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Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3). Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

1. Origins and Character

2. high tide: the dial , fuller, thoreau, 3. social and political critiques, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” (T, 4).

The Unitarians were “modern.” They attempted to reconcile Locke’s empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the accounts of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for the truth of religion. It was precisely on this ground, however, that the transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism. For although they admired Channing’s idea that human beings can become more like God, they were persuaded by Hume that no empirical proof of religion could be satisfactory. In letters written in his freshman year at Harvard (1817), Emerson tried out Hume’s skeptical arguments on his devout and respected Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in his journals of the early 1820s he discusses with approval Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion and his underlying critique of necessary connection. “We have no experience of a Creator,” Emerson writes, and therefore we “know of none” (JMN 2, 161).

Skepticism about religion was also engendered by the publication of an English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s Critical Essay Upon the Gospel of St. Luke (1825), which introduced the idea that the Bible was a product of human history and culture. Equally important was the publication in 1833—some fifty years after its initial appearance in Germany—of James Marsh’s translation of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious texts and humanly-produced poetry, casting doubt on the authority of the Bible, but also suggesting that texts with equal authority could still be written. It was against this background that Emerson asked in 1836, in the first paragraph of Nature : “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs” (O, 5). The individual’s “revelation”—or “intuition,” as Emerson was later to speak of it—was to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean skepticism.

An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “German metaphysics” and his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant, (T, 87)—that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “[S]ince the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge” (T, 92). Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.

Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766–1817), whose De l’Allemagne ( On Germany ) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.

James Marsh (1794–1842), a graduate of Andover and the president of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging philosophy of transcendentalism. Marsh was convinced that German philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced Coleridge’s version—much indebted to Schelling—of Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson’s early work. In Nature , for example, Emerson writes: “The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world” (O, 25).

German philosophy and literature was also championed by Thomas Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip to Europe in 1831. Carlyle’s philosophy of action in such works as Sartor Resartus resonates with Emerson’s idea in “The American Scholar” that action—along with nature and “the mind of the Past” (O, 39) is essential to human education. Along with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle embraced a “natural supernaturalism,” the view that nature, including human beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to an independent deity.

Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth, whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820s. Wordsworth’s depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping power of the mind that his collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of such power pervades Emerson’s Nature , where he writes of nature as “obedient” to spirit and counsels each of us to “Build … your own world.” Wordsworth has his more receptive mode as well, in which he calls for “a heart that watches and receives” (in “The Tables Turned”), and we find Emerson’s receptive mode from Nature onward, as when he recounts an ecstatic experience in the woods: “I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; The currents of the universal being circulate through me.” (O, 6).

Emerson’s sense that men and women are, as he put it in Nature , gods “in ruins,” led to one of transcendentalism’s defining events, his delivery of an address at the Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838. Emerson portrayed the contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an “eastern monarchy of a Christianity” that had become an “injuror of man” (O, 58). Jesus, in contrast, was a “friend of man.” Yet he was just one of the “true race of prophets,” whose message is not so much their own greatness, as the “greatness of man” (O, 57). Emerson rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak, but because proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken view of the nature of religion: “conversion by miracles is a profanation of the soul.” Emerson’s religion is based not on testimony but on a “perception” that produces a “religious sentiment” (O, 55).

The “Divinity School Address” drew a quick and angry response from Andrews Norton (1786–1853) of the Harvard Divinity School, often known as the “Unitarian Pope.” In “The New School in Literature and Religion” (1838), Norton complains of “a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,” which he traces to German “speculatists” and “barbarians” and “that hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle.” Emerson’s “Address,” he concludes, is at once “an insult to religion” (T, 248) and “an incoherent rhapsody” (T, 249).

An earlier transcendentalist scandal surrounded the publication of Amos Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels (1836). Alcott (1799–1888) was a self-taught educator from Connecticut who established a series of schools that aimed to “draw out” the intuitive knowledge of children. He found anticipations of his views about a priori knowledge in the writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection for the idea that idealism and materiality could be reconciled. Alcott replaced the hard benches of the common schools with more comfortable furniture that he built himself, and left a central space in his classrooms for dancing. The Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels , based on a school Alcott (and his assistant Elizabeth Peabody) ran in Boston, argued that evidence for the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of children’s thought. What people particularly noticed about Alcott’s book, however, were its frank discussions of conception, circumcision, and childbirth. Rather than gaining support for his school, the publication of the book caused many parents to withdraw their children from it, and the school—like many of Alcott’s projects, failed.

Theodore Parker (1810–60) was the son of a farmer who attended Harvard and became a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist. He published a long critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu , and translated Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament , both of which cast doubt on the divine inspiration and single authorship of the Bible. After the publication of his “A Discourse Concerning the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) he was invited to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (he did not), and was no longer welcome in many pulpits. He argued, much as Emerson had in the “Divinity School Address,” that Christianity had nothing essential to do with the person of Jesus: “If Jesus taught at Athens, and not at Jerusalem; if he had wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had forever perished at his birth, Christianity would still have been the Word of God … just as true, just as lasting, just as beautiful, as now it is…” (T, 352). Parker exploited the similarities between science and religious doctrine to argue that although nature and religious truth are permanent, any merely human version of such truth is transient. In religious doctrines especially, there are stunning reversals, so that “men are burned for professing what men are burned for denying” (T, 347).

Surveying the scene in his 1842 lecture, “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson begins with a philosophical account, according to which what are generally called “new views” are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of idealism. It is not a skeptical idealism, however, but an anti-skeptical idealism deriving from Kant:

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg [sic], who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (O, 101–2).

Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims, which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind “forms” experience; that the existence of such mental operations is a counter to skepticism; and that “transcendental” does not mean “transcendent” or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which experience is made possible. Emerson’s idealism is not purely Kantian, however, for (like Coleridge’s) it contains a strong admixture of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of Reason, for example, as a faculty of “vision,” as opposed to the mundane understanding, which “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues….” ( Letters , vol. 1, 413). For many of the transcendentalists the term “transcendentalism” represented nothing so technical as an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind’s powers, and a modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states, believes in miracles, conceived as “the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power…” (O, 100).

Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by speaking always of what “they” say or do, despite the fact that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading transcendentalist. He notes with some disdain that the transcendentalists are “’not good members of society,” that they do not work for “the abolition of the slave-trade” (though both these charges have been leveled at him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (O, 106). This critique is Emerson’s own in such writings as “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar”; and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the “Economy” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden .

The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at first The Christian Examiner , then, after the furor over the “Divinity School Address,” The Western Messenger (1835–41) in St Louis, then the Boston Quarterly Review (1838–44). The Dial (1840–4) was a special case, for it was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental Club, with Margaret Fuller (1810–50) as the first editor. Emerson succeeded her for the magazine’s last two years. The writing in The Dial was uneven, but in its four years of existence it published Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” (the core of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century ) and her long review of Goethe’s work; prose and poetry by Emerson; Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” (which gave the magazine a reputation for silliness); and the first publications of a young friend of Emerson’s, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). After Emerson became editor in 1842 The Dial published a series of “Ethnical Scriptures,” translations from Chinese and Indian philosophical works.

Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and, later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls “her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress” (P, 443), Fuller became friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. In the winters of 1839–44, Fuller organized a series of popular and influential “conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. She journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes the following year. After this publishing success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson’s and the editor of the New York Tribune , invited her to New York to write for the Tribune . Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms: for example, of Longfellow’s poetry and Carlyle’s attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846–9, sending back hundreds of pages for the Tribune . On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of Fire Island, New York.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision of her “Great Lawsuit” manifesto in The Dial , is Fuller’s major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and femininity pass into one another, that there is “no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (T, 418). In classical mythology, for example, “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo; woman of the Masculine as Minerva.” But there are differences. The feminine genius is “electrical” and “intuitive,” the male more inclined to classification (T, 419). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them. What they most want, Fuller maintains, is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom necessary not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, Fuller calls for periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of “distraction” and “imbecility,” and a return only after “the renovating fountains” of individuality have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage. “Union,” she holds, “is only possible to those who are units” (T, 419). In contrast, most marriages are forms of degradation, in which “the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him” (T, 422).

Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson’s “The American Scholar” as the commencement address in 1837. He first published in The Dial when Emerson commissioned him to review a series of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast about for a literary outlet after The Dial’ s failure in 1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers . He also wrote a first draft of Walden , which eventually appeared in 1854.

Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in Emerson’s Nature , which it followed by eighteen years. Nature now becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau’s subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He finds himself “suddenly neighbor to” rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and he learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he can properly sit. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds, he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer, who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his operations.

In Walden ’s opening chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did in The Republic , what are life’s real necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a “life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust” (W, 15). Considering his contemporaries, he finds that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (W, 8). Thoreau’s “experiment” at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality—a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor—he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of “improving the nick of time” (W, 17).

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain—July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other” (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully” (W, 141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town. (It was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance, an episode that became the occasion for “Resistance to Civil Government.”)

At the opening of Walden’s chapter on “Higher Laws” Thoreau confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and hunting for their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle age he has given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in such literary works as Hamlet and the Iliad; and even in certain forms of society: “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet” (“Walking” (1862), p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or uplifting, however. In The Maine Woods , Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world; and in Cape Cod (1865), he records the foreignness, not the friendliness, of nature: the shore is “a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it” (P, 577).

Although Walden initiates the American tradition of environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and writing. In the chapter on “Reading,” Thoreau speaks of books that demand and inspire “reading, in a high sense” (W, 104). He calls such books “heroic,” and finds them equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: “Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares…” (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that Walden is or aspires to be such a book; and indeed the enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built but the book he wrote.

Thoreau maintains in Walden that writing is “the work of art closest to life itself” (W, 102). In his search for such closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the journal as a work in itself, “each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be” (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the days, but it may have no order; or what order it has emerges in the writer’s life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters on “Reading,” “Solitude,” “Economy,” “Winter,” and “Spring,” Walden is more “worked up” than the journal; in this sense, Thoreau came to feel, it is less close to nature than the journal.

The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient: a “mass” of “bugs or spawn” as Emerson put it in “The American Scholar”; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says in Walden . Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles: Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organized by the Transcendental Club; Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. As the nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists’ dissatisfaction with their society became focused on policies and actions of the United States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the war with Mexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.

