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what is transcendental thinking

by Prof. Merlin Krajcik Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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Transcendentalism is a 19th-century school of American theological and philosophical thought that combined respect for nature and self-sufficiency with elements of Unitarianism and German Romanticism.

Transcendentalism is a philosophy started in the early 19th century that promotes intuitive, spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based on material things.

Full Answer

What is the main idea of transcendentalism?

Transcendentalism is a philosophical and social movement that emphasizes the inherent goodness of all nature and humanity and the belief that people can find truth through their own intuition and imagination. People are at their best when they are most self-reliant and independent. Transcendentalism Definition.

What is the Transcendental movement?

The transcendental movement can be described as an American outgrowth of English Romanticism. Transcendentalists believe that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—corrupt the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

What is Contemporary transcendental philosophy?

Contemporary transcendental philosophy is developed by German philosopher Harald Holz with a holistic approach. Holz distanced transcendental philosophy from the convergence of neo-Kantianism.

What is a transcendental argument?

A modest transcendental argument would then aim to show that a belief whose coherence with the other beliefs is challenged so coheres after all. The requisite coherence might be demonstrated by showing that the belief in question is actually a necessary condition of a belief that is indispensable (in some coherentist sense) to one’s set.

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What is an example of a transcendental?

transcendental function, In mathematics, a function not expressible as a finite combination of the algebraic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to a power, and extracting a root. Examples include the functions log x, sin x, cos x, ex and any functions containing them.

What is a transcendental thinker?

Transcendentalism is a 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for ...

What best describes the transcendental thought?

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in New England. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

What are 3 characteristics of transcendentalism?

Transcendentalists believed in numerous values, however they can all be condensed into three basic, essential values: individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature.

Do transcendentalists believe in God?

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

What are the 5 elements of transcendentalism?

The 5 Characteristics of TranscendentalismSimplistic Living. ... Self-Reliance. ... Importance of Nature. ... Spirituality. ... Spirituality. ... Simplistic Living. ... Self-Reliance.

What is Transcendentalism in simple terms?

Transcendentalism is a philosophy started in the early 19th century that promotes intuitive, spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based on material things.

What are the main principles of Transcendentalism?

These all echo the major principles of transcendentalism: freethinking, self relianceself reliance"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Self-RelianceSelf-Reliance - Wikipedia and non conformity, growth and renewal of the individual, revolt against tradition and established institutions, civil disobedience, brotherhood of man, nature and spiritual unity, and educational reform.

How is Transcendentalism used today?

Transcendentalism is found in today's modern world. Many examples of transcendentalist ideas are in song lyrics, paintings, newspapers, magazine articles, television shows, TV advertisements, films, poetry, novels, biographies, etc.

What were transcendentalists most concerned with?

Evangelists of the Second Great Awakening preached the power of personal spirituality, whereas transcendentalists were more concerned with the individual soul.

Is Transcendentalism a religion?

Transcendentalism is not a religion per se; it is more like a collection of philosophical and theological thought, an intellectual and a spiritual movement that emphasizes the goodness of nature and the independence of humanity. However, during the 1830s, they became an organized group.

Who was the leading transcendentalist?

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous and influential transcendentalists. Some influential transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller, were early pioneers of feminism.

What does Kant mean by transcendental?

By transcendental (a term that deserves special clarification) Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.

What makes being transcendental?

In religious experience transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence and by some definitions has also become independent of it. This is typically manifested in prayer, séance, meditation, psychedelics and paranormal "visions".

What are the transcendental categories?

The specific a priori concepts whose applicability to objects of experience Kant aims to vindicate in the Transcendental Deduction are given in his Table of Categories (A80/B106); they are Unity, Plurality, and Totality (the Categories of Quantity); Reality, Negation, and Limitation (the Categories of Quality); ...

What are the transcendentals of being?

The transcendentals (Latin: transcendentalia, from transcendere "to exceed") are the properties of being, nowadays commonly considered to be truth, beauty, and goodness. The concept arose from medieval scholasticism. Viewed ontologically, the transcendentals are understood to be what is common to all beings.

What Is Transcendentalism?

