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Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. [1] [2] [3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, [1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendental poetry is a term related to the theory of poetry and literature and, more precisely, to the fields of aesthetics and romantic philosophy. [1] The expression "transcendental poetry" was created by the German critic and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and also used by the poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), also known as Novalis.
Henry David Thoreau embodied the majority of these characteristics, except for neglecting to take action against the government. Thoreau was a staunch abolitionist; his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was actively subverting the government, but Emerson admitted that there was no perfect Transcendentalist.
Illustration of Emerson's transparent eyeball metaphor in "Nature" by Christopher Pearse Cranch, ca. 1836-1838. Emerson uses spirituality as a major theme in the essay. Emerson believed in re-imagining the divine as something large and visible, which he referred to as nature; such an idea is known as transcendentalism, in which one perceives a new God and a new body, and becomes one with his ...
Emerson introduces Transcendentalist and Romantic views to explain an American scholar's relationship to nature. A few key points he makes include: We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself.
Aristotle's substance theory (being a substance belongs to being qua being) has been interpreted as a theory of transcendentals. [3] Aristotle discusses only unity ("One") explicitly because it is the only transcendental intrinsically related to being, whereas truth and goodness relate to rational creatures.
Transcendentalism was rooted in Immanuel Kant's transcendence and German idealism, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who encountered German ideas through their readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only ...
Emerson's spiritual transcendentalism re-emerged in New England following Kant's rational transcendentalism. He was a pivotal member of the Transcendental Club (1836) [ 23 ] and thus had a significant impact on the rise of transcendental humanism.