Emerson’s 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a “removal” agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a minority faction to agree to move to territories west of the Mississippi. Despite the ruling by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall that the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty had been violated, Jackson’s policies continued to take effect. In 1838, President Van Buren, Jackson’s former Vice-President and approved successor, ordered the U. S. Army into the Cherokee Nation, where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they could and marched them west and across the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way. In his letter to President Van Buren, Emerson calls this “a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?” (A, 3).

Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the country, but the question of its morality and entrenchment within the American political system came to the fore with the annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the 28th state in 1845. Emerson’s breakout address “On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844) was delivered in this context. (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and celebrated annually in Concord.) In his address Emerson wrote: “Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, … the producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world. … I am heartsick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers” (A, 9).

Frederick Douglass spoke in Concord at Thoreau’s invitation, and was on the dais in Concord in August 1844, when Emerson delivered his emancipation address, where he states: “The Black Man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization” (Wirzbicki, 95; A, 31). Douglass took up Emerson’s term “self-reliance” in advice to his readers and hearers, and he quotes “The American Scholar” in his abolitionist newspaper North Star . “It is a mischievous notion,” Douglass quotes Emerson as saying, “that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God so is it ever to so much of his attribute that we bring to it” (Wirzbicki, 53; O, 47).

Another important black abolitionist with Transcendentalist leanings and connections was William C. Nell, who founded Boston’s Adelphic Union Library Association in 1836. Nell attended Bronson Alcott’s conversations, heard Emerson speak, and participated in Emerson’s Town and Country Club. He referred to Emerson as the “ever-to-be-honored friend of equal rights” (Wirzbicki, 55). The leadership of Nell’s Association was black, but invited speakers included prominent black and white abolitionists, including Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Angelina Grimké. Nell founded the New England Freedom Association in 1842 to “extend the helping hand to the ‘chattel’ who may have taken to itself ‘wings’” (Wirzbicki, 148); and he joined with Lewis Hayden (who had escaped slavery in Kentucky) to establish the Boston Vigilance Committee after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Thoreau worked with both Nell and Hayden. He brought Hayden to Concord to speak to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, and he contributed to the Underground Railroad by hosting fugitives in his cabin at Walden Pond (Wirzbicki, 158).

Fuller addresses American slavery directly in Woman in the Nineteenth Century , recalling her dread at the news that James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to Texas, had been elected the nation’s 11th president (by an all-male electorate). The “choice of the people,” she wrote, “threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of Texas!” (F, 97). Addressing “[t]he women of my country,” she asks: “have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls for a money market and political power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which can check, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in union” (F, 98).

This call both to the individual and to individuals acting together characterizes Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed “in letting one another alone” (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a “peaceable revolution,” he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76).

The Fugitive Slave Law passed by the United States Congress in 1850 had dramatic and visible effects not only in Georgia or Mississippi but in Massachusetts and New York. For the law required all citizens of the country to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their owners. This extension of the slave-system to the north, the subject of Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), was on public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to the harbor, where he was taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner placed him in a notorious “slave pen” outside Richmond, where Burns was handcuffed, chained at the ankles and left to lie in his own filth for four months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a court in Boston “trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE,” when the question has already been “decided from eternity” (R, 92). In his “Lecture on Slavery” of 1855, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution’s recognition of slavery a “crime” (A, 100), and he contrasts the written law of the constitution with the “Laws” and “Right” ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and Confucius. An immoral law, he holds, is void.

Although Thoreau advocated nonviolent action in “Resistance to Civil Government,” he later supported the violent actions of John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau portrays Brown as an “Angel of Light” (R, 137) and “a transcendentalist above all” (115) who believed “that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave” (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown’s life and actions.

Other Primary Sources

• Buell, Lawrence. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings , New York: Modern Library, 2006. [Anthology with commentary]
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Robert B. Spiller, et al. (eds.), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1971–
• –––, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939. 6 vols.
• –––, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals: 1820–1842 , Lawrence Rosenwald (ed.), New York: Library of America, 2010.
• Fuller, Margaret, Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846 , Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• –––, “ These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850 , Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (eds.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
• Hochfield, George (ed.), Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists , 2nd edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 (orig. 1966). [Anthology]
• Mikics, David. The Annotated Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. [Anthology with commentary]
• Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 (orig. 1950). [Anthology with commentary]
• Thoreau, Henry David, Cape Cod , Joseph J. Moldenhauer (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
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• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1986. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021. Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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• Wright, Conrad, 1957. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America , Boston: Beacon.
• –––, 1970. The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History , Boston: Beacon.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Transcendentalists website by Jone Johnson Lewis (M. Div.), available at the Internet Archive.

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General Education

Confused about transcendentalism? You’re not alone! Transcendentalism is a movement that many people developed over a long period of time, and as a result, its complexity can make it hard to understand.

That’s where we come in. Read this article to learn a simple but complete transcendentalism definition, key transcendentalist beliefs, an overview of the movement's history, key players, and examples of transcendentalist works. By the end, you’ll have all the information you need to write about or discuss the transcendentalist movement.

What Is Transcendentalism?

It’s all about spirituality. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It centers around the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition. In other words, transcendentalists believe spirituality isn’t something you can explain; it’s something you feel. A transcendentalist would argue that going for a walk in a beautiful place would be a much more spiritual experience than reading a religious text.

The transcendentalism movement arose as a result of a reaction to Unitarianism as well as the Age of Reason. Both centered on reason as the main source of knowledge, but transcendentalists rejected that notion. Some of the transcendentalist beliefs are:

• Humans are inherently good
• Society and its institutions such as organized religion and politics are corrupting. Instead of being part of them, humans should strive to be independent and self-reliant
• Spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion
• Insight and experience are more important than logic
• Nature is beautiful, should be deeply appreciated, and shouldn’t be altered by humans

Major Transcendentalist Values

The transcendentalist movement encompassed many beliefs, but these all fit into their three main values of individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature.

Individualism

Perhaps the most important transcendentalist value was the importance of the individual. They saw the individual as pure, and they believed that society and its institutions corrupted this purity. Transcendentalists highly valued the concept of thinking for oneself and believed people were best when they were independent and could think for themselves. Only then could individuals come together and form ideal communities.

The focus on idealism comes from Romanticism, a slightly earlier movement. Instead of valuing logic and learned knowledge as many educated people at the time did, transcendentalists placed great importance on imagination, intuition and creativity . They saw the values of the Age of Reason as controlling and confining, and they wanted to bring back a more “ideal” and enjoyable way of living.

Divinity of Nature

Transcendentalists didn’t believe in organized religion, but they were very spiritual. Instead of believing in the divinity of religious figures, they saw nature as sacred and divine. They believed it was crucial for humans to have a close relationship with nature, the same way religious leaders preach about the importance of having a close relationship with God. Transcendentalists saw nature as perfect as it was; humans shouldn’t try to change or improve it.

History of the Transcendentalist Movement

What’s the history of transcendentalism? Here’s an overview of the movement, covering its beginning, height, and eventual decline.

While people had begun discussing ideas related to transcendentalism since the early 1800s, the movement itself has its origins in 1830s New England, specifically Massachusetts. Unitarianism was the major religion in the area, and it emphasized spirituality and enlightenment through logic, knowledge, and rationality. Young men studying Unitarianism who disagreed with these beliefs began to meet informally. Unitarianism was a particularly large part of life at Harvard University, where many of the first transcendentalists attended school.

In September 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson organized the first meeting of what would later be called the Transcendental Club. Together the group discussed frustrations of Unitarianism and their main beliefs, drawing on ideas from Romanticism, German philosophers, and the Hindu spiritual texts the Upanishads. The transcendentalists begin to publish writings on their beliefs, beginning with Emerson’s essay “Nature.”

The Transcendental Club continued to meet regularly, drawing in new members, and key figures, particularly Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, published numerous essays to further spread transcendentalist beliefs. In 1840, the journal The Dial was created for transcendentalists to publish their works. Utopia communities, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands attempted to make transcendentalism a complete lifestyle.

By the end of the 1840s, many key transcendentalists had begun to move onto other pursuits, and the movement declined. This decline was further hastened by the untimely death of Margaret Fuller, one of the leading transcendentalists and cofounder of The Dial. While there was a smaller second wave of transcendentalism during this time, the brief resurgence couldn’t bring back the popularity the movement had enjoyed the previous decade, and transcendentalism gradually faded from public discourse, although people still certainly share the movement’s beliefs. Even recently, movies such as The Dead Poets Society and The Lion King express transcendentalist beliefs such as the importance of independent thinking, self-reliance, and enjoying the moment.

Key Figures in the Transcendentalist Movement

At its height, many people supported the beliefs of transcendentalism, and numerous well-known names from the 19th century have been associated with the movement. Below are five key transcendentalists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is the key figure in transcendentalism. He brought together many of the original transcendentalists, and his writings form the foundation of many of the movement’s beliefs. The day before he published his essay “Nature” he invited a group of his friends to join the “Transcendental Club” a meeting of like-minded individuals to discuss their beliefs. He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches to promote transcendentalism. Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include “The Over-Soul,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and “Divinity School Address.”

Henry David Thoreau

The second-most important transcendentalist, Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s who is best known for his book Walden . Walden is focused on the benefits of individualism, simple living and close contact with and observation of nature. Thoreau also frequently opposed the government and its actions, most notably in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was perhaps the leading female transcendentalist. A well-known journalist and ardent supporter of women’s rights, she helped cofound The Dial , the key transcendentalist journal, with Emerson, which helped cement her place in the movement and spread the ideas of transcendentalism to a wider audience. An essay she wrote for the journal was later published as the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century , one of the earliest feminist works in the United States. She believed in  the importance of the individual, but often felt that other transcendentalists, namely Emerson, focused too much on individualism at the expense of social reform.

Amos Bronson Alcott

A friend of Emerson’s, Alcott (father of Little Women’ s Louisa May Alcott), was an educator known for his innovative ways of teaching and correcting students. He wrote numerous pieces on transcendentalism, but the quality of his writing was such that most were unpublishable. A noted abolitionist, he refused to pay his poll tax to protest President Tyler’s annexation of Texas as a slave territory. This incident inspired Thoreau to do a similar protest, which led to him writing the essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Frederic Henry Hedge

Frederic Henry Hedge met Emerson when both were students at Harvard Divinity School. Hedge was studying to become a Unitarian minister, and he had already spent several years studying music and literature in Germany. Emerson invited him to join the first meeting of the Transcendental Club (originally called Hedge’s Club, after him), and he attended meetings for several years. He wrote some of the earliest pieces later categorized as Transcendentalist works, but he later became somewhat alienated from the group and refused to write pieces for The Dial.

