Transcendentalism and the American Past

Transcendentalism as a movement is rooted in the American past: To Puritanism it owed its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light." It is also similar to the Quaker "inner light." However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas intuition is an act of an individual. In Unitarianism, deity was reduced to a kind of immanent principle in every person - an individual was the true source of moral light. To Romanticism it owed the concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe (deism) which is fixed and permanent.

Transcendentalism was a 1. spiritual, 2. philosophical and 3. literary movement and is located in the history of American Thought as

(a). Post-Unitarian and free thinking in religious spirituality
(b). Kantian and idealistic in philosophy and
(c). Romantic and individualistic in literature.

Important ideas

1. Its origin is traced to the relaxing of Puritan Calvinism into Unitarianism - a belief very much like Deism. From its early liberalism, Unitarianism developed, for some of the young intellectuals, into "a new orthodoxy of smug social conformity that denied the spiritual and emotional depths of experience - 'corpse-cold Unitarianism,' as Emerson was to call it."

2. German and English Romanticism provided some inspiration towards the search for some deeper 'truth.'

3. "Transcendentalism represented a complex response to the democratization of American life, to the rise of science and the new technology, and to the new industrialism - to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of the relation of man to nature and to other men that was being demanded by the course of history."

Influences:

a. From Plato came the idealism according to which reality subsists beyond the appearances of the world. Plato also suggests that the world is an expression of spirit, or mind, which is sheer intelligibility and therefore good.

b. From Immanuel Kant came the notion of the 'native spontaneity of the human mind' against the passive conception of the 18th c. sensational theory (also known as the philosophy of empiricism of John Locke and David Hume; the concept that the mind begins as a tabula rasa and that all knowledge develops from sensation).

c. From Coleridge came the importance of wonder, of antirationalism, and the importance of individual consciousness.

d. From Puritanism came the ethical seriousness and the aspect of Jonathan Edwards that suggested that an individual can receive divine light immediately and directly.

4. "Transcendentalism was, at its core, a philosophy of naked individualism, aimed at the creation of the new American, the self-reliant man, complete and independent."

5. "The achievement of the transcendentalists has a grandeur. They did confront, and helped define, the great issues of their time, and if they did not resolve those issues, we of the late twentieth century, who have not yet resolved them, are in no position to look down our noses at their effort."

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 874