In this all-American episode, we’ll talk about the German Higher Criticism, the Rosetta Stone, heiroglyphs, and Emerson’s notion of the Self. American Transcendentalism wasn’t the first iteration of Perennialist thinking, but it became one of the most interesting. It was a refuge for the intellectuals in Boston who couldn’t fit themselves in with the remnant of Puritanism that lingered in the 19th century, but who also weren’t satisfied with the strictly empirical worldview of the Enlightenment generation. Emerson inspired the likes of Whitman and Thoreau and Dickinson, as well as Hawthorne and Melville. Want to be a public intellectual in America? You have to go through Emerson! If you want to support the show, here’s a link:
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