transcendentalism critical essay

• Emerson's Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Critical Essays Understanding Transcendentalism

Never a truly organized body of thought, and characterized by defects as well as inspirational ideals, transcendentalism became one of the most subtly influential trends in nineteenth-century America. Three main currents contributed to this uniquely American school of thought: neo-Platonism and the belief in an ideal state of existence; British romanticism, with its emphasis on individualism; and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

From neo-Platonism — as nineteenth-century educated Americans understood it — came the belief in the primacy of intellectual thinking over material reality, an idea originated by the Greek philosopher Plato. Through a series of dramatic dialogues, Plato argues that there are ideal forms existing in an absolute reality; in the material world in which we live, all objects and phenomena are imperfect representations of these ideals. Our entire lives are spent trying to perfect ourselves and our environment in hopes of attaining an ideal existence. Agreeing with Plato, philosophers like Emerson and his fellow transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott go so far as to say that ideas are the only reality: The tangible world exists solely as a manifestation of pure ideas.

This preoccupation with pure ideas also appears in the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who was first to use the term "transcendentalism." His philosophical investigations of the pure workings of the mind were extremely influential throughout Western culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as they pertain to American transcendentalism. Kant believes that transcendental knowledge is limited because, as humans, we can understand only what we are capable of perceiving. If we cannot perceive something, it simply does not exist. Other German transcendentalists, with whom Emerson is closer in his thinking, expand Kant's reasoning. They argue that simply because we cannot perceive something does not mean that it does not exist. Emerson maintains that the soul exists, but he admits that he cannot define what this soul is, other than acknowledging when he senses it in himself or in another person.

British romanticism also influenced Emerson and transcendentalism. Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge advocate the primacy of the individual over the community and foster a belief in the authenticity of individual vision over the conventions and formalities of institutions. For romantics and transcendentalists alike, all institutions — be they religious, social, political, or economic — are suspect as being false, materialistic, and deadening to an individual's pure insight. Both movements emphasize personal insight, or intuition, as a privileged form of knowledge. Such fierce adherence to individuality, a mainstay in Emerson's writing, influenced the progressive social movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Individuality came to be recognized as a God-given right, a belief that holds as true today as it did during Emerson's life.

Another strong influence on Emerson's expression of transcendentalism is the writings of the Swedish mystic-philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Heavily influenced by Swedenborg's belief in the absolute unity of God — not the Trinity — and in our personal responsibility for our salvation, Emerson expresses strong distrust and criticism of the restrictions and shallowness of conventional society. He is not the visionary that others influenced by Swedenborg are, but he advocates an ecstatic, visionary approach to life and to knowledge. Many of his essays express admiration for Swedenborg and acknowledge the influence that Swedenborg had on his own thinking.

The major emphasis of American transcendentalism is transcendence, which involves reaching beyond what can be expressed in words or understood in logical or rational thinking to seek the genesis of our existence. By gaining a new understanding, we attain a heightened awareness of the world and our rightful place in it. Emerson refers to this all-encompassing force that he credits for the mystery of our existence by various terms: God, the Universal Being, the Over-Soul. He closely identifies nature with this force, to the extent that, finally, his philosophy is generally judged to be pantheistic rather than theistic. That is, God coexists with nature, sharing similar powers, rather than being a power beyond it.

According to transcendentalists like Emerson, a person who follows intuition and remains faithful to personal vision will become a more moral, idealistic individual. For many of Emerson's contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau and Amos Bronson Alcott, such a course of action resulted in an idealism that formed the basis for their actions, especially actions that undertook to critique and change what was perceived as evil in society. For example, Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes to support America's involvement in the Mexican War. Transcendentalism also provided one major philosophical foundation for the abolition of slavery. However, while individuals such as Emerson combined transcendentalism with spirituality, the essentially pantheistic nature of the theory paved the way for more materialistic and exploitative expression. The doctrine of self-reliance mutated from an expression of moral integrity to a simple assertion of self-promotion and selfishness.