George Ripley

Like Hedge, Ripley was also a Unitarian minister and founding member of the Transcendental Club. He founded the Utopian community Brook Farm based on major Transcendentalist beliefs. Brook Farm residents would work the farm (whichever jobs they found most appealing) and use their leisure time to pursue activities they enjoyed, such as dancing, music, games, and reading. However, the farm was never able to do well financially, and the experiment ended after just a few years.

Criticisms of Transcendentalism

From its start, transcendentalism attracted numerous critics for its nontraditional, and sometimes outright alien, ideas. Many transcendentalists were seen as outcasts, and many journals refused to publish works written by them. Below are some of the most common criticisms.

Spirituality Over Organized Religion

For most people, the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism was that it promoted individual spirituality over churches and other aspects of organized religion. Religion was the cornerstone of many people’s lives at this time, and any movement that told them it was corrupting and to give it up would have been unfathomable to many.

Over-Reliance on Independence

Many people, even some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, felt that transcendentalism at times ignored the importance of community bonds and over-emphasized the need to rely on no one but one’s self , to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness. Some people believe that Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick was written as a critique of complete reliance on independence. In the novel, the character Ahab eschews nearly all bonds of camaraderie and is focused solely on his goal of destroying the white whale. This eventually leads to his death. Margaret Fuller also felt that transcendentalism could be more supportive of community initiatives to better the lives of others, such as by advocating for women’s and children’s rights.

Abstract Values

Have a hard time understanding what transcendentalists really wanted? So did a lot of people, and it made them view the movement as nothing more than a bunch of dreamers who enjoyed criticizing traditional values but weren’t sure what they themselves wanted. Edgar Allen Poe accused the movement of promoting “obscurity for obscurity's sake.”

Unrealistic Utopian Ideals

Some people viewed the transcendentalists’ focus on enjoying life and maximizing their leisure time as hopelessly naive and idealistic. Criticism frequently focused on the Utopian communities some transcendentalists created to promote communal living and the balance of work and labor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stayed at the Brook Farm communal living experiment, disliked his experience so much that he wrote an entire novel, The Blithedale Romance , criticizing the concept and transcendentalist beliefs in general.

Major Transcendentalist Works

Many transcendentalists were prolific writers, and examples abound of transcendentalism quotes, essays, books, and more. Below are four examples of transcendentalist works, as well as which of the transcendentalist beliefs they support.

“ Self-Reliance ” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson wrote this essay in 1841 to share his views on the issue of, you guessed it, self-reliance. Throughout the essay he discusses the importance of individuality and how people must avoid the temptation to conform to society at the expense of their true selves. It also contains the excellent line “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

There are three main ways Emerson says people should practice self-reliance is through non-conformity (“A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of conformity”), solitude over society (“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”), and spirituality that is found in one’s own self (“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps”). Self-reliance and an emphasis on the individual over community is a core belief of transcendentalism, and this essay was key in developing that view.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Published in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass included 12 untitled poems. Whitman was a fan of Emerson’s and was thrilled when the latter highly praised his work. The poems contain many transcendentalism beliefs, including an appreciation of nature, individualism, and spirituality.

A key example is the poem later titled “ Song of Myself ” which begins with the line “I celebrate myself” and goes on to extoll the benefits of the individual “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me”, the enjoyment of nature (“The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”), the goodness of humans (“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun”), and the connections all humans share (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”).

“ The Summer Rain ” by Henry David Thoreau

This transcendentalism poem, like many of Thoreau’s works, focuses on the beauty and simplicity of nature. Published in 1849, the poem describes the narrator’s delight at being in a meadow during a rainstorm.

The poem frequently mentions the enjoyment that observing nature can bring, and there are many descriptions of the meadow such as, “A clover tuft is pillow for my head/And violets quite overtop my shoes.” But Thoreau also makes a point to show that he believes nature is more enjoyable and a better place to learn from than intellectual pursuits like reading and studying. He begins the poem with this verse: “My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read/'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large/Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,/And will not mind to hit their proper targe” and continues later on with “Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,/What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,/If juster battles are enacted now/Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?”

He makes clear that he is comparing works of Shakespeare and Homer to the joys of nature, and he finds nature the better and more enjoyable way to learn. This is in line with Transcendentalist beliefs that insight and experience are more rewarding than book learning.

“ What Is Beauty? ” by Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child, a women’s rights activist and abolitionist, wrote this essay, which was published in The Dial in 1843. The essay discusses what constitutes beauty and how we can appreciate beauty.

It frequently references the transcendentalist theme that intuition and insight are more important than knowledge for understanding when something is beautiful, such as in the line “Beauty is felt, not seen by the understanding.” All the knowledge in the world can’t explain why we see certain things as beautiful; we simply know that they are.

Summary: Transcendentalism Definition

What’s a good transcendentalism definition? Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement centered around spirituality that was popular in the mid-19th century. Key transcendentalism beliefs were that humans are inherently good but can be corrupted by society and institutions, insight and experience and more important than logic, spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion, and nature is beautiful and should be respected.

The transcendentalist movement reached its height in the 1830s and 1840s and included many well-known people, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalists wrote widely, and by reading their works you can get a better sense of the movement and its core beliefs.

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Introduction

• Published: April 2010
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The only extended attempt at defining Transcendentalism by a participant came from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a lecture on “The Transcendentalist” delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston in December 1841, Emerson, whose name was identified by the public as synonymous with the movement, stated, “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” ( EmCW 1:201). A few pages later, in typical Emerson fashion, he gave another definition: “Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith” (1:206). These definitions did not satisfy skeptics then, and they appeal even less to scholarly inquisitors today. The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism presents fifty wide-ranging essays that exhibit this diverse and influential movement's complexity and its contemporary relevance.

These essays suggest that Emerson's broad-based definitions are, in fact, useful overtures for any reader embarking on a study of these remarkable and eclectic figures known as the Transcendentalists. Though they disagreed on many things, as a group they rose to challenge the materialism and the insularity of an expanding United States by bringing to its shores the latest texts from across Europe and Asia: German theology and European post-Kantian philosophy; Romantic poetry and fiction, from Goethe to George Sand to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; Persian poetry and Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. Consolidated as a group by their rebellion against conservatives, who were shocked at such daring cosmopolitanism, various Transcendentalists then diverged to found and contribute to a range of radical reforms in religion, education, literature, science, politics, and economics, centreed especially on securing equal rights for the working classes, women, and slaves. The fate of their movement, as it splintered, diversified, foundered, and triumphed, should rivet every scholar and student of contemporary affairs, for at a time of economic, religious, and political crisis, the Transcendentalists asked key questions: How can art reawaken faith in a reborn cosmos? How can an individual live a moral life in a society rife with injustice and cruelty? Is self-cultivation a means to social reform or a distraction from urgent social issues? How might America—indeed, should America—lead a world that it cannot master or control? Transcendentalists worked out answers to these questions, and though today we might differ with their strategies and solutions as we face our own parallel crises, we have the advantage of their words and experience, their triumphs and defeats, to instruct and inspire us. Never have the Transcendentalists had so much to say to their descendents.

Emerson's lecture demonstrates that he regarded Transcendentalism primarily as a philosophical movement. He argues that humankind was “ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell” ( EmCW 1:201). In a brilliant analogy, he shows that, while the Transcendentalist views material objects from the perspective of a participant in the physical world, at the same time “he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end , each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact” (1:202). This analogy shows that Transcendentalism is also a religious or spiritual movement: “The Transcendentalist…believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy” (1:204). But philosophy, religion, and spirituality are not enough: The Transcendentalist cannot take refuge in such pursuits but must derive from them the knowledge and inspiration needed to interact with and, importantly, to reform the day-to-day world, to improve society—and make good on the American promise—for all. As Emerson says, “the good and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the combatants and demagogues in the dusty arena below” (1:211).

Scholars through the years have been troubled by the fact that Transcendentalism was not monolithic or easily defined and that it was not, in fact, an organized movement at all. The name “transcendentalism” was initially bestowed by the movement's critics to ridicule that diverse group of philosophical idealists who held that certain beliefs and values transcended mere sensory experience. Some of these idealists were ministers, others former ministers; most were Harvard College or Harvard Divinity School graduates, while others were self-educated; most were men, but women made substantial contributions; most were from the Boston area, but some were from Connecticut and Virginia; most published prose, others poetry, but only one wrote fiction; most left formal religious institutions, but others remained in them; but all, key to their Transcendentalism, sought their own way of leading a purpose-driven life. Starting in the 1830s, these individuals met together, read each other's writings, attended each other's lectures and sermons, and often disagreed. Few of them liked being labeled “Transcendentalists” because such glib identification flattened out the complexity of their individual beliefs.

The Transcendentalists embraced a metaphysical position that placed God within the world and within each person rather than outside humankind's experience and knowledge. Though many of them grew up reading John Locke, they grew to reject his philosophical belief that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, at birth, on which all sensory impressions are written (the “Understanding”), in favor of the idealism of Immanuel Kant, which held that certain categories of preexisting knowledge could be grasped intuitively (“Reason”). They championed the new European literature and philosophy over traditional British Enlightenment figures. They did not reject but redefined Enlightenment ideals of scientific experimentation, following the latest scientific theories, which sought not only to understand the phenomena of nature through empirical investigation and sensory experience but also to discover behind the screen of appearances nature's underlying truths, its laws or principles. They prized the quintessential American concept of individuality (as evidenced in their two most often read and taught works, Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau's Walden) even as they experimented with new forms of association and community. They worked to transform antebellum educational methods of learning by rote memorization and replaced them with teachers who would draw out their students' own thinking rather than having them parrot conventional views. As ardent believers in social and political reform, they worked to abolish slavery and establish civil rights for women as well as to overhaul the church, the government, prisons, mental institutions, and health and dietary practices. They believed that Nature, like the gnomon on the face of a sundial, points to divine lessons from which we can benefit once we learn to sympathize with the natural world; as such, although the words did not yet exist, they were early ecologists and pioneer environmentalists. The Transcendentalists were, in other words, innovators and precursors of much that we now regard as central to American life, culture, literature, and national identity.

