Discuss Transcendentalism and Other Views of Nature in Nineteenth-Century America

Question

Examlex · Accepted Answer

The Answer is Romanticism infused all aspects of nineteenth-century American culture and found its purest expression in the transcendental movement.The group of New England Unitarian ministers who formed the first Transcendental Club took its name from a treatise by the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller.Schiller's System of Transcendental Idealism defended the oneness of Spirit and Nature and encouraged the realization of the higher spiritual self through sympathy with nature.The American transcendentalists-descendants of the English Puritans-held that knowledge gained by way of intuition transcended knowledge based on reason and logic.Reacting against the material excesses of advancing industrialization,they found sympathetic ideals in such mystical philosophies as Neoplatonism,and in the religions of East Asia.
The giants of transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.Emerson is perhaps best known for his essays,especially those on the virtues of self-reliance and nonconformity.His poetry shows a mystic reverence for nature and a unique appreciation of Asian philosophy,including the Bhagavad-Gita.Thoreau,a fierce anti-materialist,abandoned urban society to live in the Massachusetts woods near Walden Pond-an experiment that lasted twenty-six months.He described his love of the natural world,his nonconformist attitude toward society,and his deep commitment to monkish simplicity in his "handbook for living," called Walden,or Life in the Woods.In this intimate yet forthright diary,Thoreau glorifies nature as innocent and beneficent-a source of joy and practical instruction.

Discuss Transcendentalism and Other Views of Nature in Nineteenth-Century America

Definitions: