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Transcendentalism was a 19th-century American philosophy that emphasized the unity of spirit and nature. Its most renowned spokesman was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called it “the Saturnalia or excess of Faith.” That which is “popularly called Transcendentalism among us,” he wrote, “is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (Emerson, 198, 193). Rather than being a well-organized and clearly defined movement, transcendentalism was instead the name given to a loosely knit group of authors, preachers, and lecturers bound together by their opposition…

[English Version] I. Religionsphilosophisch Der Ausdruck T. geht, vorbereitet durch ältere Terminologien (Transzendentalien), auf die krit. Transzendentalphilosophie I. Kants zurück und bez. im Anschluß an dessen Bestimmung des Begriffs »transzendental« eine solche methodische Denkweise, die »sich nicht so wohl mit Gegenständen, sondern mit unserer Erkenntnisart von Gegenständen, so fern diese a priori möglich sein soll, überhaupt beschäftigt« (KrV, B 25). Er beinhaltet ein methodisches Programm, für das eine doppelte Abgrenzung konstitutiv ist: G…

[German Version] I. Philosophy of Religion The term transcendentalism, preceded by earlier terminology (Transcendentals), goes back to the critical transcendental philosophy of I. Kant; following on his definition of the term transcendental, it denotes a method of thinking that “is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible a priori” ( KrV, B 25). It implies a methodological program defined by a dual differentiation: in contrast to rationalism, it asserts that our concepts, t…