Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
The terms transcendent and transcendental are used in various senses, all of which, as a rule, have antithetical reference in some way to experience or the empirical order.
(1) For the Scholastics, the categories are the highest classes of “things that are and are spoken of”. The transcendentals are notions, such as unity, truth, goodness, being, which are wider than the categories, and, going beyond them, are said to transcend them. In a metaphysical sense transcendent is opposed by the Scholastics and others to immanent; thus, the doctrine of Divine Transcendence is opposed to the doctrine of Divine Immanence in the Pantheistic sense., Here, however, there is no reference to experience. (See IMMANENCE.)
(2) In the loosest sense of the word any philosophy or theology which lays stress on the intuitive, the mystical, the ultra-empirical, is aid to be transcendentalism. Thus, it is common to refer to the New England School of Transcendentalism, of which mention is made further on.
(3) In a stricter sense transcendentalism refers to a celebrated distinction made by Kant. Though he is not consistent in the use of the terms transcendent and transcendental, Kant understands by transcendent what lies beyond the limits of experience, and by transcendental he understands the non-empirical or a priori elements in our knowledge, which do not come from experience but are nevertheless, legitimately applied to the data or contents of knowledge furnished by experience. The distinction is somewhat subtle, Yet, it may be made clear by an example. Within the limits of experience we learn the uniform sequence of acorn and oak, heat and expansion, cold and contraction, etc., and we give the antecedent as the cause of the consequent. If, now, we go beyond the total of our experience and give God as the cause of all things, we are using the category “cause in a transcendent sense, and that use is not legitimate. If, however, to the data of sequence furnished by experience we apply the a priori form causation, we are introducing a transcendental element which elevates our knowledge to the rank of universal and necessary truth: “Every effect has its cause.” Kant, as has been said, does not always adhere to this distinction. We may , then, understand transcendent and transcendental to refer to those elements or factors in our knowledge which do not come from experience, but are known a priori. Empirical philosophy is, therefore, a philosophy based on experience alone and adhering to the realm of experience in obedience to Hume’s maxim, ” ‘Tis impossible to go beyond experience.” Transcendental philosophy, on the contrary, goes beyond experience, and considers that philosophical speculation is concerned chiefly, if not solely, with those things which lie beyond experience.
(4) Kant himself was convinced that, for the theoretical reason, the transcendental reality, the thing-in-itself, is unknown and unknowable. Therefore, he defined the task of philosophy to consist in the examination of knowledge for the purpose of determining the a priori elements, in the systematic enumeration of those elements, for forms, and the determination of the rules for their legitimate application to the data of experience. Ultra-empirical reality, he taught, is to be known only by the practical reason. Thus, his philosophy is critical transcendentalism. Thus, too he left to his successors the task of bridging over the chasm between the theoretical and the practical reason. This task they accomplished in various ways, eliminating, transforming, or adapting the transcendent reality outside us. the thing-in-itself, and establishing in this way different transcendentalisms in place of the critical transcendentalism of Kant.
(5) Fiche introduced Egoistic Transcendentalism. The subject, he taught, or the Ego, has a practical as well as a theoretical side. to develop its practical side along the line of duty, obligation, and right, it is obliged to posit the non-Ego. In this way, the thing-in-itself as opposed to the subject, is eliminated, because it is a creation of the Ego, and, therefore all transcendental reality is contained in self. I am I, the original identity of self with itself, is the expression of the highest metaphysical truth.
(6) Schelling, addressing himself to the same task, developed Transcendental Absolutism. He brought to the problems of philosophy a highly spiritual imaginativeness and a scientific insight into nature which were lacking in Kant, the critic of knowledge, and Fiche, the exponent of romantic personalize. He taught that the transcendental reality is neither subject or object, but an Absolute which is so indeterminate that it may be said to be neither nature nor spirit. Yet the Absolute is, in a sense, potentially both the one and the other. For, from it, by gravity, light and organization, is derived spirit, which slumbers in nature, but reaches consciousness of self in the highest natural organization, man. There is here a hint of development which was brought out explicitly by Hegel.
(7) Hegel introduced Idealistic Transcendentalism. He taught that reality is not an unknowable thing in itself, nor the subject merely, nor an absolute of indifference, but an absolute Idea, Spirit, or Concept (Begriff), whose essence is development (das Werden), and which becomes in succession object and subject, nature and spirit, being and essence, the soul, law, the state, art, science, religion, and philosophy.