To a great extent, transcendentalism was a local phenomenon centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and was developed by a group of individuals from New England and New York who knew and communicated closely with each other. Their ideas were seldom successfully put into action, but at least one attempt is worthy of mention. Brook Farm, a utopian community founded on transcendentalist principles, lasted some six or seven years before it dissolved, to the financial loss of many who had invested in the venture. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived there for a time and later wrote about the experience in The Blithedale Romance (1852), felt that its weakness was its lack of government, and that the community failed because too few of its members were willing to do the physical work required to make it viable. Although it failed materially, Emerson, with his characteristic optimism, believed it to be a noble experiment that provided invaluable education and enlightenment for the participants. He did not live there, but he visited the site and included a brief, personal account of Brook Farm in one of his writings, Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England .

Any writer or speaker who wishes to explain or promote a philosophy such as transcendentalism confronts the problem of discussing in language ideas that are, by definition, beyond language. Emerson resorts to imagery, but his writings are frequently cryptic, apparently contradictory, enigmatic, or simply confusing. Like other transcendentalists, he does not offer an organized body of thought; rather, he tends to circle a subject, offering comparisons, analogies, and hypotheses.

Some of the major concepts of transcendentalism have persisted and become foundational in American thought. Probably the most important of these is the affirmation of the right of individuals to follow truth as they see it, even when contrary to established laws or customs. This principle inspired both the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement and the twentieth-century civil rights and conscientious objector movements.

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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

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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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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Transcendental Arguments

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y —where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover, because these arguments are generally used to respond to sceptics who take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental life which the sceptic can be expected to accept without question (e.g., that we have experiences, or make certain judgements, or perform certain actions, or have certain capacities, and so on), where X is then something the sceptic doubts or denies (e.g., the existence of the external world, or of the necessary causal relation between events, or of other minds, or the force of moral reasons). In this way, it is hoped, scepticism can be overturned using transcendental arguments that embody such transcendental claims.

At first sight, this anti-sceptical potential of such arguments makes them seem powerful and attractive, by offering a proof of what otherwise might seem to be known only through inductive reasoning or fallible experience. However, as we shall see, transcendental arguments conceived of in this ambitious form have struggled to live up to this promise, though they still have their devotees. Nonetheless, the potential for such arguments has been kept alive, by reassessing their possible uses, where it has been suggested that they can perhaps be given a more modest role, which then makes them more viable and enables their apparent difficulties to be set aside. Whether this is indeed the case, and whether even if it is, this then leaves them denuded of their anti-sceptical value and allure, remains an open question, and will be discussed further below. We will then discuss some recent developments in modal metaphysics and epistemology to see if they provide useful conceptual resources. We will also consider how far transcendental arguments can serve a role not just in epistemology in defending our claims to knowledge, but also in ethics, in persuading the sceptic of the force of certain moral considerations and principles. Moreover, we will briefly discuss how transcendental arguments have been used in philosophy of psychology and perception, where anti-scepticism is often not the goal.

1. History and Exemplars

2. key features of transcendental arguments, 3. objections to transcendental arguments, 4. responses to objections, 5. connections to modal metaphysics and epistemology, 6. transcendental arguments in ethics, 7. transcendental arguments in philosophy of psychology and perception, 8. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

Although Immanuel Kant rarely uses the term ‘transcendental argument’, and when he does it is not in our current sense (cf. Hookway 1999: 180 n. 8; cf. Austin 1961), he nonetheless speaks frequently of ‘transcendental deductions’, ‘transcendental expositions’, and ‘transcendental proofs’, which roughly speaking have the force of what is today meant by ‘transcendental argument’. Prior exemplars of such arguments may perhaps be claimed, such as Aristotle’s proof of the principle of non-contradiction (see Metaphysics 1005b35–1006a28; Illies 2003: 45–6, Walker 2006: 240 and 255–6); but Kant nonetheless formulated what are generally taken to be the central examples of such arguments, so the history of the topic is usually assumed to start here, with the Critique of Pure Reason and its Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, Second Analogy, and Refutation of Idealism. Briefly put, the Deduction is directed against Humean scepticism concerning the applicability of a priori concepts to our experience; the Second Analogy concerns Humean doubts over causal powers or forces; while the Refutation of Idealism focuses on Cartesian (methodological) doubts concerning the existence of the external world.