In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson addresses the state of literary study in the young nation: “Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but whoso knows these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will believe that this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark” ( EmCW 1:207–8). The contributors to this volume demonstrate that Transcendentalism has indeed left “its mark,” and they shed new light on its rich legacy to American life, letters, and culture. They also adhere to Emerson's admonition: “Each age…must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding” (1:56). These essays not only present a survey of previous and current interpretations of Transcendentalism but suggest potential new directions as well for a new generation of creative readers.

The fifty essays in this book are arranged topically and in a broadly chronological order; contributors were encouraged not to review standard coverage of topics but to provide new perspectives on old themes, explore new directions, open new topics, and point to work demanded by a new century. There is naturally some degree of overlap, which the editors hope will provide a variety of fresh perspectives; while we have provided a broad range of topics, we do not aspire to completeness of coverage—were such even possible. The opening section, “Transcendental Contexts,” sets the stage for the rise of Transcendentalism in the early nineteenth-century's transatlantic history and culture, from world literature and philosophy, to world historical movements in history, to the unique conditions of American print culture and religious history, out of which Transcendentalism had its most immediate birth. The second section, “Transcendentalism as a Social Movement,” follows the contested and multifarious diversification of Transcendentalist ideas as they ramified outward into the world, from religion, to politics, to education and self-culture, including abolitionism, women's rights, utopian communities, the vexed legacy of Manifest Destiny, and the origin of American environmentalism.

The third section, “Transcendentalism as a Literary Movement,” turns to the work of Transcendentalists as linguistic performers in a range of genres both oral and written: from conversations, to diaries and journals, to letters, lectures, and sermons, to printed essays, periodicals, and books in genres ranging from poetry and literary criticism to travel, nature, and life writing. The fourth section, “Transcendentalism and the Other Arts,” suggests new opportunities for scholarship by examining visual arts, photography, architecture, and music; the fifth, “Varieties of Transcendental Experience,” points beyond the texts themselves to sketch the diverse experiential worlds that Transcendentalism created for its proponents, geographically from Boston to the globe, culturally from the family living room to high philosophy, and historically from the Transcendentalists' day to our own. Finally, “Transcendental Afterlives” provides a look back, starting with the perspective of the post–Civil War generation, who tried to reconstitute Transcendentalism for their own time, to the various threads—politics, nature and environmental activism, poetry, and electronic texts—through which Transcendentalism has come down to our own day as a living legacy not just for scholars but also for readers, activists, and pilgrims. Given that these essays are thematic rather than bibliographical, appendices provide brief bibliographies of the figures discussed, together with a chronology of the movement and selected historical landmarks.

Part I , “Transcendental Contexts,” begins with the study of Greek and Roman classics, which pervaded education for every literate man and woman. As K. P. Van Anglen establishes, study of the classics pointed the Transcendentalists not only backward to a traditional grounding in concepts of the “good” and the “true” but also forward to redefine a fresh sense of origins, a commitment “to autonomy, independence, and intellectual renewal.” Similarly, Robin Grey shows that though Transcendentalists famously rejected their predecessors, particularly the materialism of Locke and the skepticism of Hume, they also turned to Enlightenment writers, particularly the Scottish School of Common Sense philosophers, to define their concepts of the social and moral dimensions of human nature, a dimension “not always acknowledged by scholars of Transcendentalism, who have tended to focus on their individualism.” A second corrective is offered by Alan Hodder in his essay on Transcendentalism's Asian influences—ironically, a product of British imperialism that allowed Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott to break the “centuries-long dominion of Christianity in the West.” Frank Shuffelton offers a third corrective by connecting the Transcendentalists' religious hunger for mystical experience to the Puritans' ability to discover God's grace and glory in earthly experience and by redrawing with a difference Perry Miller's line “from Edwards to Emerson.” Dean Grodzins explores in detail the origin of Transcendentalism “as a phase of American, or more precisely New England, Unitarianism” that “forced the expansion of the boundaries of liberal religious fellowship” and opened new possibilities for religious action. By contrast, Michael Ziser sets the Transcendentalists' religious revolution in a world perspective by tracing the powerful line of revolutionary activity that spread from America in 1776, through the French and Haitian revolutions and the Bolivarian wars of independence in South America, to the European Revolution of 1848 and beyond. The resulting “Romantic revolution” in literature and the arts and sciences, centreed in Great Britain and continental Europe, sent shock waves back across the Atlantic that, as Barbara Packer shows, led to what one participant called a “remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground.” Finally, these were the years as well of the Industrial Revolution, which completely redefined print and manuscript production, dissemination, and reception as print went from conditions of Revolutionary-era scarcity to antebellum abundance; as Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray show, while the “sensorium” that emerged was structured by the expressive social technology of print, during this era print culture did not replace but helped maintain “interpersonal relationships under stress from often chaotic socioeconomic conditions.”

Part II takes up “Transcendentalism as a Social Movement.” Although only one extended study, Anne Rose's Transcendentalism as a Social Movement (1981), has focused on the totality of Transcendentalists' efforts to improve their society, numerous studies have recovered their contributions to specific nineteenth-century reform movements. The essays in this section provide historical overviews that establish the breadth of the Transcendentalists' activism as well as point to the conflicted nature and resulting controversy of their often radical speeches and writings. Albert von Frank contends that the relationship of Transcendentalism to Unitarianism is more complex than is commonly supposed and that the most central of the Transcendentalists' religious motives were adopted and ironically refashioned by later nineteenth-century popular movements. Len Gougeon discusses how drastic social changes in antebellum America directly impacted the everyday lives of Transcendentalists—from their personal financial wealth to their ability to secure meaningful employment. Wesley Mott's essay on education reveals the centrality of this subject to the Transcendentalists' concerns, so much so that Mott argues “that ‘the Movement’ might just as fairly be defined as an educational demonstration.” Transcendentalists' critique of their increasingly industrialized society is documented by Lance Newman, who reveals, particularly, how the Transcendentalists' concern with society's disconnection from nature led to a nascent environmental consciousness. Lawrence Buell, in “Manifest Destiny and the Question of the Moral Absolute,” points out the “unresolvable split image” of Transcendentalists' reform identity—the disconnect between their ideals and their pragmatic resolve to live in the world as it is, particularly as individuals attempted to “make sense of the paradox of Transcendentalism's strong antiestablishment tendencies as against the signs of complicity with American expansionism.” Similarly, Joshua Bellin points to the troubling paucity of Transcendentalists' seeming concern or action over U.S. genocide of its native population. Although Sandra Petrulionis demonstrates the pivotal antislavery activism of many Transcendentalists, Bellin notes the disparity between these efforts and those on behalf of Native Americans. With regard to another controversy, Phyllis Cole focuses in “Woman's Rights and Feminism” on the empowering “protofeminism” generated by the rhetoric and the idealism of Transcendentalism. On a more individual level, Mary Shelden demonstrates that self-reform pervaded the immediate reality of Transcendentalists: From austere vegetarian diets to physical activity and homeopathic regimes, they attempted to purify their physical bodies in addition to their spiritual selves. Such efforts were enabled, at least briefly, by joining with a community of the like-minded, as Sterling Delano demonstrates in “Transcendentalist Communities.”

Part III , “Transcendentalism as a Literary Movement,” takes up the subject that most often dominates discussions of Transcendentalism, yet for a movement usually taught in the literature classroom, Transcendentalists were decidedly unconventional and, moreover, rather less productive of canonical works than other American authors. Although two of them, Emerson and Thoreau, are included in F. O. Matthiessen's classic study of the literary “American Renaissance,” the Transcendentalists did not write best-selling fiction, publish the great American novel, or leave behind volumes of classic poetry. However, the wealth and value of their literary output, what Emerson valorized as “literature of the portfolio,” is readily apparent in the array of genres discussed in this section. Ed Folsom leads off with a comprehensive essay on transcendental poetics, which on the one hand assesses the modest output of individual poets, while on the other argues for the instrumental role of Transcendentalism (especially on Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson) in shaping the trajectory of the two poets most central to nineteenth-century American literary studies: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Robert Sattelmeyer investigates journal keeping, this most transcendental of genres, practiced by nearly every figure associated with the movement, the wealth of which “ranged from the occasional notation of daily activities to highly self-conscious literary composition.” Similarly, Robert Hudspeth reveals the often artistic, self-consciously literary “performance[s]” of Transcendentalists' letters—private writings that often allowed the correspondents to achieve a closer connection than was possible in person. The genre with which most Transcendentalists were familiar was an oral one—the sermon, delivered weekly from various New England pulpits, and Susan Roberson shows that these dramatic messages offer a “valuable window into the evolution of Transcendentalism.” Secular outlets for their spoken eloquence included the public venues examined by Kent Ljungquist; not only did Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Alcott exploit the lecture podium to offer literary, philosophical, and historical addresses, but Thoreau, Caroline Healey Dall, and others spoke out on political topics such as slavery and women's rights. The oral nature of the movement's œuvre is further elucidated by Noelle Baker's discussion of Transcendentalist conversations, a practice especially empowering to women that drew on a history and culture rich in informal reading and writing practices. As Baker explains, Bronson Alcott “invested conversation with natural and supernatural attributes and with the agency to reform individuals and society.” The print medium in which Transcendentalists enjoyed the greatest success was the vastly expanded periodical market, the subject of Todd Richardson's work, a study that, as Richardson notes, is now greatly enabled by various digitization projects, in addition to the recent formation of the Research Society for American Periodicals. Premier among periodical outlets for Transcendentalist authors was, of course, the Dial , the focus of Susan Belasco's essay, which assesses the impact of this four-year quarterly on the workload of its editors, Margaret Fuller and Emerson, and on the literary aspirations of its numerous contributors. As critics, Fuller and Emerson differed in their mode of appraising literary works, according to Jeffrey Steele. For Emerson, individual genius transcended time and place—great literature came about “as the expressive acts of exceptional individuals”; in contrast, Fuller valued both the end product and the contexts in which authors created. For Steele, then, Fuller's goal as a critic was not only “to define empowering ideals of selfhood but also to measure the social and psychological obstacles to that imagined development.” Barbara Packer demonstrates that examples of possibly the Transcendentalists' “best writing” are found in the popular antebellum genre of travel writing. From Emerson's travel journals, to Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 and dispatches from Europe, to Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , travel writing permitted the free flow of ideas and individual reflection most suited to Transcendentalist expression. Thanks in large part to Thoreau and Walden , the literary genre most indelibly associated with Transcendentalism is nature writing, which, as Philip Gura's essay on this subject evaluates, reflects the Transcendentalists' attempts both to interrogate and to honor their relation to the external world. Thus, this genre as a whole includes some of the earliest examples of contemporary ecocriticism. Robert Habich elaborates on the Transcendentalists' privileging of self-reflection, particularly as individuals memorialized each other and as biographers have since narrated their life stories. For Emerson, as Habich reminds us, biography trumps history, and his essay usefully weighs how the genre transformed before and after the Civil War, from work that “constructs subjects with an eye to the essential and the philosophical” to studies that do so with a regard for “the individual and the social.”

