Transcendentalism

 What is Transcendentalism ?

Transcendentalism an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.

 Characteristics of transcendentalism:

Individualism

Idealism

Divinity of Nature

Major Author in Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson—a New England preacher, essayist, lecturer, poet, and philosopher—was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 19th century in the United States. Emerson was also the first major American literary and intellectual figure to widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for classical Asian and Middle Eastern works. He not only gave countless readers their first exposure to non-Western modes of thinking, metaphysical concepts, and sacred mythologies; he also shaped the way subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers approached the vast cultural resources of Asia and the Middle East.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau is recognized as an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism. His essays, books, and poems weave together two central themes over the course of his intellectual career: nature and the conduct of life. The continuing importance of these two themes is well illustrated by the fact that the last two essays Thoreau published during his lifetime were “The Last Days of John Brown” and “The Succession of Forest Trees” (both in 1860). In his moral and political work Thoreau aligned himself with the post-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy—in particular, the Cynics and Stoics—that used philosophy as a means of addressing ordinary human experience. His naturalistic writing integrated straightforward observation and cataloguing with transcendentalist interpretations of nature and the wilderness. In many of his works Thoreau brought these interpretations of nature to bear on how people live or ought to live.

Margaret fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller, known as Margaret Fuller, was one of the most prominent literary women of the 19th century, and is sometimes thought of as America’s first feminist. Born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, to lawyer and senator Timothy Fuller and Margarett Crane, Fuller received a rigorous classical education not often available to girls of her time at the hands of her father. She attributed his intense lessons and high standards to sleeplessness and nightmares as a child.

In 1840 Emerson and Fuller started the transcendentalist journal The Dial, which Fuller edited before joining the New York Tribune. Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which is considered the first major feminist work in America and became a feminist classic.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Born in 1799 to an illiterate flax farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott was singular among the Transcendentalists in his unassailable optimism and the extent of his self-education. With the encouragement of his spirited and resourceful mother, he taught himself to read and write by forming letters in charcoal on the kitchen floorboards. Profoundly influenced by John Bunyan's book, Pilgrim's Progress, Bronson left home at the age of seventeen to become a peddler in Virginia and the Carolinas. Through the sheer force of his personality, he charmed prosperous Southern families into opening their doors, and thus was introduced to an aesthetic and elegance that inspired him for the rest of his life. After five years, he returned to Connecticut, determined to become an educator. Attracted to Pestalozzi's innovative child-centered educational ideas, he soon began a long and varied career as a teacher.

Transcendentalists talks about individual’s relation with Nature. What is Nature for you ? Share your Views.

👉I think about what is a Nature ? I feel my around all is a nature. My all activities and thought related the nature. Nature is important about me because nature is help our life. I part of a nature and our body all read create nature elements and after death our body convinced the nature. I childhood very close nature  like a land, trees, flower etc. but became a youngest I slowly understand the value of nature in my life. Pas the time change the view about the nature.

Transcendentalism is an American Philosophy that influenced American literature at length. Can you find any Indian/Regional literature or Philosophy came up with such similar thought?

👉I find the Indian philosophy refers to philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. In Hinduism traditional two classification astika and nastika schools of philosophy. In school there are six pats of Vedic philosophy Nayaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta and five is sramanic school Jain, Buddhist, Ajivika, Ajnana and Charvaka.

The main school of philosophy were formalized and recognized chiefly between 500 BCE and the late centuries of the common era. I find the Mimamsa tradition  of  contemplation reflected on the meaning of Vedic. This tradition is know as Purva Mimamsa compared to the karma Mimamsa because purva Mimamsa believe in on the earlier Vedic text to dealing with the ritual action and the same thing in Karama our ritual action believes. Other Mimamsa is Uttara Mimamsa in focus a later portions of the Upanishad. Both of you earlier and later Mimamsa is aim of the human action and the different attitudes the necessity of ritual. In school is a Mimamsa  form of philosophical realism.