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American Transcendentalism

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From Walden Pond to Woodstock: The Transcendentalist Roots of the 1960s Counterculture: While many of the countercultural dynamics of the 1960s were original, other aspects had roots in the 19th century, notably within the intellectual landscape of New England transcendentalism. Bill Dinges, a professor of religion and culture at Catholic University, explores this notable American intellectual movement, and how it inspired the activism, literature, and religion of the 1960s and beyond.


The economic collectivism was also obviously there, too, but of the type prior to the influences of Marx and other European proponents. The experimental socialism of transcendentalists failed because it lacked an authoritarian government to enforce and protect it from rival orientations. Though, of course, the latter approach fails too eventually as the Party leaders evolve into oligarchs seeking to enrich themselves. The CCP (China) survived by switching to a Sino-fascism that exploits capitalism and persecutes minorities in rehabilitative "brainwashing" camps, while still masquerading as communism; and North Korea endures via its personality cult variation.

American transcendentalists weren't into the extreme activism, conspiracy mindset, and duplicitous revolutionary tactics descended from Marxism, either; so that's a weaker connection of transcendentalists to the 1960s in terms of the most militant movements (though still some of their intellectual DNA).

New England Transcendentalism: Second, the later inception of romantic idealism in the United States led its exponents to less fluctuating and at the same time less radical programs of social reform. If the typical German or English romantic began with an enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution, became disillusioned by the Terror, and ended his career a conservative, Emerson's disciples felt the outcome of the Revolution as something more distant and, in any case, European. Their social philosophy was the natural outcome of their reactions to the very different American scene. The majority of transcendentalists never wavered in their active opposition to slavery, imperialism, bureaucratization, and cultural philistinism; yet, partly because the United States had already achieved a democracy and partly because Western expansion kept economic conditions relatively good, the transcendentalists were not incited to the more extreme forms of political protest characteristic of such European inheritors of idealism as Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


While American transcendentalists did borrow from Kant, they don't seem to have completely assimilated his view that the "Understanding" faculty was globally distributed in terms of its "operating system": that its concepts output the same consensus, experiential reality for everyone (a natural or scientific world, IOW). But instead they drifted tentatively or slightly in the direction of the malleable cognitive faculty of the continental philosophers. Who by the mid and late 20th-century centuries deemed mutable, local human culture as being the architect of its interpretations. Yielding postmodernism and items like today's political antinaturalism and sociological antinaturalism

Origins and Character: Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims, which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind “forms” experience; that the existence of such mental operations is a counter to skepticism; and that “transcendental” does not mean “transcendent” or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which experience is made possible.

Emerson’s idealism is not purely Kantian, however, for (like Coleridge’s) it contains a strong admixture of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of Reason, for example, as a faculty of “vision,” as opposed to the mundane understanding, which “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues….” (Letters, vol. 1, 413). For many of the transcendentalists the term “transcendentalism” represented nothing so technical as an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind’s powers, and a modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states, believes in miracles, conceived as “the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power…” (O, 100).

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