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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
transcendentalism
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Andrew and I spent many hours on the Windrush porch discussing almost everything under the sun from party politics to mystic transcendentalism.
▪ Many were drawn to a movement called transcendentalism, without ever being able to define for others quite what the word meant.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism \Tran`scen*den"tal*ism\, n. [Cf. F. transcendantalisme, G. transcendentalismus.]

  1. (Kantian Philos.) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.

    Note: As Schelling and Hegel claim to have discovered the absolute identity of the objective and subjective in human knowledge, or of things and human conceptions of them, the Kantian distinction between transcendent and transcendental ideas can have no place in their philosophy; and hence, with them, transcendentalism claims to have a true knowledge of all things, material and immaterial, human and divine, so far as the mind is capable of knowing them. And in this sense the word transcendentalism is now most used. It is also sometimes used for that which is vague and illusive in philosophy.

  2. Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
transcendentalism

1803, in reference to Kant, later to Schelling; 1842 in reference to the New England religio-philosophical movement among American followers of Schelling; from transcendental + -ism.

Wiktionary
transcendentalism

n. 1 The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge. 2 Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction. 3 A philosophy which holds that reasoning is key to understanding reality (associated with Kant); philosophy which stresses intuition and spirituality (associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson); transcendental character or quality. 4 A movement of writers and philosophers in New England in the 19th century who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.

WordNet
transcendentalism

n. any system of philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical and material [syn: transcendental philosophy]

Wikipedia
Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern region of the United States. The movement was a reaction to or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was of particular interest.

Transcendentalism was rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume, and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of German Idealism. It was also influenced by Indian religions, especially the Upanishads.

A core belief was in the inherent goodness of both people and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual, and had faith that people are at their best when truly " self-reliant" and independent.

Their intellectual preoccupations were less reliant on objective empiricism, and more on subjective intuition. They believed that individuals were capable of generating completely original insights with as little attention and deference to past masters as possible.

Usage examples of "transcendentalism".

In both the empiricist and the idealist currents, transcendentalism was the exclusive horizon of ideology, and in the successive centuries nearly all the major currents of philosophy would be drawn into this project.

Against the tired transcendentalism of modern sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rousseauian form, the American constituents thought that only the republic can give order to democracy, or really that the order of the multitude must be born not from a transfer of the title of power and right, but from an arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic interaction of powers linked together in networks.

In fact, from our perspective the transcendentalism of temporality is destroyed most decisively by the fact that it is now impossible to measure labor, either by convention or by calculation.

Modern European philosophy, in its origins and in its creative components that were not subjugated to transcendentalism, continually tended to pose posse at the center of the ontological dynamic: posse is the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in an expansive, constitutive process.

He made acquaintance with Transcendentalism and the Transcendentalists.

Chekhov, in between the two, who helped to make this two-level perception, derived perhaps from transcendentalism, into a principle of fictional order.

On a show business level, Kaine was slick as goose grease and this kind of popularized scientific transcendentalism was his stock in trade.

Once get the church going, and with a preacher of the Dogtown school, to preach out and out transcendentalism, and another ism or two, and they could get up an opposition that would be popular with the people.

Their ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or upon any phase of Transcendentalism.

Magnetism, or Mesmerism, or Swedenborgianism, or Transcendentalism, or some other equally delicious ism, of the same species, and invariably patronized by one and the same species of people.

In Late Bellow, however, the transcendentalism has found its true function, which is Yeatsian — a source of metaphor, a system of imagery that gives the reader an enduring mortal pang, a sense of his situation in larger orders of time and space.