Grice Chairs The Transcendental Club

transcendentalism: Also called “New England transcendentalism,” an early nineteenth-century spiritual and philosophical movement in the United States, represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It was centered in the so-called The Transcendental Club in Boston, and published a quarterly journal The Dial. Influenced by German idealism and Romanticism, it claimed that there is a spirit of the whole, the over-soul, which is beyond the space and time of the everyday world but at the same time immanent in it, and which forms a higher spiritual reality. It advocated an ascetic lifestyle, emphasized selfreliance and communal living, and rejected contemporary civilization. The eventual goal of life is to achieve a mystical unity with this spiritual reality, that is, with nature. Transcendentalism is viewed as a mixture of speculative philosophy and semi-religious faith. This philosophical movement had a deep influence upon existentialism, James’s pragmatism, and contemporary environmental philosophy. In a broad sense, transcendentalism is any doctrine that emphasizes the transcendental, and is taken as a synonym of transcendental philosophy. In this sense, all types of absolute philosophy, especially those idealist systems that emphasize the transcendence of the Absolute over the finite world, are considered examples of transcendentalism. Thus, transcendentalists had aims differing from those of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which criticized those who wished to extend knowledge beyond experience and instead sought to use a transcendental argument to establish the conditions for the possibility of experience. “The transcendentalists believed in man’s ability to apprehend absolute Truth, absolute Justice, absolute Rectitude, absolute goodness. They spoke of the Right, the True, the Beautiful as eternal realities which man can discover in the world and which he can incorporate into his life. And they were convinced of the unlimited perfectibility of man.” Werkmeister, A History of Philosophical Ideas in America