It’s all about spirituality. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau . It centers around the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition. In other words, transcendentalists believe spirituality isn’t something you can explain; it’s something you feel. A transcendentalist would argue that going for a walk in a beautiful place would be a much more spiritual experience than reading a religious text.

Why did the transcendentalist movement start?

The transcendentalism movement arose as a result of a reaction to Unitarianism as well as the Age of Reason.

What was the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism?

For most people, the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism was that it promoted individual spirituality over churches and other aspects of organized religion. Religion was the cornerstone of many people’s lives at this time, and any movement that told them it was corrupting and to give it up would have been unfathomable to many.

What are the three main values of the transcendentalist movement?

The transcendentalist movement encompassed many beliefs, but these all fit into their three main values of individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature.

Who felt that transcendentalism ignored the importance of community bonds?

Many people, even some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller , felt that transcendentalism at times ignored the importance of community bonds and over-emphasized the need to rely on no one but one’s self, to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness.

Who organized the Transcendental Club?

In September 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson organized the first meeting of what would later be called the Transcendental Club. Together the group discussed frustrations of Unitarianism and their main beliefs, drawing on ideas from Romanticism, German philosophers, and the Hindu spiritual texts the Upanishads.

What is Emerson's most important contribution to the transcendental movement?

The day before he published his essay “Nature” he invited a group of his friends to join the “Transcendental Club” a meeting of like-minded individuals to discuss their beliefs. He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches to promote transcendentalism. Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include “The Over-Soul,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and “Divinity School Address.”

Who is the founder of transcendental thinking?

Much of transcendental thinking comes from German idealism and the writings of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher generally seen as laying the foundation of all modern philosophy. Kant used the term transcendental to describe those a priori (nonanalytic) elements involved in empirical experience. Kant did not believe these elements to be “spiritual” in any sense, but he held that they did not originate with empiric observation and so were, in some sense, intuitive.

What is transcendentalism in philosophy?

Transcendentalism is a philosophy that says that our knowledge of reality comes from an analysis of our own thought processes, rather than from scientific evidence. According to the transcendentalist, if God exists, He can be found through human intuition.

What was the significance of transcendentalism in the 1830s?

The transcendentalism of 1830–60s New England essentially hijacked Kant’s philosophy and applied his “transcendentals” to ideas as well as to the phenomenological realm. Thus, intuition was valued as a necessary guide in the understanding of all reality, including science, philosophy, and religion.

What is transcendentalism? What are its origins?

What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” (T, 4).

Who were the transcendentalists?

Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3). Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

How does Emerson keep his distance from the transcendentalists?

Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by speaking always of what “they” say or do, despite the fact that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading transcendentalist. He notes with some disdain that the transcendentalists are “’not good members of society,” that they do not work for “the abolition of the slave-trade” (though both these charges have been leveled at him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (O, 106). This critique is Emerson’s own in such writings as “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar”; and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the “Economy” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden.

Why did Thoreau visit Walden Pond?

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain— July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other” (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully” (W, 141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town. (It was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance, an episode that became the occasion for “Resistance to Civil Government.”)

What was James Marsh's contribution to transcendentalism?

James Marsh (1794–1842), a graduate of Andover and the president of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging philosophy of transcendentalism. Marsh was convinced that German philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced Coleridge’s version—much indebted to Schelling—of Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson’s early work. In Nature, for example, Emerson writes: “The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world” (O, 25).

Who was the founder of the Transcendental Club?

Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm.

When was the senses of Walden published?

Cavell, Stanley, 1981. The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition, San Francisco: North Point Press, and University of Chicago Press.

What is transcendentalism in American society?

Transcendentalism is a philosophical and social movement that emphasizes the inherent goodness of all nature and humanity and the belief that people can find truth through their own intuition and imagination. People are at their best when they are most self-reliant and independent.

What did the transcendentalists emphasize?

Furthermore, the transcendentalists’ emphasis on abolition, fair treatment of women, and better conditions for workers line up with the Bible’s instructions to look out for the poor and downtrodden and to seek justice.

When was transcendentalism first established?

Transcendentalism became an organized way of thought upon the creation of “The Transcendental Club” in 1836, hosted in the Boston home of George Ripley. Early members of the club included Ralph Waldo Emerson, and between 1836 and 1860, the club was associated with members such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father), and Henry David Thoreau.

