RT Article
T1 Chinese Thought and Transcendentalism: Ecology, Place and Conservative Radicalism
JF Religions
VO 14
IS 5
A1 Crippen, Matthew
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2023
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1843472538
AB My central claim is that resonances between Transcendentalist and Chinese philosophies are so strong that the former cannot be adequately appreciated without the latter. I give attention to the Analects, the Mengzi and the Tiantai Lotus Sutra, which Transcendentalists read. Because there was conceptual sharing across Chinese traditions, plus evidence suggesting Transcendentalists explored other texts, my analysis includes discussions of Daoism and Weishi, Huayan and Chan Buddhism. To name just some similarities between the targeted outlooks, Transcendentalists adopt something close to wu-wei or effortless action; though hostile to hierarchy, they echo the Confucian stress on rituals or habits; Thoreau’s individualistic libertarianism is moderated by a radical causal holism found in many Chinese philosophies; and variants of Chinese Buddhism get close to Transcendentalist metaphysics and epistemologies, which anticipate radical embodied cognitive science. A specific argument is that Transcendentalists followed some of their Chinese counterparts by conserving the past and converting it into radicalism. A meta-argument is that ideas were exchanged via trade from Europe through North Africa to Western Asia and India into the Far East, and contact with Indigenous Americans led to the same. This involved degrees of misrepresentation, but it nonetheless calls upon scholars to adopt more global approaches.
K1 social and political philosophy
K1 metaphysics and epistemology
K1 Thoreau
K1 Emerson
K1 ecology and place
K1 Daoism
K1 Chinese philosophy
K1 Chinese Buddhism
K1 Confucianism
K1 American Transcendentalism
DO 10.3390/rel14050570