In all these various meanings there is preserved a generic resemblance to the original signification of the term transcendentalism. The transcendentalists one and all, dwell in the regions beyond experience, and, if they do not condemn experience as untrustworthy, at least they value experience only in so far as it is elevated, sublimated, and transformed by the application to it of transcendental principles. The fundamental epistemological error of Kant, that whatever is universal and necessary cannot come from experience, runs all through the transcendentalist philosophy, and it is on epistemological grounds that the transcendentalists are to be met. This was the stand taken in Catholic circles, and there, with few exceptions, the doctrines of the transcendentalists met with a hostile reception. The exceptions were Franz Baader (1765-1841), Johann Frohschammer (1821-1893), and Anton Günther (1785-1863), who in their attempt to “reconcile” Catholic dogma with modern philosophical opinion, were influenced by the transcendentalists and overstepped the boundaries of orthodoxy. It may without unfairness be laid to the charge of the German transcendentalists that their disregard for experience and common sense is largely accountable for the discredit into which metaphysics has fallen in recent years.
New England transcendentalism, sometimes called the Concord School of Philosophy, looks to William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) as its founder. Its principal representatives are Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Frederick Henry Hedge (1805-890), George Ripley (1802-1880), and Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). It had its inception in the foundation of the Transcendental Club in 1836. The chief influences discernible in its literary output are German philosophy, French sociology, and the reaction against the formalism of Its sociological and economic theories were tested in the famous Brook Farm (1841), with which the names just mentioned and those of several other distinguished Americans were associated.
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For the history of German transcendentalism see Ueberweg, Hist. of Philosophy, tr. Morris (New York, 1892); Falckenberg, Hist. of Modern Philosophy, tr. Armstrong (New York, 1893); Turner, Hist. of Philosophy (Boston, 1903); Stöckl, Gesch. der Phil. (Mainz, 1888). For New England transcendentalism see Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (New York, 1876); Codman, Brook Farm (Boston, 1894).
WILLIAM TURNER
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XVCopyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Transcendentalism
a name given to some forms of recent German philosophy. Fichte taught a subjective idealism, Schelling an objective idealism, and Hegel an absolute idealism-regarding thought and being as identical. Nature is God coming into self-consciousness, for he is ever striving after self-realization: In order to philosophize aright, we must lose our own personality in God, who is chiefly revealed in the acts of the human mind. In the infinite developments of divinity, anti the infinite progress towards self- consciousness, the greatest success is reached in the exertions of human reason. In men’s minds, therefore, is the highest manifestation of God. God recognizes himself best in human reason, which is a consciousness of God. And it is by human reason that the world (hitherto without thought, and so without existence, mere negation) comes into consciousness; thus God is revealed in the world. After arriving at an ideal God, we learn that philosophy and religion draw us away from our little selves, so that our separate consciousness is dissolved in that of God. Philosophy is religion; and true religion frees man from all that is low, and from himself, from clinging to I-hood (Ichheit) and subjectivity, and helps him to life in God as the truth, and thereby to true life. In this ablation of personal identity, we must not claim property even in our own thoughts. Hegel teaches that it is God who thinks in us; nay, that it is precisely that which thinks in us which is God. The pure and primal substance manifests itself as the subject; and true knowledge of the absolute is the absolute itself. There is but a step to take and we arrive at the tenet that the universe and God are one.
The Hegelians attempt to distinguish this from the doctrine of Spinoza, but their distinctions are inappreciable; their scheme is pantheism. And as God is revealed by all the phenomena of the world’s history, he is partly revealed by moral action, and consequently by sin, no less than by holiness. Sin is, therefore, a part of the necessary evolution of the divine principle; or, rather, in any sense, which can affect the conscience, there is no evil in sin there is no sin. It was reserved for Hegel to abandon all the scruples of six thousand years, and publish the discovery certainly the most wonderful in the history of human research that something and nothing are the same! In declaring it he almost apologizes, for he says that this proposition appears so paradoxical that it may readily be supposed that it is not seriously maintained. Yet he is far from being ambiguous. Something and nothing are the same. The absolute of which so much is vaunted is nothing. But the conclusion, which is, perhaps, already anticipated by the reader’s mind, and which leaves us incapacitated for comment, is this-we shudder while we record it-that after the exhaustive abstraction is carried to infinity in search of God, we arrive at nothing. God himself is nothing! (Princeton Essays).