Perhaps because of its brevity and relative clarity, but also perhaps because of the hope it can be made ‘self-standing’ and independent of the (to some) disreputable machinery of transcendental idealism [see §3 of the entry on Immanuel Kant ], it is the Refutation that has become the paradigm to many of a transcendental argument. While the wisdom of this can be questioned (cf. Bell 1999, where the Refutation is called ‘a mistaken paradigm’), the Refutation undoubtedly makes a useful place for us to start.

As presented by Kant, the Refutation is aimed at the ‘problematic idealism of Descartes’, who holds that the existence of objects outside us in space is ‘doubtful and indemonstrable’ (Kant 1781/1787 B274)—where, as Kant famously remarks in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique in which he comments on the Refutation, ‘it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith , and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof’ (Kant 1781/1787 Bxxxix note). Kant’s strategy in response then sets the canonical pattern for a transcendental argument, in beginning from what the sceptic takes for granted, namely that we have mental states which we experience as having a temporal order, and then arguing for the transcendental claim that experience of this sort would not be possible unless we also had generally veridical experience of things in space outside us, and thus knowledge of the external world. In more detail, the argument can be presented as follows (cf. Kant 1781/1787 B275–79 and Bxxxix–xli note):

In this way, Kant hoped to ‘turn the game played by idealism against itself’ (cf. B276), by working from the inner experience that it takes for granted and showing that this depends on an outer experience which the idealist doubts, so that in this manner the ‘scandal to philosophy’ posed by such doubts can finally be resolved.

However, despite its brevity, the Refutation has given rise to considerable dispute and discussion, not only because questions can be raised about the details of the argument, but also because Kant’s wider theoretical commitments to transcendental idealism have also rendered the Refutation problematic and his intentions unclear: for example, doesn’t the argument undermine Kant’s own idealism in some way, and how does the Refutation relate to the somewhat similar argument in the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition of the Critique (A366–80), but in which an appeal to transcendental idealism plays a greater role? These complications have led to a range of disputes concerning the Refutation, from whether or not it can be made cogent, to whether or not it fits within Kant’s own philosophical project, and indeed whether focusing on this as Kant’s response to scepticism distorts his conception of scepticism, and how he thought it should be resolved. (For further discussion of the Refutation, see Guyer 1987: 279–332, Caranti 2007, Dicker 2008.)

Transcendental arguments found a place in philosophy after Kant, including in the post-Kantian German idealist tradition (cf. Franks 1999, Franks 2005: 201–59, Taylor 1976, Beiser 2005: 174–91, Rockmore & Breazeale 2014, Nance 2015, Tse 2020, Schüz 2022; but for some critical discussion of Taylor see Stern 2013 and Houlgate 2015, and of Beiser see Stern 2012). However, their prominence in more contemporary analytic philosophy is largely due to the work of P. F. Strawson, and particularly his earlier books Individuals and The Bounds of Sense —the latter of which is a commentary on Kant’s Critique , while the former is written under its influence in a broader way (cf. Grundmann 1994; Niquet 1991; Callanan 2011). One example from these works is the ‘objectivity argument’ to be found in The Bounds of Sense , which aims to show that ‘[u]nity of diverse experiences in a single consciousness requires experience of objects’; the argument may be outlined as follows (see Strawson 1966: 97–112, esp. 108; also see Cassam 1997, Cheng 2021a):

In this way, Strawson hoped to capture what he took to be the central core of Kant’s position, but without appeal to the ‘doctrines of transcendental psychology’ (Strawson 1966: 97), which he found to be problematic. Likewise, in Individuals , Strawson presented an argument starting from the premise that we think of the world as containing objective particulars in a single spatiotemporal system, to the conclusion that objects continue to exist unperceived, where the latter is said to be required in order to make possible the kind of identification and re-identification necessary for the former (cf. Strawson 1959: 31–58). Thus, as Strawson famously put it, the sceptic ‘pretends to accept a conceptual scheme’ of a world containing objects in a spatio-temporal system, ‘but at the same time quietly rejects one of the conditions of its employment’ (Strawson 1959: 35).

