists, was a symbol of everything unexplainable, and since nobody in the village knew (or wanted to admit) what the black veil symbolized, Mr. Hooper running into nature's darkness is symbolic of this Anti-Transcendental idea. Herman Melville was born in 1819 and died 1891. He was an American novelist who was only recognized at the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in New York City and published his primary anti-transcendentalist piece of art, Moby Dick. It shows human nature and evil in that it describes Captain Ahab as an individual who goes after a dream that will not be fulfilled and eventually will bring him death. It shows the evil inside of people. The authors during the movements concentrated on reflecting the ideas (of the corresponding movement) to the reader in a symbolic way through literature. The literature builds the idea of humanity and nature in different perspectives, which reflects the principle ideas of both the movements. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1297