Romanticism and European Philosophy, or “Idealism As It Appears in 1842”

Résumé En

In “The Transcendentalist,” Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842.” Considering Emersonian Transcendentalism as an early and determining instantiation of American Romanticism, this chapter charts the philosophical legacy that it inherited and outlines some of the main European philosophical contexts out of which it grew. In particular, the chapter explores the Transcendentalists’ reception of three strands of European philosophy: Transcendentalism’s origins in the metaphysics of Plato, Plotinus and seventeenth-century Cambridge Neoplatonism; its refutation of Locke’s empiricism and Hume’s scepticism following eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophy; and its reliance on post-Kantian German Idealism as reformulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England and Victor Cousin in France.