On the basis of the promise of arguments of this sort from Strawson, and from others (such as Shoemaker 1963: 168–9), together with growing interest in the work of Kant himself within analytic philosophy, this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a significant one for the history of transcendental arguments, leading to much subsequent discussion. At the same time, central Wittgensteinian doctrines prominent at the time (such as the notion of ‘criteria’: see §1.3 of the entry on other minds ) were also given a transcendental inflection, so certain Wittgensteinian claims came to take on the form of transcendental arguments (cf. Rorty 1971: 3, where he comments that ‘Many admirers of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and of Strawson’s Individuals have taken the theme of both books to be an analysis of philosophical skepticism and their distinctive contribution to be a new way of criticizing the skeptic’). However, crucial to the debates of the period were also a number of critical articles pointing to the perceived limitation of the transcendental approach, including those by Stefan Körner (Körner 1966, 1967, 1969) and by Barry Stroud (Stroud 1968), where the latter in particular shaped the ensuing discussion over the value of transcendental arguments and what they could be expected to achieve, as we shall see in section 3 .

Nonetheless, while the intervention by Stroud and others led to doubts about the value of transcendental arguments, as theorists asked if these critiques held good and if so what might remain of the transcendental approach, this did not deter prominent philosophers continuing to produce transcendental arguments. Two of these may serve as further exemplars of the genre, where both have gone on to be much discussed. The first was offered by Hilary Putnam in relation to external world skepticism once again, and the second by Donald Davidson, this time relating more directly to the problem of other minds.

Putnam’s argument comes in Chapter 1 of Reason, Truth and History , where his goal is to refute a modern-day version of Descartes’ evil demon hypothesis, according to which I do not inhabit a world containing ordinary physical objects (trees, tables, houses), but I am a brain in a vat in a lab whose experiences are caused by a computer artificially stimulating my nerve endings, so that none of these objects actually exist beyond my hallucinatory impression of them (see the entries on Brains in a Vat and Skepticism and Content Externalism). This is the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, and it stands for the possibility that, for all I know, nothing rules out the world being very different from how it appears to me to be, given the gap that exists between appearance (our experience of it) and reality.

Now, Putnam’s response to the sceptic is to argue that though we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-vats on the grounds of how things appear to us, we can rule it out nonetheless. How? Here is one reconstruction of the reasoning: we can rule it out because on a plausible theory of reference, it is self-refuting: that is, ‘I am a brain-in-a-vat [or BIV, for short]’ cannot be truly affirmed by anyone. The theory of reference Putnam uses as a premise is a causal one, which states that ‘one cannot refer to certain kinds of things, e.g., trees , if one has no causal interaction at all with them, or with things in terms of which they can be described’ (Putnam 1981: 16–17). Putnam defends this theory, on the grounds that it alone can explain how reference occurs in a way that is not ‘magical’, i.e., which does not assume that the connection is just somehow intrinsic between representations and their referents. It then follows, according to Putnam, that a BIV affirming ‘I am a BIV’ is saying something true only if the BIV is in what the BIV is calling a ‘vat’. But the BIV is not in one of those; rather, he is in a real vat. What he is calling a ‘vat’ is that to which his use of that term causally connects in a referential way—where for a BIV, that is something in the computer that prompts his applications of ‘vat’ by giving him hallucinations of the appearance of vats. Yet the BIV is not in that part of the computer. Thus, Putnam concludes, ‘I am a BIV’ cannot be truly asserted by anyone, much like ‘I do not exist’ or ‘I cannot construct a meaningful sentence’ (cf. Bardon 2005). It therefore cannot ever be wrong to assert that one is not a BIV, so that in this sense ‘I am not a BIV’ is an incorrigible claim (cf. Putnam 1981: 14–15). Putnam therefore holds that we can rule out the BIV hypothesis on a priori grounds, and thus refute the sceptic.