These systems of philosophy in Germany, that nation of thinkers and critics, have, each in its turn, influenced the science of Biblical philology; and whether it be the moralism of Kant, or the idealism of Fichte, or the deeper transcendentalism of Hegel, it makes Scripture speak its own dogmas, and consecrates the apostles the coryphaei of its system. When Strauss wrote his Leben Jesu, Germany was thrilled by the publication all classes of her divines and philosophers, historians and scholars. When, as in this work of Strauss, all historical reality is denied to the gospels, and they are declared to be composed, not of facts, but ideas, and are affirmed to describe, not a personal God or a historical Christ, but a cluster of notions intensely prevalent in Judaea; and when it is argued that the names and events occurring in the evangelical narrations are but symbols of inward emotions, and the blasphemies of pantheism are reasoned for from the union of deity and humanity in Jesus, as shadowing forth the identity of the forms vulgarly named Creator and creature, it is easily seen that the author uses the philosophy of Hegel as the great organ of perverting and desecrating the records of the evangelists, especially of polluting the finer and more experimental portions of the work of the beloved disciple. Weisse, the producer of a similar mixture of boldness and impiety, declares it impossible for any one to understand his theology unless he have mastered his philosophy.
No one can comprehend the systems of Daub, Schwartz, or Schleiermacher till he has mastered the philosophy which Schelling propounded in his early and adventurous youth. A life beyond the grave, says. Strauss, is the last foe which speculative criticism has to encounter, and, if it can, to extirpate. So, to find a place for such theories, this author commenced a series of wild and unjustifiable attacks on the gospels, finding discrepancies where there are none, creating exaggerations where the narrative is easy and simple, denying the possibility of miracles, and involving the whole narrative in confusion and mystery, in order to destroy its historical character, and render its interpretation possible only on the supposition of its being a useless and disconnected mythology. Whatever sophistry and perverted logic could supply, whatever perplexity a shrewd and malicious criticism could suggest, whatever reasoning a clever and fascinating philosophy could produce, were used to create and garnish the new hypothesis. The whole system is a sad memorial of the proud and unhallowed wisdom of this world, impugning the revelation already given, delighting in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and exalting in withdrawing every thought from the obedience of Christ. Well might Eschenmayer speak of the Ischariotismus of Hegelianism. While it kissed, it betrayed, and at length proceeded to the trial and condemnation of its victim (Old and New, Aug. 1870, p, 186). SEE DEISM; SEE PANTHEISM; SEE RATIONALISM,
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Transcendentalism
Any doctrine giving emphasis to the transcendent or transcendental (q.v.).
Originally, a convenient synonym for the “transcendental philosophy” (q.v.) of Kant and Schelling.
By extension, post-Kantian idealism.
Any idealistic philosophy positing the immanence of the ideal or spiritual in sensuous experience.
The philosophy of the Absolute (q.v.), the doctrine ofa) the immanence of the Absolute in the finite; b) the transcendence of the Absolute above the finite conceived as illusion or “unreality”.
A name, onginally pejorative, given to and later adopted by an idealistic movement in New England centering around the informal and so-called “Transcendental Club,” organized at Boston in 1836. An outgrowth of the romantic movement, its chief influences were Coleridge, Schelling and Orientalism. While it embodied a general attitude rather than a systematically worked out philosophy, in general it opposed Lockean empiricism, materialism, rationalism, Calvinism, Deism, Trinitarianism, and middle-class commercialism. Its metaphysics followed that of Kant and post-Kantian idealism posited the immanancc of the divine in finite existence, and tended towards pantheism (Emerson’s “Nature”, “Oversoul”, “The Transcendentalist”). Its doctrine of knowledge was idealistic and intuitive. Its ethics embraced idealism, individualism, mysticism, reformism and optimism regarding human nature. Theologically it was autosoteric, unitarian, and broadly mystical (Theo. Parker’s “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity”).
Popularly, a pejorative term for any view that is “enthusiastic”, “mystical”, extravagant, impractical, ethereal, supernatural, vague, abstruse, lacking in common sense. — W.L.