Part IV , “Transcendentalism and the Other Arts,” expands the range of Transcendentalist interest and practice beyond print culture. Albert von Frank takes the 1839 exhibition of Washington Allston's romantic paintings—rather than the work of Hudson River School artists—as the focus of the Transcendentalists' most intense encounter with the art of painting, and shows that it prompted several quite distinct rhetorics of art criticism. Photography vexed this relation in both creative and disconcerting ways, as Sean Meehan shows; both Emerson and Thoreau were intrigued by early photographic technology, which emerged “alongside Transcendentalists' interest in reproducing in thought and word the legible traces of the invisible in the visible world.” Domestic architecture presented another new aesthetic, one that offered to improve domestic life; indeed, Barksdale Maynard argues that Transcendentalism's most famous house, the one Thoreau built at Walden Pond, was a sophisticated and creative adaptation of the contemporary craze for country “villas,” which allowed the urban dweller to retire to nature and led directly to the suburban American home-and-garden ideal. Finally, Ora Frishberg Saloman shows that Transcendentalism left a rich legacy of music criticism in the writings of John Sullivan Dwight and, moreover, helped build “a strong intellectual foundation for the development of art music in the nation,” including improvements in concert practices and “increased respect for the valuable role of creative and performing artists in American society.”

Part V , “Varieties of Transcendental Experience,” expands the range of Transcendentalism in several directions. By focusing on the local, Ronald Bosco shows how succeeding generations traveled much in Concord, their steps directed by guidebooks to the relics of Transcendentalism—buildings and monuments—that re-created the hometown of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts as a quaint village outside the stream of time that promised to reenchant the modern world. On the other hand, Robert Scholnick follows a cosmopolitan arc of partnership along the transatlantic axis from Boston to London, recovering the vigorous radicalism of John Chapman's Westminster Review and the channel opened by Chapman and his stable of contributors (including Harriet Martineau and George Eliot), by which Transcendentalism and British radicalism energized and challenged one another. Taking up the global scale, Laura Dassow Walls points to the cosmopolitanism at the heart of Transcendentalism, which paradoxically fused the world's texts into an image of American nationalism while also using them to remake America into a global, planetary ideal that extended a “cosmopolitics” to human and nonhuman planetary partners. As Elizabeth Addison writes, the personal relationships that forged the movement and kept it going are becoming “ever more evident”; this cross-generational project then branched into “lateral connections with others of like mind, writers and reformers well beyond Boston and Concord.” Philip Cafaro's essay on “virtue ethics” takes up the Transcendentalists' challenge to conventional ethics and their attempts to vitalize American ethical thought, as the traditional foundations seemed to be giving way; in response to the challenges of modernity, they emphasized “the full flourishing of the whole human person” and asserted that change and uncertainty are “ineliminable aspects of human life” in an evolving world that is continually bringing radical new possibilities for human life. Lawrence Rhu further examines the ethical philosophy of Transcendentalism through the recent work of Stanley Cavell, who has built on Emerson and Thoreau to deepen our contemporary understanding of the Transcendentalists' skepticism and engagement with tragedy. In Cavell's view, the intractable predicaments we face in life require of us “patience, if not surrender, and the transformation of the self,” a striving toward the perfectable without any assurance that perfection can be reached. Eric Wilson also takes up the Transcendentalists' response to a fluid, changing, and increasingly turbulent world but through aesthetics rather than ethics: In their quest to make words that are alive, “the time-honored distinction between words and things can entirely collapse and thus leave animated words and verbal vitalities,” a “generative coincidence of opposites, a pulsating synthesis of mind and matter.” That science is indeed at the heart of the Transcendentalists' philosophy and theology, not an “extraterrestrial domain” peripheral to the concerns of humanists, is the argument advanced by Laura Dassow Walls, who offers not a detailed study of any one science but a hypothetical portrait of how Transcendentalism might look were science and technology restored to the integral place they held in literature and culture during the nineteenth century. William Rossi tackles head-on the evolutionary science that undergirded the Transcendentalists' understanding of a changing nature. He offers a detailed case study of the way they not only assimilated radical thought from cosmopolitan and continental sources but also fused “moral philosophy and experiential theology with science, grounding all in a species of natural law.” Finally, Richard Kopley looks to the key American writers—“naysayers”—who set themselves in opposition to the Transcendentalist school. To the “prelapsarian” vision of Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville offered a “postlapsarian” corrective, one that more fully acknowledged the darker side of human life: “Neither vision was ascendant. And the tension between the two endures—for we need both.”

That the tension and the vision do indeed endure is the theme of the final section, “Transcendental Afterlives.” Although its heyday was broadly the three decades prior to the Civil War, Transcendentalism lived on through the thought and writings of subsequent generations. Both in the specific lives of individuals such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Caroline Healey Dall, who as young adults imbibed the mantra of self-culture from reading Emerson and attending Fuller's conversations, and in the principled examples of civil protest and calls for an environmental consciousness, the Transcendentalists bequeathed to later generations the urgency—the moral obligation—of the examined life. These various afterlives are taken up in this section, first by David Robinson, whose study of the Free Religion movement traces the role played by Higginson and other second-generation Transcendentalists in the establishment and ensuing success of a “‘pure’” religious community that perpetually reformed itself, after the manner of Transcendentalism. Linck Johnson discusses the now centuries-long afterlife of Thoreau's exemplary political protest in “Civil Disobedience,” and he sets straight the various, often uncontexualized, misinterpretations of this famous essay, whose influence is arguably greater than any single Transcendentalist-authored work; Johnson argues that “Civil Disobedience” “speaks in different voices to those engaged in other protests and social causes.” Robert Burkholder discusses Thoreau's other primary legacy in an essay that evaluates the Transcendentalists' centrality to the genre of nature writing, particularly in their example of humanism coalescing with a political sensibility toward the environment—today's “ecocentrism”—which directly inspired John Muir, John Burroughs, Rachel Carson, and others to environmental activism. Paying homage to the sine qua non of Transcendentalist places is the focus of Leslie Wilson's “Walden: Pilgrimages and Iconographies,” which appraises the afterlife of Thoreau's cabin site at Walden Pond—from the first stone laid at what is now a sprawling cairn to the late twentieth-century crusade to save Walden Woods from development. Wilson points out that, in contrast to the other literary and historical Concord sites, “Walden beckons as a shrine, offering retreat, removal from the distractions of town life, opportunity for contemplation, enhanced receptivity to spirit, and personal transformation.” Saundra Morris argues for the longevity and centrality of Transcendentalist thought on major American poets and stresses Transcendentalism's “fundamental concern with a politically ethical aesthetics that calls us to imagine the poetically beautiful in terms of the politically just.” And in “The Electronic Age,” Amy Earhart situates Transcendentalism scholarship in the surfeit of online search tools, databases, full-text articles, and Google books. She examines resources essential to Transcendentalism studies and authors; while noting the limitations of each, she points to the direction of future technologies.

Given the expansive topics covered in this volume, it is perhaps ironic that we conclude by emphasizing the need for continued scholarship on the Transcendentalists and Transcendentalism. However, most of these essays raise questions and point to unexamined terrain—figures and eras only partially recovered or contextualized. Particularly in light of the ongoing democratization of the archive achieved by a plethora of digitized collections, additional biographical treatments are needed. While we have enjoyed recent studies of Emerson, Fuller, Parker, Whitman, Mary Moody Emerson, the Peabody sisters, and Lydia Maria Child, we await those on William Henry Channing, Caroline Healey Dall, Franklin B. Sanborn, Ednah Dow Cheney, and Moncure Conway. Similarly essential are more published volumes of private writings: The letters and journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott are only partially available; the letters of most antislavery women and other reformers remain unpublished. The ongoing effort to situate various Transcendentalists in the context of antebellum reform must persist, particularly their role in the woman's rights movement. Additionally beneficial would be studies of Transcendentalists in dialogue with each other and with their society on crucial issues such as manifest destiny and U.S. expansionism, the Mexican War, the nullification crisis, the Fugitive Slave Law, and Charles Darwin's publications. Although the relation of Emerson and Thoreau to nineteenth-century science and evolutionary theory has been established, what of other figures, particularly women like Mary Moody Emerson, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Susan Fenimore Cooper? How would the conventional picture of this period change if science and technology studies were to become integral to literary and cultural studies instead of supplemental background material? No one doubts that “nature” was a central term in nineteenth-century literature, especially in the United States—Perry Miller's “Nature's Nation”—but too often “nature” is unproblematized and unmediated. Much of this work needs to be pursued through the periodical archive, and indeed, the explosion of the digital archive suggests completely new avenues for periodical studies—for example, how do the letters published in various newspapers from Transcendentalist lecturers and reformers, particularly in their western travels, expand the boundaries of and expectations for travel literature? For literary criticism? For science and exploration? We must also reinforce the transnational, even planetary, scope of the movement through studies that recover the rapidly changing relationships between American national identity and the evolving identities of other nations, whether imperialistic or cosmopolitan, both within (Native American) and without, hemispheric, transatlantic, and transpacific. It is, after all, in their diverse conceptions of America, as well as in their refusal to be more than a “club of the like-minded” (in James Freeman Clarke's words), that the strength and ongoing relevance of the Transcendentalists reside.

Joel Myerson and Laura Dassow Walls are both grateful to Steven Lynn and William Rivers, chairs of the English department at the University of South Carolina, for helping them to do their work (especially in Mr. Myerson's case since he is supposedly retired). They also thank Dean Mary Anne Fitzpatrick for her support and Jessie Bray for her assistance in preparing the volume. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis thanks Penn State Altoona's Division of the Arts and Humanities and Academic Affairs for their ongoing support of her research; for proofreading and other administrative assistance, she thanks Christina Seymour.