Putnam is keen to emphasise the transcendental nature of his enterprise in this respect. He stresses that the kinds of constraints on reference that operate here and disprove the BIV hypothesis are not physical or merely analytic, but involve limitations on what is possible that can be arrived at through philosophical reflection on the nature of representation and meaning, and hence fit into a broadly Kantian model of how to respond to scepticism, albeit with more empirical elements:

What we have been doing is considering the preconditions for thinking about, representing, referring to , etc. We have investigated these preconditions not by investigating the meaning of these words and phrases (as a linguist might, for example) but by reasoning a priori . Not in the old ‘absolute’ sense (since we do not claim that magical theories of reference are a priori wrong), but in the sense of inquiring into what is reasonably possible assuming certain general premisses, or making certain very broad theoretical assumptions. Such a procedure is neither ‘empirical’ nor quite ‘a priori’, but has elements of both ways of investigating. In spite of the fallibility of my procedure, and its dependence upon assumptions which might be described as ‘empirical’ (e.g., the assumption that the mind has no access to external things or properties apart from that provided by the senses), my procedure has a close relation to what Kant called a ‘transcendental’ investigation; for it is an investigation, I repeat, of the preconditions of reference and hence of thought—preconditions built in to the nature of our minds themselves, though not (as Kant hoped) wholly independent of empirical assumptions. (Putnam 1981: 16)

As a result of his attempt to respond to external world scepticism in this way, Putnam has had an important influence in reviving interest in the possibility of using transcendental arguments against scepticism. (For further discussion of Putnam’s position, see Brueckner 1986, Coppock 1987, Heil 1987, David 1991, Brueckner 1992, Caranti 2007: 110–13.)

Finally, we may turn to the work of Donald Davidson, who like Putnam bases his transcendental claim on a form of externalism, which links the content of our mental states to how we relate to our environment; but in his case, this idea is directed against scepticism concerning other minds. Thus, while the sceptic holds that the existence of such minds is doubtful, Davidson argues that it would not be possible for a creature like me to have thoughts unless I lived in a world with other creatures who also had thoughts, so the truth of the latter can be deduced from the fact that I am indeed capable of thinking: ‘What are the conditions necessary for the existence of thought, and so in particular for the existence of people with thoughts? I believe there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were no other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world’ (Davidson 1989: 193; note that he uses ‘existence,’ not ‘possibility’). On one interpretation, Davidson’s transcendental argument is based on his account of what it takes for a thought to have content, for which he argues that a process of ‘triangulation’ must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is ‘fixed’ by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world. Thus, Davidson argues, if there were no other people, the content of our thoughts would be totally indeterminate, and we would in effect have no thoughts at all; from the self-evident falsity of the latter, he therefore deduces the falsity of the former (cf. Davidson 1991: 159–60). Davidson therefore argues that the mistake the sceptic makes, in common with the Cartesian heritage of which he is part, is in the assumption that it is possible to be a lone thinker: Davidson’s transcendental argument is designed to show that this is not in fact the case, given the constraints on what it takes to have thoughts with content, so that the existence of a single thinking subject entails the existence of others.

As Davidson suggests (cf. Davidson 1991: 157), his position here might be said to have certain similarities to that put forward in Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, at least under the interpretation given by Kripke (see Kripke 1982). Kripke takes Wittgenstein as arguing that it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded: what makes our continuation of some addition rule a case of rule-following at all (for example), is that the community goes on in the same way; and, unless addition were rule-governed as a practice, statements like ‘2+2=4’ could have no meaning. Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that ‘fix’ this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former (cf. Kripke 1982: 89). On this view, then, unless the sceptic is prepared to admit the existence of this community of fellow-speakers, and thus attribute a capacity for intentional rule-following to those around him, he cannot make sense of the idea of meaningful thought in his own case.