What are the core beliefs of transcendentalism?

There are a couple of core beliefs of transcendentalism. 1. Everyone is essentially good. The first is that there is a divinity that pervades all nature and humanity. In other words, everyone is essentially good but may need to pursue this goodness through thinking and self-determinization. In Nature, Emerson, one of the leading thinkers ...

Where did transcendentalism originate?

Transcendentalism was a movement that arose in America, specifically New England, in the early nineteenth century, coming into its own in the 1830s. Rather than an actual religious movement, adherents considered it a way of thinking. Though specific beliefs may have differed from person to person, in general, transcendentalism can be defined as ...

Where did Thoreau live?

Thoreau struck out on his own in an attempt to live self-sufficiently in the woods near Walden Pond, where he built a hut and tried to live independently of society. (Supposedly; he was known to visit his friends, the Alcotts, frequently for meals.) From this experience, he wrote the book Walden, now a classic text assigned in high school and college literature courses. Of his experience, Thoreau wrote,

Who were the transcendentalists?

Some transcendentalists identified as Christians, usually Unitarians, and others as agnostics. The beliefs can be traced to roots in the ideas of Immanuel Kant, ancient Indian and Chinese scriptures, Platonism, and German and English Romanticism. As the way of thinking grew, it was reflected in the work of several notable American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

What is transcendentalism in philosophy?

Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.

What are the transcendentalists?

Transcendentalists desire to ground their religion and philosophy in principles based upon the German Romanticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Transcendentalism merged "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume ", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), interpreting Kant's a priori categories as a priori knowledge. Early transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Staël, and other English and French commentators for their knowledge of it. The transcendental movement can be described as an American outgrowth of English Romanticism.

How is transcendentalism related to Unitarianism?

Transcendentalism is closely related to Unitarianism, the dominant religious movement in Boston in the early nineteenth century. It started to develop after Unitarianism took hold at Harvard University, following the elections of Henry Ware as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of John Thornton Kirkland as President in 1810. Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead, they longed for a more intense spiritual experience. Thus, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians.

What are the influences of transcendentalism?

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume ", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. Miller and Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism. It was also strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads .

What is the transcendentalist view of nature?

Transcendentalists have a deep gratitude and appreciation for nature, not only for aesthetic purposes, but also as a tool to observe and understand the structured inner workings of the natural world. Emerson emphasizes the Transcendental beliefs in the holistic power of the natural landscape in Nature:

What is the transcendence of the spirit?

Notably, the transcendence of the spirit, most often evoked by the poet's prosaic voice, is said to endow in the reader a sense of purpose. This is the underlying theme in the majority of transcendentalist essays and papers—all of which are centered on subjects which assert a love for individual expression.

When was transcendentalism founded?

Transcendentalism became a coherent movement and a sacred organization with the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1836, by prominent New England intellectuals, including George Putnam (Unitarian minister), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Henry Hedge.

What is the transcendental deduction?

The Transcendental Deduction (A84–130, B116–169) is Kant’s attempt to demonstrate against empiricist psychological theory that certain a priori concepts correctly apply to objects featured in our experience. Dieter Henrich (1989) points out that Kant’s use of ‘ Deduktion ’ redeploys German legal vocabulary; in Holy Roman Empire Law, ‘ Deduktion ’ signifies an argument intended to yield a historical justification for the legitimacy of a property claim. In Kant’s derivative epistemological sense, a deduction is an argument that aims to justify the use of a concept, one that demonstrates that the concept correctly applies to objects. For Kant a concept is a priori just in case its source is the understanding of the subject and not sensory experience (A80/B106; Strawson 1966: 86). The specific a priori concepts whose applicability to objects of experience Kant aims to vindicate in the Transcendental Deduction are given in his Table of Categories (A80/B106); they are Unity, Plurality, and Totality (the Categories of Quantity); Reality, Negation, and Limitation (the Categories of Quality); Inherence and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, and Community (the Categories of Relation), and Possibility-Impossibility, Existence-Nonexistence, Necessity-Contingency (the Categories of Modality).

Which philosopher is the most significant rival to Kant's theory of mental processing?