All three editors would like to thank the contributors for responding to our invitations with such enthusiasm and creativity and for their patience during the long process of pulling this volume together. We also appreciate the patience of our respective and long-suffering spouses. Finally, we are grateful to Shannon McLachlan for presenting us the challenge and opportunity of preparing this volume and for her continued support as we worked on it.

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Transcendentalism

I. definition.

Transcendentalism was a short-lived philosophical movement that emphasized transcendence , or “going beyond.” The Transcendentalists believed in going beyond the ordinary limits of thought and experience in several senses:

• transcending society by living a life of independence and contemplative self-reliance, often out in nature
• transcending the physical world to make contact with spiritual or metaphysical realities
• transcending traditional religion by blazing one’s own spiritual trail
• even transcending Transcendentalism itself by creating new philosophical ideas based on individual instinct and experience

II. Transcendentalism vs. Empiricism vs. Rationalism

When the Transcendentalists first came on the scene, philosophy was split between two major schools of thought: empiricism and rationalism . Transcendentalism rejected both schools, arguing that they were both too narrow-minded and failed to account for different kinds of transcendence.

III. Quotes About Transcendentalism

“Go alone…refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.” ( Ralph Waldo Emerson )

Probably no one is more strongly associated with transcendentalism than the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson wrote fiery essays arguing for independence, self-reliance, and going beyond the boundaries of society. In this short quotation, Emerson expresses two of his central ideas: first, that you should follow your own path rather than imitating others, no matter how noble or admirable they may be; and second, traditional religious organizations are unnecessary in our spiritual path and we should seek an independent, one-to-one relationship with God.

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” (George Carlin)

Stand-up legend George Carlin brought a strong Emersonian flavor to his comedy, a style that continues to be popular with modern stand-up comics. Like Emerson, Carlin hated social rules and was constantly pushing limits – using cursewords in his routines and talking about taboo subjects like race and sexuality at a time when standup comics almost never dared to broach these uncomfortable topics. Emerson would have liked the quote, which celebrates both social awkwardness (talking to yourself) and independent thinking.

IV. The History and Importance of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was America’s first major intellectual movement. It arose in the Eastern U.S. in the 1820s, when America had fully established its independence from Britain. At that time, the country was led by the first generation to have been born after the Revolutionary War – a generation that had never known anything other than independence. People in this generation couldn’t understand their parents’ reverence for European culture and philosophy, a reverence that was still strong in spite of the Americans’ desire for political independence. To them, America was its own nation, on its own continent, with its own laws and customs, and it needed to have its own art, culture, and philosophy as well – even its own religion! Transcendentalism was designed to fill all of these roles.

Although Transcendentalism didn’t grow into a flourishing philosophical school as its founders hoped (more on that in section 6), Transcendentalist ideas heavily influenced other movements and continue to have echoes today. The Transcendentalist movement was the main inspiration for William James and other founders of the Pragmatist school, which has been by far America’s most significant contribution to global philosophy.

The Transcendentalists even influenced European philosophy – Nietzsche, a revered if eccentric German philosopher, cited Transcendentalists as one of his main influences. Ironically, this means that the American thinkers were a strong philosophical inspiration to German nationalism and even Nazism, with their themes of strong individual leadership, rejecting traditional religion and morality, and breaking down limits so as to usher in a glorious future. Clearly, Emerson and Nietzsche would have strongly disapproved of Hitler and the Third Reich, but it goes to show how philosophers’ ideas can have unexpected consequences when they enter the realms of society, culture, and politics.

V. Transcendentalism in Popular Culture

There are many Transcendentalist themes in the sci-fi action movie Equilibrium starring Christian Bale. In the movie, John Preston is a Cleric, a law-enforcement officer required to take an emotion-suppressing pill every day so that he can carry out his duties without the interference of feelings. But when he misses his dose, Preston becomes increasingly aware of flaws in the system.

The film is Transcendentalist in a couple of ways: first, the emphasis on emotions rather than logic and duty. Preston’s moral awakening comes when he gets in touch with his emotions, which suggests that true morality is an emotional experience. Second, Preston ends up rejecting authority, social expectations, and the whole system that he’s been raised in. That makes him a very Emersonian sort of hero.

Many video games have “ranger” or “druid” characters (e.g. Dota 2, Warcraft, or Neverwinter Nights), and they often seem a little like transcendentalists. They live out in nature, or on the fringes of society, surviving by their own skills and living by their own rules – transcending the limits of civilization. In some cases, they also have spiritual or magical abilities that allow them to transcend the ordinary, physical world.

VI. Controversies

Is transcendentalism philosophy.

Transcendentalism never really caught on in professional philosophy, possibly because of the structure of its arguments. As we saw in section 2, transcendentalism rejected both rationalism and empiricism, pointing out the limitations in both logic and observation. But logic and observation are our main ways of attaining the truth, and if you push back against both of them, then what is the foundation of your own argument ?

In other words, Transcendentalism was based on an intuition, a feeling – several philosophers got together and had similar feelings about society, religion, and truth, but what they didn’t have was a set of arguments . As a result, they were not able to persuade new followers other than those who already shared their feelings. The Transcendentalists were brilliant writers, crafting expressive essays and compelling poetry, but they did not write philosophical arguments in the traditional sense.

As a result, some people have argued that Transcendentalism was more of a literary or artistic movement than a philosophical one. Whether or not that’s true really comes down to your definition – if you see philosophy as defined by a method of argument, then Transcendentalism isn’t philosophy. If you see philosophy as defined by an interest in musing about life, then Transcendentalism definitely belongs.

a. Logic and duty

b. Religion and community

c. Emotions and independence

d. All of the above

a. Ralph Waldo Emerson

b. Confucius

c. Socrates

a. Logic / Rationality

b. Empirical observation

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Transcendentalism

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: November 15, 2017

Transcendentalism is a 19th-century school of American theological and philosophical thought that combined respect for nature and self-sufficiency with elements of Unitarianism and German Romanticism. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was the primary practitioner of the movement, which existed loosely in Massachusetts in the early 1800s before becoming an organized group in the 1830s.

The Origins of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between “New Light” theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and “Old Light” opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

These “Old Lights” became known first as “liberal Christians” and then as Unitarians, and were defined by the belief that there was no trinity of father, son and holy ghost as in traditional Christian belief, and that Jesus Christ was a mortal.

Various philosophies began to swirl around this crowd, and the ideas that would become Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism over its perceived rationality and instead embraced German Romanticism in a quest for a more spiritual experience.

Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ancient Indian scripture known as the Vedas and religious founder Emanuel Swedenborg.

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

By the 1830s, literature began to appear that bound the Transcendentalist ideas together in a cohesive way and marked the beginnings of a more organized movement.

The Transcendental Club

On September 12, 1836, four Harvard University alumni—writer and Bangor, Maine , minister Frederic Henry Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson , and Unitarian ministers George Ripley and George Putnam—left a celebration of the bicentennial of Harvard to meet at Willard’s Hotel in Cambridge.

The purpose was to follow up on correspondence between Hodge and Emerson and to talk about the state of Unitarianism and what they could do about it.

One week later, the four met again at Ripley’s house in Boston. This was a meeting of a much larger group that included many Unitarian ministers, intellectuals, writers and reformers. There would be 30 more meetings of what was called “the Transcendental Club” over the next four years, featuring a shifting membership that always included Emerson, Ripley, and Hodge.

The only rule the meetings followed was that no one would be allowed to attend if their presence prevented the group from discussing a topic. Emerson’s essay “Nature,” published in 1836, presented Transcendentalist philosophy as it had formed in the club meetings.

This group ceased to meet in 1840, but were involved in the publication The Dial , at first helmed by member and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller , and later by Emerson, with the mission of addressing Transcendentalist thought and concerns.

Henry David Thoreau got his start in The Dial , reporting on wildlife in Massachusetts . After its demise in 1844, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond where he wrote his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods .

Inspired by different utopian groups like the Shakers, members of the Transcendental Club were interested in forming a commune to put their ideas to the test. In 1841, a small group of them, including author Nathaniel Hawthorne , moved to a property named Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

The venture, helmed by George Ripley, was covered in the pages of The Dial as an idyllic one that involved farm work by day and creative work by candlelight at night.

Emerson never joined the farm. He approved of the commune but didn’t want to give up his privacy, preferring to be a frequent visitor. Thoreau refused to join as well, finding the entire idea unappealing. Margaret Fuller visited but felt the farm was destined for failure.

The farm was run by members buying shares for life-long membership, guaranteeing an annual return on their investment, and allowing members who could not afford a share to compensate with work. As farmers, they were fledglings, but Hawthorne, in particular, was thrilled by the physicality of farming life.

There was also a boarding school onsite that was the farm’s primary income source. The farm proved successful enough that in its first year, members had to build new homes on the property to house everyone. There were over 100 residents.

In 1844, following a restructuring that brought further growth, the commune began to fall into a slow decline, with members becoming disillusioned by its mission, as well as financial challenges and other problems, and squabbling amongst themselves. By 1847, this particular Transcendentalist experiment was finished.

Transcendentalism Fades Out

As the 1850s arrived, Transcendentalism is considered to have lost some of its influence, particularly following the untimely death of Margaret Fuller in an 1850 shipwreck.

Though its members remained active in the public eye—notably Emerson, Thoreau and others in their public opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—following the failure of Brook Farm, it never again materialized as a cohesive group.

American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura . Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Chris Jennings . Transcendentalism. Arizona State University . Transcendentalism. Stanford University .

