The Metaphysical Correspondence between Nature and Spirit in the Visions of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

TRANS- ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vesselina Runkwitz
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Romantic Influence and Nature Reconsidered: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
British Romanticism

This chapter reads the thought and writing of Emerson and Thoreau as exhibiting a knowing self-consciousness about their treatment of self and nature and its use of allusion to the literary and cultural tradition of British Romanticism. What is offered is a fresh awareness of the intellectual and imaginative engagement of the thought of Emerson and Thoreau with the works of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The chapter also points up the affinities rather than the divisions between these two important American writers and their ideas about self and nature.

Laws That Refuse To Be Stated: The Post-Sectarian Spiritualities of Emerson, Thoreau, and D. T. Suzuki

2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-654
Author(s):  
Palmer Rampell
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Henry David Thoreau

Drawing on previously untranslated Japanese articles, this essay reveals the powerful and sustained influence New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau exerted on the highly renowned and yet highly unorthodox arbiter of Japanese Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki.

Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein

Paragraph ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Laugier
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Spiritual Exercise ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Point Of Departure

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation.

The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
David L. Norton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Informal Group ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Four Books ◽  
American Thought

Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

scholarly journals The Scarlet Letter: Embroidering Transcendentalism and Anti-transcendentalism Thread for an Early American World

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Ramtin Noor-Tehrani (Noor) Mahini ◽  
Erin Barth
Keyword(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Perspective

Published in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the dark romantic story of The Scarlet Letter was immediately met with success, and Hawthorne was recognized as the first fictional writer to truly represent American perspective and experience. At the time when most novelists focused on portraying the outside world, Hawthorne dwelled deeply in the innermost, hidden emotional and mental psyches of his characters. Despite being acquainted to both famed transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and married to the transcendentalist painter Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne was often referred to as anti-transcendentalist or dark romantic writer in The Scarlet Letter. Is he also influenced by the transcendentalist movement in his famed novel?  Evidence shows that he is more transcendentalist than anti-transcendentalist in The Scarlet Letter.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

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