Explain Transcendentalist Literature
Transcendentalism is an American erudite, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET 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 review of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the dubitation of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new period was at hand. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and prompted that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “ an original relation to the macrocosm” (O, 3). Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitariness amidst nature, and in their jotting. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, Explain Transcendentalist Literature were engaged in the social trials of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an decreasingly critical notice of American slavery.
Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two felicitations they believed in the significance and efficacity of mortal seeking, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and necessary mortal depravity; and they emphasized the concinnity rather than the “ Trio” of God ( hence the term “ Unitarian,” firstly a term of abuse that they came to borrow.) Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET Utmost of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still lesser than mortal beings; a many followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804) in holding that Jesus was completely mortal, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading dominie, William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved mortal beings from sin, not just from discipline. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET His homily “ Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “ the conspiracy of periods against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “ Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that mortal beings “ partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “ a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” (T, 4). Explain Transcendentalist Literature
The Unitarians were “ ultramodern.” They tried to attune Locke’s empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the accounts of cautions in the Bible give inviting substantiation for the verity of religion. It was precisely on this ground, still, that the transcendentalists plant fault with Unitarianism. For although they respected Channing’s idea that mortal beings can come more like God, they were converted by Hume that no empirical evidence of religion could be satisfactory. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET In letters written in his beginner time at Harvard (1817), Emerson tried out Hume’s skeptical arguments on his devout and reputed Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in his journals of the early 1820s he discusses with blessing Hume’s Discourses on Natural Religion and his underpinning notice of necessary connection. “ We've no experience of a Creator,” Emerson writes, and thus we “ know of none” (JMN 2, 161).
Dubitation about religion was also formed by the publication of an English restatement ofF.D.E. Schleiermacher’s Critical Essay Upon the Philosophy ofSt. Luke (1825), which introduced the idea that the Bible was a product of mortal history and culture. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET Inversely important was the publication in 1833 — some fifty times after its original appearance in Germany — of James Marsh’s restatement of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious textbooks and humanly- produced poetry, casting mistrustfulness on the authority of the Bible, but also suggesting that textbooks with equal authority could still be written. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET It was against this background that Emerson asked in 1836, in the first paragraph of Nature “ Why should we not have a poetry and gospel of sapience and not of tradition, and a religion by disclosure to us, and not the history of theirs” (O, 5). The existent’s “ disclosure” — or “ suspicion,” as Emerson was latterly to speak of it — was to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean dubitation.
An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German gospel was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805 – 90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of sense, transferred him to introductory academy in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “ German theories” and his immense gifts of education and expression, he laments that Coleridge hadn't made Kant and thepost-Kantians more accessible to an English- speaking followership. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET This is the task — to introduce the “ transcendental gospel” of Kant, (T, 87) — that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in gospel “ (S) ince the supposition that our anticipations depend on the nature of the world without, won't answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our anticipations.” Explain Transcendentalist Literature This “ key to the whole critical gospel,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “ a priori knowledge” (T, 92). Barricade organized what ultimately came known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected youthful Unitarian church. Transcendentalist Literature | M.A Entrance | UGC NET The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four times, and was a guarantor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Barricade was a oral opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and came a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.
Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German gospel was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766 – 1817), whose De l’Allemagne (On Germany) was a fave of the youthful Emerson. In a broad check of European theories and political gospel, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalistic academy of epistemology that leads to the dubitation of Hume. Explain Transcendentalist Literature She finds an seductive discrepancy in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.
James Marsh (1794 – 1842), a graduate of Andover and the chairman of the University of Vermont, was inversely important for the arising gospel of transcendentalism. Marsh was induced that German gospel held the key to a reformed theology. Explain Transcendentalist Literature His American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced Coleridge’s interpretation — much obliged to Schelling — of Kantian language, language that runs throughout Emerson’s early work. Explain Transcendentalist Literature In Nature, for illustration, Emerson writes “ The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world” (O, 25).
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