For Kant, the most significant rival theory of mental processing is that of his target, Hume. Hume concurs that a theory of experience requires an account of the processing of mental items, but he denies that such an account demands a priori concepts or issues in their legitimate applicability to experience.

What is Kant's view on representation?

For a representation to be objectively valid it must be a representation of an objective feature of reality, that is, a feature whose existence and nature is independent of how it is perceived (Guyer 1987:11–24). In this argument, it appears that Kant just assumes that the representations that make up experience are objectively valid. He then aims to establish that association is inadequate because it can yield only representations that are not objectively valid. In the above passage, Kant contends that our objectively valid representations must in a sense be necessary and universal. However, the empirical unity of consciousness, which involves an ordering of representations achieved by association, can only be non-universal, contingent, and hence merely subjectively valid, by contrast with the transcendental unity of apperception, which involves an ordering that is universal and necessary, and is therefore objectively valid. In Kant’s conception, it is the fact that the transcendental unity of apperception is generated by a priori synthesis that allows it to yield an ordering that is universal, necessary, and objectively valid. (Ameriks 1978, Pereboom 1995, Patricia Kitcher 2011: 115–60; Allais 2011, 2015; Vinci 2014). On Lucy Allais’s proposal, empirically we are acquainted with objects, but absent a priori synthesis, empirical representations would be of objects that are indeterminate with respect to multiple possible ways of conceptualizing and individuating them. Only with a priori synthesis is the representation of determinate objects possible. The concept of cause has a key role here, since determinacy is paradigmatically a function of represented causal unity of objects (Allais 2015: 275–85; cf. Beck 1978; Vinci 2014: 134–44). This determinacy, by virtue of a shared scheme of a priori concepts, yields the universality and necessity Kant has in mind.

What is the first part of Kant's theory?

The first, contained in §§15–16, is designed to show that association cannot account for an aspect of one’s consciousness of one’s self that Kant refers to as the consciousness of its unity, and that synthesis is required to provide this explanation.

What is Kant's strategy?

Kant’ strategy is to establish a theory of mental processing, synthesis, by arguing that its truth is a necessary condition for the truth of such a premise, and then to show that the a priori concepts at issue – the categories – have an essential role in this sort of mental processing.

What is Kant's most influential contribution to philosophy?

Kant’s Transcendental Arguments. Among Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) most influential contributions to philosophy is his development of the transcendental argument.

What is Kant's view on judgment?

In §19, Kant argues that there must be a certain way in which each of my representations is unified in the subject, and he identifies this way with judgment: “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given cognitions are brought to the objective unity of apperception ” (B141). Judgment, Kant proposes, is objectively rather than subjectively valid, and hence exhibits the type of universality and necessity that characterizes objective validity (B142). He then claims that without synthesis and judgment as its vehicle, an ordering of representations might reflect what appears to be the case, but it would not explain how we make distinctions between objective valid phenomena (i.e., objects) and the subjective states they induce.

What is transcendental theory?

"Transcendental" is a word derived from the scholastic, designating the extra-categorical attributes of beings.

What does transcendental mean in Kant's definition of transcendental?

Something is transcendental if it plays a role in the way in which the mind "constitutes" objects and makes it possible for us to experience them as objects in the first place. Ordinary knowledge is knowledge of objects;

What is transcendence in Sartre's work?

Jean-Paul Sartre also speaks of transcendence in his works. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre uses transcendence to describe the relation of the self to the object oriented world, as well as our concrete relations with others. For Sartre, the for-itself is sometimes called a transcendence. Additionally if the other is viewed strictly as an object, much like any other object, then the other is, for the for-itself, a transcendence-transcended. When the for-itself grasps the other in the others world, and grasps the subjectivity that the other has, it is referred to as transcending-transcendence. Thus, Sartre defines relations with others in terms of transcendence.

What is transcendence in philosophy?

In philosophy, transcendence is the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning (from Latin ), of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages. It includes philosophies, systems, and approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, ...

What is transcendent in phenomenology?

In phenomenology, the "transcendent" is that which transcends our own consciousness: that which is objective rather than only a phenomenon of consciousness. Noema is employed in phenomenology to refer to the terminus of an intention as given for consciousness.