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Transcendentalism by David M. Robinson LAST REVIEWED: 22 February 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0086

Transcendentalism was a religious, literary, and political movement that evolved from New England Unitarianism in the 1820s and 1830s. An important expression of Romanticism in the United States, it is principally associated with the work of essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; journalist and feminist theorist Margaret Fuller; Unitarian minister and antislavery advocate Theodore Parker; and essayist, naturalist, and political theorist Henry David Thoreau. In their initial phase, the transcendentalists extended the Unitarian theological rebellion against Puritan Calvinism, moving toward a post-Christian spirituality that held each man and woman capable of spiritual development and fulfillment. They developed literary as well as theological forms of expression, making perhaps a stronger impact on American literary and artistic culture than they did on American religion. When Emerson delivered two controversial addresses at Harvard, “The American Scholar” (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838), he emerged as the central figure of a loose coalition of ministers and aspiring authors who questioned religious doctrines, such as the New Testament miracles and the supernatural nature of Jesus, and embraced German Romantic writers and the British Romantics. Sharpened by the controversy that erupted after Emerson’s Divinity School Address , theological and literary thinking among the transcendentalists developed in three interrelated directions in the late 1830s and 1840s. Parker and Emerson continued to extend their theological explorations, with Parker calling in 1841 for a religion based on “permanent” rather than “transient” principles. Emerson and Thoreau began to absorb the spiritual sensibility of Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, which were becoming available more widely in translation. Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau gave the movement a literary character, based on Emerson’s innovative prose, Fuller’s translations and critical studies of Goethe, and Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative Walden (1854). The transcendentalists also responded to the politically turbulent 1840s and 1850s, devoting themselves to issues of social reform. Fuller published her groundbreaking women’s rights treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, and Thoreau published his influential essay “Civil Disobedience” in 1849, describing his night in the Concord jail as a protesting tax resister. With national tensions rising over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s, Parker became Boston’s great antislavery preacher, and both Emerson and Thoreau wrote ringing antislavery addresses. By the early 1860s, following the outbreak of the Civil War, the transcendentalists had helped formulate the principles that would reshape American culture well into the 20th century.

For half a century after its publication, Miller 1950 , an annotated anthology of transcendentalist writings, also served as the movement’s best history. Miller’s extended introductions explained the controversies surrounding the rise of the movement and brought emphasis to many of its lesser known figures. Miller 1950 remains of continuing usefulness, but two recently completed histories of transcendentalism, Gura 2007 and Packer 2007 , are now the authoritative histories. Myerson 1977 traces the meetings of the Transcendental Club, in which members of the loosely organized group exchanged ideas and plans. Capper and Wright 1999 provides historically grounded perspectives on themes and authors in the movement. Taylor 2010 places key transcendentalists in an account of New England conceptions of American intellectualism. Cameron 1973 represents the extensive scholarly works of Kenneth Walter Cameron and has been particularly valuable for making little-known 19th-century materials available.

Cameron, Kenneth Walter. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading . New York: Haskell, 1973.

Originally published in 1941 (Raleigh, NC: Thistle Press). Cameron’s pioneering study of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reading is listed here as a representative selection of his voluminous work on transcendentalism, most of it published under Transcendental Books, his imprint. Cameron was especially capable in recovering and reprinting sources for works of Emerson and Thoreau. For further information see the listing for Cameron at WorldCat .

Capper, Charles, and Conrad E. Wright, eds. Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts . Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1999.

These twenty essays drawn from a 1997 conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society constitute the best available compilation of scholarly essays on transcendentalism. The introductory essay by Charles Capper (pp. 3–45) is an informative survey of the historiography of transcendentalism, and Lawrence Buell’s concluding essay (pp. 605–619) charts the place of transcendentalism in American literary history.

Gura, Phillip F. American Transcendentalism: A History . New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.

A history of transcendentalism as most importantly a social movement, one of a series of attempts to democratize American society more completely. Gura emphasizes the inherent tension between self-fulfillment and social change in transcendentalist thinking.

Hutchison, William R. The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Originally published in 1959. Hutchison focuses on the theological and ecclesiastical background of transcendentalism, noting the ministerial roles of Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and others, and describing their efforts to awaken and reform the New England Unitarian churches.

Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Miller’s anthology of transcendentalist writing is now useful principally for the penetrating introductions to the texts, which provide an excellent historical framework for the controversies surrounding the movement.

Myerson, Joel. “A History of the Transcendental Club.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 23.1 (1977): 27–35.

Charts the meetings of the Transcendental Club between 1836 and 1840 to discuss theology, literature, and politics. Myerson provides the names of attendees, meeting places, and subject matter when available, and he sets the meetings in the context of the controversy over the rise of transcendentalism.

Packer, Barbara L. The Transcendentalists . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Packer traces transcendentalism from its “Unitarian Beginnings” through its literary and reform phases to its conclusion in “The Antislavery Years.” She is particularly insightful on the transcendentalists’ philosophical critique of the epistemology of John Locke and on the influence of British Romanticism, especially the work of Thomas Carlyle, in shaping the movement.

Taylor, Andrew. Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity . Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010.

Taylor considers Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller as key figures in a New England intellectual tradition that aspired to define the relationship between the individual thinker and American society. Their thought is compared with the later philosophers William James and George Santayana.

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15 Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism.

What is Transcendentalism? Who are the key players in it? Ralph Waldo Emerson plays an important role in this era. Understanding what distinguishes his work can help you to understand the characteristics of the era. In what ways is love manifested in the Transcendentalist movement?

“ LITERATURE-Ralph Waldo Emerson .”  YouTube , uploaded by The School of Life, 6 May 2016.

Transcendentalism of the Nineteenth Century

Transcendentalism was America’s first notable intellectual and philosophical movement. It developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society. In particular, transcendentalists criticized the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School.

Core Beliefs

Transcendentalism became a movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on the idea that perception is better than logic or experience. Among the transcendentalists’ core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both humans and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions, particularly organized religion and political parties, ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that man is at his best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. It was believed that only from such real individuals could true community be formed. Rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German idealism, more generally), the movement developed as a reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism, John Locke’s philosophy of sensualism, and the Manifest Destiny of New England Calvinism. Its fundamental belief was in the unity and immanence of God in the world.

The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature” is usually considered the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human consciousness to emerge from the new idealist philosophy. Early in the movement’s history, critics use the term “transcendentalist” as a pejorative, and suggested that the members’ position was beyond sanity and reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

The transcendentalists varied in their interpretations of how their ideas should manifest. Some among the group linked it with utopian social change; for example, Orestes Brownson connected it with early socialism, while others such as Emerson considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. In his 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice. The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles that were not based on, or falsifiable by, physical experience, but that were derived from the inner spiritual or mental essence of the human. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as an American outgrowth of romanticism.

By the late 1840s, Emerson believed the movement was dying out, and even more so after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women’s-rights advocate closely associated with the movement; according to Emerson, “she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation.”

Emerson’s Influence

Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, was seen as a champion of individualism and a critic of the pressures of society. He disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature.” Following this groundbreaking work, he gave a speech entitled, “The American Scholar” in 1837. Emerson’s first two collections of essays, published in 1841 and 1844, represent the core of his thinking.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets but developing certain ideas and themes such as individuality, freedom, humankind’s ability to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, Emerson’s essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking and have greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets who have followed him.

Thoreau’s Influence

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book  Walden,  a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience,” an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Among Thoreau’s lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. At the same time, he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Transcendentalists were all from the greater Boston area, mostly men, all white, and most shared a Unitarian faith. Most Black Americans at this time were enslaved. Were there any widely known Black thinkers  during this period? Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass embodied Transcendentalist philosophy. They encountered Transcendentalism as free Black Americans living in the North. Both were well-educated and effective public speakers. Both were engaged in abolition, civil rights, and temperance movements.

Focus on Individualism

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses the moral worth and value of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one’s goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing external interference upon one’s own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Liberalism, existentialism, and anarchism are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis. Individualism is associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles in which there is a tendency towards self-creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors, and also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.

Emerson championed individuality, freedom, and humankind’s ability to realize almost anything. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserted that because God’s presence is inherent in both humanity and nature, all people contain seeds of divinity. His essay “Self-Reliance” thoroughly emphasizes the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency and to follow his or her own instincts and ideas.

Adapted from “ The Emergence of American Literature ” by Boundless is licensed CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Questions to Consider: Individualism may seem like an intrinsic characteristic of the people in the West and specifically of the United States, but that ideal evolved. What are the benefits of individualism? What might be its weaknesses?

Being Human Copyright © 2023 by Jacqui Shehorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Transcendentalism | Definition | Characteristics

In the early 19th century, Transcendentalism became popular in the United States, mainly in the New England region. It highlighted the value of individuality, instinct, and the bond between humans and the natural world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller are a few of the prominent names connected to transcendentalism. It was a response to the rationalism, technological materialism, and increasing emphasis on business and industry that characterized the intellectual and cultural milieu of the time.

Table of Contents

Definition of Transcendentalism

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, coined the term “transcendentalism” to express the viewpoint that some universal truths, such as the presence of God, cannot be established by reason alone but must instead be understood through intuition or “transcendental” understanding. A group of American thinkers who were inspired by Kant and other European philosophers accepted this concept.

Background of Transcendentalism

Religious revivalism , which is connected to the New Light and Old Light dispute, was one of the major influences for transcendentalism. A theological disagreement known as the New Light and Old Light Debate broke out in the American colonies in the middle of the 18th century. It was a battle between two divisions of the Congregational Church, which at the time was the main religious institution in the colonies.

Read More: Seamus Heaney as a modern Poet

The Old Lights were traditionalists who upheld the stringent Calvinist predestination belief, which maintained that God had already predetermined who would be spared and who would be condemned. They were critical to the Great Awakening’s growing revivalism, which placed a strong emphasis on spiritual conversion and personal experiences.

The New Lights, on the other hand, supported the Great Awakening and thought strongly about the value of emotional encounters and individual conversion. They maintained that salvation was accessible to everyone, not simply those chosen by God.

The New Light and Old Light dispute was a microcosm of larger social and cultural shifts occurring in the colonies at the time, including the rise of a new middle class and a rising emphasis on individualism. New religious movements like the Baptist and Methodist religions, which prioritized individual conversion and feelings and experiences, were also influenced by the dispute.

Read More: Death of a Salesman as a modern tragedy

Transcendentalism origin:

The first manifestation of transcendentalism was a gathering of intellectuals who met in George Ripley’s home in 1836 to exchange thoughts and principles. This group comprised Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went on to become the movement’s true leader.

The Transcendentalist movement was formalized in Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature,” which became its defining text. He made the case that nature was the ultimate source of truth and beauty and that by spending time in nature, people might unite with the divine and experience spiritual enlightenment.

Transcendentalism grew out of this foundation into a more comprehensive philosophical and literary movement that stressed individualism, independence, and the value of philosophical and spiritual inquiry. The movement peaked in the 1840s and 1850s, yet many people today still identify with its principles and concepts.

