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If you have any question you can ask below or enter what you are looking for! Although Transcendentalism as a historical movement was limited in time from the mids to the late s and in space to eastern Massachusetts, its ripples continue to spread through American culture.

It is easier to note its pervasive influence, though, than it is to clarify its doctrines. The fluidity and elusiveness of Transcendentalism were registered even by some of its most intelligent contemporaries. He shouted after us, but in so Transcendentalism An American Philosophy a phraseology that we Transcendenatlism not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.

While these quotations imply that Transcendentalism had a language problem compounded of read more borrowings and oracular jargon, the underlying difficulty in comprehension is that it was both a cause and a result of a major paradigm shift in epistemology, in conceptualizing how the mind knows the world, the divine, and itself.

Essay on Transcendentalism

But while Kant emphasized the power of the mind he also stressed its limits, its inability to see more reality absolutely. The Transcendentalist vision went beyond Kant in insisting that the Transcendentalism An American Philosophy can apprehend absolute spiritual truths directly without having to go through the detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions, and without the plodding labour of ratiocination.

In this sense particularly, it was Trasncendentalism logical-or super logical-extension of both the Protestant Reformation and American democratic individualism. To grasp the significance of this paradigm shift, we have to understand how dominant, even hegemonic, Lockean thought was in America, and particularly at Harvard College through the s, where most of the male Transcendentalists were educated.

The Criticism Of Transcendentalism

So while Unitarianism was source optimistic and rationalistic than the orthodoxy it reformed, it weakened the foundation of Protestant faith by giving more authority to what happens outside the individual conscience than within it and elevating matter over spirit in shaping the mind. The genius of the mind will descend, and unite with the genius of the rivers, the lakes, and the woods. The issues were soon taken up by more activist Unitarian ministers such as Orestes Brownson, who was influenced as much by French writers like Victor Cousin and Benjamin Constant as by English and German ones. It contracts, by the very effect of its duration, a stationary character, that refuses to follow the intellect in its discoveries, and the soul in its emotions. Transcendentalism An American Philosophy is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

While these two ministers had youthful energy and wide learning on their side, they soon found themselves embattled Transcendentalism An American Philosophy link within the institution as pulpit exchanges were refused and social pressures mounted. The controversy within the church was paralleled by another conflict between the Establishment and the Movement in the field of education. Bronson Alcott, Philosoophy of the few non-ministerial Transcendentalists and a self-taught teacher who had run other innovative schools in his native rural Connecticut, opened in near the Boston Common his Temple School.

Alcott translated Transcendentalism into pedagogy by having the students shape and share their own thoughts in discussions and journals, instead of rote memory and textbook recitation. The language was seen as not simply a skill but the bridge Phillsophy the individual soul and the physical and social worlds so Transcendentalism An American Philosophy lessons on vocabulary and grammar were integrated with spiritual matters. Again, a reversion to a more primitive and protestant Christianity was seen as subversively to established Christianity. The Transcendentalists, then, lost their immediate skirmishes within the Unitarian church and the field of education, however much their ideas were later to shape both these institutions.

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An Transcendentalism An American Philosophy strategy was to extrapolate Transcendentalist ideas in a world outside these spheres, and no one did this more expansively than Margaret Fuller. She applied the notions of self-reliance and equality to gender roles in the first significant feminist essay in America, published Philosiphy in The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal ECON 2155 edited and helped found in Later, the piece was expanded to the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century Transcendentalusm then left New England Transcendentalism An American Philosophy completely to become a first literary reviewer and then a reporter on social issues for the New York Tribune, finally widening her circle even beyond America to become involved in the failed Italian revolution of and dying soon thereafter in a tragic shipwreck.

The largest organized secession, though, Amefican Boston Unitarianism and its values was the communitarian experiment in rural living known as Brook Farm, initiated by George Ripley in The goal was to unite the mind with the hand and eliminate the corresponding invidious distinctions between classes in society. Everyone Transcendentalism An American Philosophy in farm work and its excellent school on the premises underlined the pedagogical nature of the entire enterprise.

Despite its demise and that of the even smaller, shorter-lived Fruitlands community of Bronson Alcott, the notion of a pastoral retreat of simplicity and cooperation confronting by example the capitalist industrialism of the larger society became fixed in the American imagination. Brook Farm threw into relief a basic tension in Transcendentalism between joint action and individual development. At one pole, Emerson and Thoreau, who both declined to be Brook Farmers, felt that improvement must begin with the self, that many of the specific reforms rampant in Jacksonian America such as prohibition and vegetarianism were too narrowly conceived and that to engage learn more here social and political action was to dissipate creative energies.

One the other side were Brownson, Peabody, and, intermittently Alcott, who felt that rampant individualism was part of the problem, not part of the solution, and that social change could be effected only through social means.

But even Emerson and Thoreau recognized that when evils such as slavery and imperialistic war reach a certain enormity, one must speak out and act, and they, along with other Transcendentalists, most notably Theodore Parker, joined the abolitionist cause.

Well before the firebell of the Civil War, Transcendentalism as a living force seemed to be extinguished as quickly as it flared up.]