What does "terms styled transcendental" mean?

The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza used the expression "terms styled transcendental" (in Latin: termini transcendentales) to indicate concepts like Being, Thing, Something, which are so general not to be included in the definitions of species, genus and category.

What does it mean to be transcendent?

In everyday language, "transcendence" means "going beyond", and "self-transcendence" means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself. Mystical experience is thought of as a particularly advanced state of self-transcendence, in which the sense of a separate self is abandoned. " Self-transcendence " is believed to be psychometrically measurable, and (at least partially) inherited, and has been incorporated as a personality dimension in the Temperament and Character Inventory. The discovery of this is described in the book "The God Gene" by Dean Hamer, although this has been criticized by commentators such as Carl Zimmer .

What is transcendental thinking?

Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that "transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses.

What did the transcendentalists do to the American experiment?

As a group, the transcendentalists led the celebration of the American experiment as one of individualism and self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women's rights, abolition, reform, and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws, social institutions, and creeping industrialization. They created an American "state of mind" in which imagination was better than reason, creativity was better than theory, and action was better than contemplation. And they had faith that all would be well because humans could transcend limits and reach astonishing heights.

Who was the most influential person in the Transcendental Club?

But the most interesting character by far was Henry David Thoreau, who tried to put transcendentalism into practice.

Who was the leader of the Transcendental Club?

The club had many extraordinary thinkers, but accorded the leadership position to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What was Margaret Fuller's role in the Transcendentalist movement?

She helped plan the community at Brook Farm, as well as editing The Dial, and writing the feminist treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

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Origins and Character

  • What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberalNew England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinismin two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of humanstriving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete andinescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather thanthe “Tri...
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High Tide: The Dial, Fuller, Thoreau

  • The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at firstThe Christian Examiner, then, after the furor over the“Divinity School Address,” The Western Messenger(1835–41) in St Louis, then the Boston Quarterly Review(1838–44). The Dial (1840–4) was a special case,for it was planned and instituted by the members of the TranscendentalClub, with Margaret Fuller (1810–50) as th…
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Social and Political Critiques

  • The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that thesociety around them was seriously deficient: a “mass” of“bugs or spawn” as Emerson put it in “The AmericanScholar”; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says inWalden. Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles:Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organizedby the Transcendental Clu…
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Transcendentalism Definition

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Transcendentalism was a movement that arose in America, specifically New England, in the early nineteenth century, coming into its own in the 1830s. Rather than an actual religious movement, adherents considered it a way of thinking. Though specific beliefs may have differed from person to person, in general, trans…
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Transcendentalism Beliefs

  • There are a couple of core beliefs of transcendentalism. 1. Everyone is essentially good. The first is that there is a divinity that pervades all nature and humanity. In other words, everyone is essentially good but may need to pursue this goodness through thinking and self-determinization. In Nature, Emerson, one of the leading thinkers of Transcendentalism, referred to humans as “go…
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Transcendentalist Movement

  • Transcendentalism became an organized way of thought upon the creation of “The Transcendental Club” in 1836, hosted in the Boston home of George Ripley. Early members of the club included Ralph Waldo Emerson, and between 1836 and 1860, the club was associated with members such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Amos Bro…
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Is Transcendentalism Biblical?

  • It may not seem like transcendentalism has any bearing on our lives today, but the abundance of texts by these thinkers in schools and its similarities to postmodern and New Age ideas of personal truth brings up questions for Christians about whether or not the ideas of transcendentalism are biblical. Some ideas of some transcendental thinkers are widely held by …
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5.Transcendentalism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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6.What Is Transcendentalism? Beliefs of this American …

Url:https://www.christianity.com/wiki/christian-terms/what-is-transcendentalism-beliefs-of-this-american-movement.html

14 hours ago In philosophy, transcendence is the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning, of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and …

7.Transcendentalism - Wikipedia

Url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

11 hours ago Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that …

8.Kant’s Transcendental Arguments - Stanford …

Url:https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/

15 hours ago

9.Transcendence (philosophy) - Wikipedia

Url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(philosophy)

34 hours ago

10.Transcendentalism, An American Philosophy [ushistory.org]

Url:https://www.ushistory.org/US/26f.asp

16 hours ago

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