Characteristics of transcendentalism:

Transcendentalism is distinguished by a number of core ideals and principles as well as a particular writing and speaking style. Transcendentalism has a number of key characteristics, including:

Individualism and intuition

Transcendentalists, who relied on the power of the individual mind and spirit, placed a high value on intuition and freedom . Transcendentalists held that people should depend on their own sense of intuition and experience rather than accepting the legitimacy of institutions or prevailing ideas. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, penned the following in his essay “Self-Reliance” : “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” He encouraged individuals to pursue their own paths and pay attention to their inner voices rather than living up to others’ expectations.

Read More: Romanticism in English Literature

Connection with nature:

Transcendentalists valued their relationship with the natural world and considered it as a source of moral and spiritual guidance. Transcendentalists held that direct encounters with nature may help people perceive the divine. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, stated that “Nature is a symbol of spirit… It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual” in his essay “Nature.” He thought that people may communicate with a more spiritual world through nature.

They also looked to nature for moral inspiration and direction. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, wrote in his book “Walden” about his experiences residing in a cottage in the woods next to Walden Pond. He viewed nature as a means of escaping society’s corrupting influence and discovering a more straightforward, genuine way of life.

Transcendentalists highlighted the need of honoring and coexisting with nature. They believed that the natural world should be revered and maintained as a precious resource. For instance, Thoreau stated that “in wilderness is the preservation of the world” in his essay “Walking.” He made the case that maintaining the natural world was our duty since it was vital to human welfare.

Nonconformity:

Transcendentalists praised the search for one’s own truth and meaning and urged people to defy society rules and traditions. Nonconformity was a central tenet of their philosophy. Transcendentalists held that people should question ingrained ideas and customs that stifle their individuality and creativity. For example, in his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” He emphasized that people shouldn’t be frightened to voice their own opinions, even if they conflict with the views of society.

Read More: Renaissance in English literature

Transcendentalists valued idealism highly because they thought that each person’s mind and soul had the ability to improve the world. Transcendentalists had high hopes for human development and thought that people could endeavor to make the world a better place. Emerson stated, for instance, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…and the future will be built by our own hands” , in his essay “The American Scholar.” He had hope for the future and saw it as a period of possibilities.

Transcendentalists valued reform because they felt that through personal development and activity, people might work to improve society. Abolitionism and women’s suffrage were two social and political issues that transcendentalists actively supported. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, discussed his opposition to slavery and support for abolitionist John Brown in his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts” .

Transcendentalists saw education and intellectual development to be crucial for both social and personal change. For instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that “the mind is a whole and demands satisfaction for all of its faculties” in his essay “The American Scholar.” He made the case that education should educate the whole person rather than only impart practical knowledge.

Read More: Keats as a romantic poet

Major Transcendentalist thinkers:

Ralph Waldo Emerson is regarded as one of the most important individuals in the formation of transcendentalism. He was an American philosopher, writer, and poet who lived from 1803 to 1882. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in a family that appreciated learning and culture; He studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he developed an interest in the writings of German idealist philosophers like Friedrich Schelling and Immanuel Kant.

Emerson’s thoughts regarding the significance of the individual that came under the topic of what he called “self-reliance” . Everywhere he turned, he observed people living traditional lifestyles that were constrained by social conventions and religious traditions. Nobody could be themselves, Emerson reasoned, since everyone was too preoccupied with being someone else.

Emerson aimed to free people from the weights of the past, religion, and societal structures so that they could discover their true selves. In his own words, “History is an impertinence and an injury; Our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us…” He insisted that we must live from within, relying only on our own instincts. Nothing is more sacred than the integrity of your own thought, he said in his conclusion.

As a pantheist, Emerson believes that God can be found in all of creation, whether in the tiniest sand grain or the brightest star and more importantly, each of us possesses the divine spark. We are not simply being impulsive or selfish when we follow our own desires; rather, we are realizing a divine plan that history, society, and organized religion typically attempt to hide from us. Emerson believed that the earth’s mountains, grains, and stars show how closely nature, God, and humanity are connected. They merge into one. They also help Emerson see the value of every person as a component of God.

Emerson emphasizes the importance of the commonplace. In articles like “ The American Scholar” and “The Poet,” Emerson argued that the American everyday was a suitable topic for literature. Emerson believed that the transcendentalist God is present everywhere, and it is the poet’s responsibility to make this apparent. He stated, “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful… Even a corpse has its own beauty.” This statement is coming from a man who had peeked inside his first wife’s tomb a year after her passing.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau  saw technology as a frequently pointless diversion. He recognized the useful advantages of new discoveries, but he also cautioned that these discoveries couldn’t address the underlying problems with achieving personal pleasure. Instead, according to Thoreau, we should look to the natural world, which is rich with spiritual significance. He believed that waterfalls, forests, and animals have intrinsic value in addition to their aesthetic appeal and ecological significance. The ideal way for us to view ourselves is as a part of nature; we should consider ourselves to be nature itself, looking inside itself rather than as an outside force or the ruler of nature.

According to Thoreau, citizens have a moral duty to oppose governments that enforce hypocritical or blatantly unfair laws. Thoreau then went to something he called: civil disobedience:  protesting injustice by peacefully rejecting it. Despite spending time alone, Thoreau shows us how to navigate the shockingly large, intricately intertwined, and morally disturbing modern civilization. He encourages us to live authentically by participating with the world and renouncing our support for the government when we perceive it to be doing wrong rather than merely avoiding material life and its diversions. His writings continue to be relevant and serve as a reminder of how crucial it is to live without the distractions of money, technology, and other people’s opinions in order to live in accordance with our finest and truest nature.

• Critical Appreciation of Tennyson’s “Break, Break Break”
• Tennyson as a representative poet of Victorian age
• Short note on elegy
• Justify the title Pride and Prejudice
• The use of irony in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

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Transcendentalism in English Literature – Meaning and Characteristics

Back to: Literary Movements in English Literature

Table of Contents

Introduction

Transcendentalism was a movement inspired by Romanticism that emerged during the 1830s and 1840s. It was not just a literary movement but also a philosophical one. Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism too shunned rationality and rose to its prominence in America. 

Characteristic Features of Transcendentalism

Individualism.

Transcendentalism celebrated individualism, even more so than Romanticism. It was preferred above all else. Being dependent was shunned.

Nonconformity

Similarly, Transcendentalism also commemorated nonconformity. It rejected established traditional norms and conventions and was against following societal expectations blindly.

Self Realisation

Transcendentalism also values self-realisation and relying on one’s own intuition. It encouraged individuals to be self-reliant.

Transcendentalism Major Poets List and Their Important Works

Ralph waldo emerson.

Emerson was the pioneer of Transcendentalism. His magnum opus “Self-Reliance” is one of the most important texts of Transcendentalism and the manifesto of the same.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was also an important member of the Transcendentalism movement. Famous works of his include “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience”. 

Walt Whitman

Whitman again was a prominent work. His most famous work is his collection “Leaves of Grass”. 

Conclusion 

Transcendentalism was a groundbreaking movement in America that transformed their way of intellect and thinking during the Romantic Age.

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Transcendentalism

What is Transcendentalism? Who are the key players in it? Ralph Waldo Emerson plays an important role in this era. Understanding what distinguishes his work can help you to understand the characteristics of the era. In what ways is love manifested in the Transcendentalist movement?

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://pressbooks.whccd.edu/westerncivilization/?p=93#oembed-1

“ LITERATURE-Ralph Waldo Emerson .” YouTube , uploaded by The School of Life, 6 May 2016.

Transcendentalism of the Nineteenth Century

Transcendentalism was America’s first notable intellectual and philosophical movement. It developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society. In particular, transcendentalists criticized the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School.

Core Beliefs

Transcendentalism became a movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on the idea that perception is better than logic or experience. Among the transcendentalists’ core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both humans and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions, particularly organized religion and political parties, ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that man is at his best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. It was believed that only from such real individuals could true community be formed. Rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German idealism, more generally), the movement developed as a reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism, John Locke’s philosophy of sensualism, and the Manifest Destiny of New England Calvinism. Its fundamental belief was in the unity and immanence of God in the world.

The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature” is usually considered the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human consciousness to emerge from the new idealist philosophy. Early in the movement’s history, critics use the term “transcendentalist” as a pejorative, and suggested that the members’ position was beyond sanity and reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

The transcendentalists varied in their interpretations of how their ideas should manifest. Some among the group linked it with utopian social change; for example, Orestes Brownson connected it with early socialism, while others such as Emerson considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. In his 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice. The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles that were not based on, or falsifiable by, physical experience, but that were derived from the inner spiritual or mental essence of the human. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as an American outgrowth of romanticism.

By the late 1840s, Emerson believed the movement was dying out, and even more so after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women’s-rights advocate closely associated with the movement; according to Emerson, “she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation.”

Emerson’s Influence

Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, was seen as a champion of individualism and a critic of the pressures of society. He disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature.” Following this groundbreaking work, he gave a speech entitled, “The American Scholar” in 1837. Emerson’s first two collections of essays, published in 1841 and 1844, represent the core of his thinking.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets but developing certain ideas and themes such as individuality, freedom, humankind’s ability to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, Emerson’s essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking and have greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets who have followed him.

Thoreau’s Influence

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience,” an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Among Thoreau’s lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. At the same time, he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Transcendentalists were all from the greater Boston area, mostly men, all white, and most shared a Unitarian faith. Most Black Americans at this time were enslaved. Were there any widely known Black thinkers during this period? Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass embodied Transcendentalist philosophy. They encountered Transcendentalism as free Black Americans living in the North. Both were well-educated and effective public speakers. Both were engaged in abolition, civil rights, and temperance movements.

Focus on Individualism

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses the moral worth and value of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one’s goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing external interference upon one’s own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Liberalism, existentialism, and anarchism are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis. Individualism is associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles in which there is a tendency towards self-creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors, and also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.

Emerson championed individuality, freedom, and humankind’s ability to realize almost anything. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserted that because God’s presence is inherent in both humanity and nature, all people contain seeds of divinity. His essay “Self-Reliance” thoroughly emphasizes the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency and to follow his or her own instincts and ideas.

Adapted from “ The Emergence of American Literature ” by Boundless is licensed CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Questions to Consider: Individualism may seem like an intrinsic characteristic of the people in the West and specifically of the United States, but that ideal evolved. What are the benefits of individualism? What might be its weaknesses?