We have therefore seen that taking their inspiration from Kant to a greater or lesser degree, philosophers have come to develop a range of transcendental arguments that are intended to refute scepticism in a robust and ambitious manner, by establishing anti-sceptical conclusions on the basis of transcendental claims. From these exemplars and others, therefore, we may now say something further about how such arguments work and what makes them distinctive.

From something like the canon of transcendental arguments outlined above, the characteristic marks and the significance of such arguments might be listed as follows:

1. Transcendental arguments are typically anti-sceptical, so that (as Strawson puts it) it is widely assumed that ‘the point of transcendental arguments in general is an anti-sceptical point’ (Strawson 1985: 10). Moreover, in the ambitious form in which we have considered them so far, they refute the sceptic in a direct manner, by purporting to prove what she doubts or questions, and they do so on their own, without bringing in any wider epistemological theories or considerations. And these arguments are what is sometimes called world-directed or ­ truth-directed , as opposed to self-directed (cf. Peacocke 1989: 4; Cassam 1997: 33; Cassam 1999: 83): that is, they set out to establish the truth of some claim about how reality is and what it contains (such as subject-independent objects in space and time, or other minds, or causal laws).

2. Because of their anti-sceptical ambitions, transcendental arguments must begin from a starting point that the sceptic can be expected to accept, the necessary condition of which is then said to be something that the sceptic doubts or denies. This will then mean that such arguments are ineffective against very radical forms of scepticism, which doubt the laws of logic, and/or which refuse to accept any starting point as uncontentious; and it will also mean that they may be effective against a sceptic who is prepared to accept some starting point, but then ineffective against another sceptic who is not. But neither of these features of transcendental arguments need be felt to be disabling: for the scepticism of the radical sceptics is perhaps of dubious coherence, or at least of little interest because they seem so unwilling to engage with us, while the second limitation may mean merely that different transcendental arguments are required for different sceptical audiences.

3. Because of the need to find an uncontentious starting point, transcendental arguments will also then characteristically be first personal, by beginning from how I or we experience, think, judge, and so on. Thus, while it is perhaps reasonable to hold that there are necessary conditions for the possibility of ‘extra-personal’ entities such as material objects, substances, the universe, time and so on, a transcendental argument which is directed against scepticism is unlikely to be concerned with exploring such conditions, as the sceptic is unlikely to admit the existence of the things to which the conditions belong.

4. Transcendental arguments involve transcendental claims , to the effect that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y , where in saying this, the arguments do not assume this to be a matter of merely causal, natural, or nomological necessity. Given that their target is the sceptic who challenges our claims about the world, there are clearly two good reasons for this. First, although our observation of the world might suggest that experience has certain necessary causal conditions (e.g., light and sound must be transmitted between particular wavelengths), we can hardly use such considerations against a sceptic of this sort, for whom all such empirical knowledge is in question, and against whom we are therefore required to adopt a position that is less open to doubt in this way. Second, if the transcendental argument’s claim is one of only natural necessity, then this allows that there are metaphysically possible worlds (for example, where the laws of physics do not hold) in which this claim is false, again opening us up to the sceptical challenge of showing we are not in such a world.

5. However, if the transcendental claims involved are not a matter of merely causal or natural necessity, this then raises the question of what form of necessity they do in fact involve. If they were true in virtue of their meaning alone (even if unobviously so), and thus analytic, then the necessity might be said to be purely logical, where to deny the claim is then to assert some form of logical contradiction (cf. Bennett 1979, Walker 1978: 18–23, Walker 1989: 63–4, Bell 1999). Assuming that the problematic analytic/synthetic distinction is viable, this may still not seem to be the case in many instances of such transcendental claims, where in fact they may be said to be synthetic a priori (cf. Wilkerson 1976: 199–213). To many, nonetheless, it has appeared that the transcendental claim is not a logical necessity, but stands somewhere between that and natural necessity, perhaps putting it into the camp of metaphysical necessity, as this is sometimes understood: that is, a necessary relation which holds not by virtue of logical or causal constraints on the nature of logical or physical possibilities, but by virtue of metaphysical constraints on how things can be—much as the fact that nothing can be red and green all over is arguably not determined by any law of logic or causal law, but the nature of colour, and how it can be exemplified in things. There will be more on this in section 5 below.

