: a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality
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: a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and transcendental over the material and empirical
Recent Examples on the WebThough The Will to Live is lyrically rich with a kind of punk transcendentalism, the album sounds anything but natural. Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 9 Sep. 2022 So was exploring how the ideals of transcendentalism (the philosophical movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson) influenced his character. Gregg Goldstein, Variety, 8 Sep. 2022 Hickey goes on to read Gober’s stacks of newspapers and boxes of rat poison placed within a paint-by-numbers wraparound wallpaper of a New England forest as situated between the history of American transcendentalism and the raging AIDS crisis. Jarrett Earnest, The New York Review of Books, 8 June 2022 At the center of the story are Ralph Waldo Emerson and his protégé, Henry David Thoreau, who championed transcendentalism as a way to break with dogmas of the Old World so that Americans would be empowered to think for themselves. Danny Heitman, The Christian Science Monitor, 8 Dec. 2021 While Emerson was diving into nature to become a transparent eyeball, forging the new, homegrown American philosophy of transcendentalism, Poe was cobbling together a myriad of sources in a wild patchwork. Colin Dickey, The New Republic, 21 July 2021 Its workshops span the metaphysical and spiritual, lending the center an air of bohemian transcendentalism. Gregory Thomas, SFChronicle.com, 31 Oct. 2020 Since its beginnings, Esalen has been hailed as the heir to the American transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and it’s been dismissed as the festival grounds for navel-gazing and Boomer narcissism. Wallace Baine, SFChronicle.com, 5 Sep. 2019 Patience Worth’s strange diction, large output, and mix of transcendentalism and Christianity seemed at odds with Curran, a homemaker who dropped out of school at 13. Joy Lanzendorfer, Longreads, 14 June 2018 See More