Emerson Ralph Waldo - Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting

Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting

American Philosophy Series

Series Editor: John J. Kaag, University of Lowell

Advisory Board: Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Joe Margolis, Marilyn Fischer, Scott Pratt, Douglas Anderson, Erin McKenna, and Mark Johnson

The American Philosophy Series at Lexington Books features cutting-edge scholarship in the burgeoning field of American philosophy. Some of the volumes in this series are historically oriented and seek to reframe the American canons primary figures: James, Peirce, Dewey, and DuBois, among others. But the intellectual history done in this series also aims to reclaim and discover figures (particularly women and minorities) who worked on the outskirts of the American philosophical tradition. Other volumes in this series address contemporary issuescultural, political, psychological, educationalusing the resources of classical American pragmatism and neopragmatism. Still others engage in the most current conceptual debates in philosophy, explaining how American philosophy can still make meaningful interventions in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and ethical theory.

Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting , by Nicholas L. Guardiano

Thinking the Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy , edited by Marcia Morgan and Megan Craig

Peirces Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality , by Aaron Wilson

Emersons Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes, by Joseph Urbas

Death and Finitude: Toward a Pragmatic Transcendental Anthropology of Human Limits and Mortality, by Sami Pihlstrm

Ethical Habits: A Peircean Perspective, by Aaron Massecar

The American Philosopher: Interviews on the Meaning of Life and Truth , by Phillip McReynolds

Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism , by Stuart Rosenbaum

Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rortys Neopragmatism: Studies, Polemics, Interpretations , by Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski

Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting

Nicholas L. Guardiano

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

Names: Guardiano, Nicholas, author.

Title: Aesthetic transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and nineteenth-century American landscape painting / Nicholas Guardiano.

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Series: American philosophy series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041502 (print) | LCCN 2016044523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498524537 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498524544 (Electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of natureUnited States. | Transcendentalism (New England) | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18031882. | Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 18391914. | Nature (Aesthetics) | Art and philosophyUnited States. | Landscape painting, American19th century.

Classification: LCC BD581.G79 2016 (print) | LCC BD581 (ebook) | DDC 141/.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041502

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real.

Charles S. Peirce, The First Rule of Logic

NOTE

.Charles S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things : The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898 , ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 177.

Contents

The primary goal of this book is to present and argue for a philosophy entitled Transcendentalist Aesthetics or Aesthetic Transcendentalism. Its central claim is that there is an aesthetic dimension of nature that is metaphysically significant, qualitatively pluralistic, and artistically creative, and that this accounts for the sensuous complexity of experience, as well as the possibility of discovering new qualitative features about the world and expressing them in novel forms, as exemplified in art. This treatise is the first full-length presentation of the philosophy, which I historically ground in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles S. Peirce, and in the American landscape paintings of the Hudson River School and Luminism; I further evaluate it against the greater history of Western philosophy by critically comparing its ideas to alternative theories in metaphysics and aesthetics.

The project as such is part historical and part original, or in other words, part interpretive and part creative. That is, it engages in some exegetical analysis of Emersons and Peirces ideas and some art historical criticism of the painters, yet primarily as a means to the end of presenting an Aesthetic Transcendentalism. Simultaneously, as an interdisciplinary study that brings together a philosophical and literary figure in Emerson, the scientifically minded philosopher Peirce, and the arts in the form of American landscape painting, it effectively contributes to a cultural analysis that identifies a defining facet of the North American intellectual tradition. An Aesthetic Transcendentalism is simultaneously consequent within the American tradition and a creative amplification of it.