American Transcendentalism

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the concept of transcendentalism is often used in religious and philosophical debates to describe the characteristic of divinity, the feature of God to transcend being and the immanent world. The author relates that famous intellectuals of the time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Putnam, Elisabeth Palmer Peabody and Frederick Henry Hedge shaped this movement with the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1836. The paper concludes that the philosophy and evolution of the philosophical and religious perspective of transcendentalism should be seen only within the larger frame of the dominant ideology of the time and of the epistemological barriers and rigid framework, which were dominant in the universities of the time.

From the Paper:

"For Emerson, on the other hand, the unity between the soul and the nature is announced even since the publication of his work "Nature". Here, he expressed that all the beings in the Nature are interconnected with each other and with the infinite Oversoul, or Nature. The reverberations of individual acts are felt within the entire system as consequences and the individual has not only the ability to decide autonomously about his acts, but also the duty to deal with the consequences of his own actions, when confronted to his own internal intuition, with his soul."

Sample of Sources Used:

• The Transcendentalist, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842, Retrieved March 10, 2007 from http://www.emersoncentral.com/transcendentalist.htm
• Transcendentalism. (n.d.). The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/transcendentalism
• Hodder, Allan D - "Ex Oriente Lux": Thoreau's Ecstasies and the Hindu texts, Harvard Theological Review, 86 (4), 1992, pp. 403-438
• Hutchinson, William R. - The Transcendentalists as Church Reformers: Conflict and Experimentation in American Unitarianism, 1836-1853, Yale University, 1956

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