What is a transcendentalists philosophy?

Answer 1

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.

Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among Transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Prominent Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, as well as Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, George Putnam, and Sophia Peabody, the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For a time, Peabody and Hawthorne lived at the Brook Farm Transcendentalist utopian commune.

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Answer 2

Philosophically speaking, transcendentalism dates back to an old argument between the philosophers Immanual Kant and David Hume. Hume was a skeptic, believing that all that we know was primarily derived from our senses, while Kant went to lengths to dispel this idea in general, and Hume's contributions specifically.

Kant's idea of transcendentalism suggests that our senses cannot wholly be the source of our knowledge of the world, because there is some knowledge that tells us how our senses operate. This limited body of knowledge tells us how to use our senses on things, the limits of our senses, and possibly therefore much more.

You can see why it's called 'transcendentalism'. If a skeptic says "we only know what our senses tell us, and beyond this border we can know nothing", the transcendentalist may easily respond, "if this is so, how can you know about your senses themselves?" Because we know the limits of what we can perceive, a transcendentalist would say that we can also know some things BEYOND what we can perceive.

Take, for example, an artist's palette. You see a blob of orange paint. But you have the transcendental knowledge that if red and yellow paint is mixed together, it LOOKS orange. Thus although see one thing, you may (perhaps) realize that it is something else.

Another good example is an illusionist's show. A good illusionist will show you all kinds of things: people flying, audience members sawed in half, things appearing and disappearing, and so on. Yet you know none of these things are real, even though your senses are telling you they are. And you are absolutely correct in this knowledge.

Thus we can see a couple ways the view of skepticism is weakened. Our knowledge can help us perceive and understand things, such that we can see more than we see in many occasions.

Other ideas and movements came to be called transcendentalist afterward. They seem to have adopted the label largely because of Kant's idea that something beyond the senses could provide a person with knowledge. One example of this was the American Transcendental Movement, a sort of religious and literary renaissance that occurred much later in the 19th century. But let's not put the cart before the horse here.

Answer 3

It's a philosophy that "asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific, and is knowable through intuition."

This means it's the belief that there is a "larger reality" that contains the material universe in which we live, but is also much more. The nature of that larger reality is something that can be understood by human beings through intuition as opposed to scientific observation. It emerged in 19th Century America, and was espoused by writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Answer 4

Transcend means surpass, behond. Philosophy behond human knowledge?