Now Flameless Embers

I realise that what I am doing here is a prime example of 'blog-for-blog's sake', not a dissimilar idea to that of 'art-for-art's sake'. Because, it is only through love of writing, literature, Scripture and a lack of something to do that this weblog lives on. I mean, it's hardly as if anything vaguely meaningful or helpful has been brought to light through any of these literary vagaries. Enlightening perhaps.

That's aside though. The main reason for today's entry is to elaborate upon yesterday's blog, which included the writings of Henry David Thoreau, a man close to my heart and similar in sympathies. I realised, with a sudden shock not unlike one experienced upon the first step into an ice-cold paddling pool, that I wasn't entirely clear myself upon the meaning of the word 'transcendentalism', familiar as I am with it's followers and philosophies. And so, to enlighten myself as much as anyone else, here is a heavily inspired and attemptedly brief definition of the term...

Transcendentalism - An Exegesis

First to clear up a common misconception - this philosophy has nothing to do with the removal of teeth or the replacement of fillings.

American transcendentalism was an important movement in the worlds of philosophy and literature, flourishing in the years of the early to mid 19th century (1836-1860, specifically). It started as a reform movement in the Unitarian church, extending the views of William Ellery Channing on an indwelling God and the significance of intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism holding to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford Companion to American Literature). It's adherents believe that the human soul is identical to the world's soul, and contains what the world contains.

Transcendentalists rejected Lockean empiricism, unlike the Unitarians: they wanted to rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England Calvinism (although none of its dogma) and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and supernatural light," imparted immediately to the soul by the spirit of God.

Here's Lawrence Buell:

"Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence"

Webliography - Link here

KTF

Reading - Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)

Relaxing to - '93 Til Infinity (Souls of Mischief), Cypress Hill