1) History of Transcendentalism:
Transcendentalism is a 19th-century school of American religious and philosophical thinking that blended Unitarianism and German Romanticism with respect for nature and self sufficiency. The movement, which was loosely present in Massachusetts in the early 1800s before becoming an organised group in the 1830s, was primarily practised by the author Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The emergence of Unitarianism in early 1800s New England is where transcendentalism first emerged. It developed out of a disagreement between “Old Light” opponents, who prized reason in their religious approach, and “New Light” theologians, who thought that religion should emphasise an emotional experience. These “Old Lights” were characterised by their conviction that there was no trinity of father, son, and holy ghost as in orthodox Christian dogma and that Jesus Christ was a mortal. They initially became known as “liberal Christians” and then as Unitarians.
The beliefs that would later become Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism due to its alleged rationalism and embraced German Romanticism in an effort to have a more spiritual experience. The several philosophies started to circulate within this movement. The movement’s thinkers accepted concepts proposed by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Vedas, and the founder of the Reformed Church, Emanuel Swedenborg.
Transcendentalists promoted the idea of having a personal understanding of God and held that having spiritual insight might occur without the aid of a middleman. They supported idealism, emphasising the natural world and rejecting materialism. The Transcendentalist concepts were brought together in literature by the 1830s, which signalled the start of a more formalised movement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson planned the inaugural gathering of the group that would become known as the Transcendental Club in September 1836. The group’s discussion of Unitarianism’s shortcomings and core principles drew inspiration from Romanticism, German intellectuals, and the Upanishads, Hindu spiritual writings. Emerson’s essay “Nature” serves as the first piece of writing on the transcendentalists’ beliefs to be published.
A number of influential people, most notably Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, authored numerous writings to advance the dissemination of transcendentalist ideas. The Transcendental Club continued to meet frequently, bringing in new members. The Dial, a periodical for transcendentalist writers, was founded in 1840. Communities in utopias like Brook Farm and Fruitlands made an effort to make transcendentalism a full-fledged way of life.
The movement started to wane by the end of the 1840s as many influential transcendentalists started to pursue other interests. The premature death of Margaret Fuller, a major transcendentalist and cofounder of The Dial, accelerated this deterioration even more. Transcendentalism experienced a smaller second wave around this time, but it was unable to regain the level of popularity it had in the preceding ten years. As a result, the movement progressively lost favour with the general public, even though many people still hold its principles today. Even today, transcendentalist ideals like the value of free thought, individualism, and enjoying the moment are expressed in films like The Dead Poets Society and The Lion King.
2) Transcendental Idealism:
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, established the transcendental idealism school of thought in the 18th century. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is filled with his epistemological programme. By transcendental, Kant indicates that his philosophical view of knowledge transcends the simple analysis of sensory evidence and necessitates knowledge of the mind’s innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.
In the section on “Transcendental Aesthetic” in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes how time and space are purely intuitive concepts that come from our own sense of sensibility. Although they are the “subjective” shapes of our sensibility and hence the necessary a priori circumstances under which the objects we confront in our experience can even appear to us, space and time do not exist “outside” of us. Time and space, according to Kant, are transcendentally ideal but “empirically real.”
According to Kant, the conscious subject only perceives the objects of experience in the context of our sensibility, not as they are in themselves. Therefore, Kant’s concept limits the range of our cognition to appearances supplied to our sensibility and rejects the idea that we can have knowledge of things irrespective of how we experience them through our cognitive capacities, or things as they are in themselves.
3) Transcendental Realism:
A realist theory of science begins with a proposed paradox: how it is that people produce knowledge as a result of social interactions and at the same time knowledge is “of” things that are not produced by people at all. The former is motivated by Kuhnian arguments about how scientific communities develop knowledge and asserts that all observation is theory-laden and based on previously acquired concepts. Therefore, it is not a naive realist viewpoint to claim that knowledge is a direct acquisition of facts by observation of reality, but rather that knowledge is subject to error. Given that information can change through time, this ontological position is referred to as the transitive domain of knowledge.
It is said that the second part of the paradox is based on a real world that exists and functions in the same way whether or not there are people or whether they are conscious of the actual world. The intransitive sphere of knowledge is what is meant by this. The epistemic mistake, which Bhaskar claims has been committed frequently during the past 300 years of philosophy of science, is the reduction of ontology to epistemology.
Transcendental realism’s explanation of the world goes on to say that it is further split into the real, the actual, and the empirical in addition to the real world and our knowledge of it. The real is the intransitive realm of existing things (i.e., the real world), including things, their structures, and their causal potential. It is crucial to remember that even though certain structures and objects may be capable of carrying out specific tasks, those tasks may not actually be carried out. The events that truly take place, whether or not individuals are aware of them, are the actual, which is what this gives rise to. The empirical contains the things that genuine people have gone through.
A stratified reality is further supported by transcendental realism. It is possible to develop completely new structures with new causal powers by combining the causal powers of different objects and their interconnections. The basic example of this is water, which can put out a fire but is composed of elements like oxygen and hydrogen that can cause combustion. All sciences fall under this classification, including physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, etc. This suggests that sociological concepts like capitalism and labour markets are just as real as those found in science. This is not a reductionist viewpoint because, despite the fact that each stratum depends on the objects and connections in the strata below it, their disparate causal capacities make them inevitably separate objects.
According to other scientific theories rooted in the Humean tradition, the regularity of event sequences serves as the foundation for causation. This explanation of causation has little significance for transcendental realism because, according to Sayer (2000, p. 14), “what causes something to happen has nothing to do with the number of times we have observed it happening.” Instead of referring to events, transcendental realism speaks of causal mechanisms, the internal workings of objects that give rise to events. These systems could be inactive or work against one another to stop things from happening.
4) Criticisms of Transcendentalism:
Spirituality Over Organized Religion:
Transcendentalism’s preference for promoting individual spirituality over churches and other forms of organised religion was, for the majority of people, its most shocking aspect. Many people’s lives at this time were centred around religion, so any movement that suggested they give it up or said it was corrupting would have been incomprehensible to them.
Over-Reliance on Independence:
A lot of people, including some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, believed that transcendentalism occasionally undervalued the value of interpersonal relationships and overemphasised the need to rely only on oneself, to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness. Some individuals think that Herman Melville was criticising total independence when he wrote Moby Dick. Ahab, the main character in the book, eschews almost all ties of friendship and is entirely preoccupied with his mission to kill the white whale. He finally dies as a result of this. Margaret Fuller also believed that transcendentalism may assist neighbourhood efforts to enhance the lives of others, such as promoting the rights of women and children.
Abstract Values:
Have trouble comprehending what the transcendentalists’ true goals were? Numerous individuals did as well, which led them to perceive the movement as nothing more than a group of idealists who delighted in attacking established norms but lacked clarity regarding what they actually desired. The trend was criticised by Edgar Allen Poe for encouraging “obscurity for obscurity’s sake.”
Unrealistic Utopian Ideals:
The transcendentalists’ emphasis on taking pleasure in life and making the most of their spare time was seen by others as hopelessly idealistic and naive. The utopian villages that some transcendentalists established to encourage community life and the balance of work and labour were severely criticised. The Brook Farm communal living experiment guest Nathaniel Hawthorne detested his stay so much that he produced a full book, The Blithe Dale Romance, attacking the idea and transcendentalist ideals in general.