6. It is then partly because of the apparently rather special nature of these transcendental claims, that the suspicion arises that there will then turn out to be something distinctively Kantian about such arguments; for Kant made it the focus of his critical project to account for metaphysical knowledge of this sort, where transcendental idealism is then supposed to provide the answer to how such knowledge is possible. The idea, roughly speaking, is that it is too much for us to be able to know how things must be beyond the limits of our experience, and so claim metaphysical knowledge of things-in-themselves. By contrast, once we confine ourselves to how things appear to us given our ways of seeing and thinking about the world, then we can understand how we could at least acquire knowledge of how things must behave as phenomena, by knowing about the forms of intuitions and concepts through which such phenomena must appear to us if we are to experience them at all (cf. Williams 1974, Pippin 1988, Stroud 1999, Stroud 2000a). However, as we saw in the case of Strawson, whether or not such full-blooded Kantian commitments are necessary to the transcendental argument strategy is a matter of dispute. Indeed, some have argued that there is a ‘neglected alternative’ here: namely, while Kant might be right to hold that we cannot plausibly claim insight into the constraints on the world itself but only on the nature of our sensibility and understanding, nonetheless we can argue from this that the world must itself be a certain way to fit these conditions, without thereby thinking that it is mind-dependent or that all we thereby know is how things appear to us. The analogy is thus drawn to a case such as the following: once we know how our lungs work, we can know what the air must be like in order to allow us to breath, without the nature of air being determined by how our lungs work (cf. Harrison 1989, Westphal 2004: 68–126).

The features discussed above therefore have a reasonable claim to be what make transcendental arguments distinctive, at least of the sort we have considered so far. However, as we shall now go on to see, transcendental arguments of this type have turned out to be open to serious objections, so that alternative models have been proposed which do not incorporate all these features in quite the same way.

Just as the rise in interest in transcendental arguments within twentieth-century philosophy can largely be traced back to the work of Strawson, so too the subsequent disillusionment can largely be traced back to the work of one person, namely Barry Stroud, in his influential 1968 article (Stroud 1968). In that paper, Stroud focused on the nature of the transcendental claim that the truth of some proposition S is a necessary condition for the possibility of language, but then argued that ‘the sceptic can always very plausibly insist that it is enough to make language possible if we believe that S is true, or that it looks for all the world as if it is, but that S needn’t actually be true’ (Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24]). Moreover, the general problem this raises is that if such a response by the sceptic is plausible in the case of language, perhaps it is also plausible in the case of other starting-points too? Thus, for example, when it comes to scepticism about the existence of the external world or other minds, maybe no argument can be constructed to show there must actually be such a world or minds as a condition for inner experience or the having of thoughts, but just that we must believe them to exist, or that they must seem to us to do so—which hardly looks like enough to quash sceptical doubts on these matters.

Now, in the 1968 paper, Stroud appears to get to his conclusion by arguing from an analysis of specific cases (viz. arguments proposed by Strawson and Shoemaker in Strawson 1959 and Shoemaker 1963 respectively). But then, this may seem to leave open the hope that even if these arguments fall to his critique, others may not. However, in subsequent work, Stroud has said more to substantiate his objection and make it seem more likely to hold across the board. For, while he allows that we might reasonably be able to make modal claims about ‘how our thinking in certain ways necessarily requires that we also think in certain other ways’, he believes it is puzzling ‘how…truths about the world which appear to say or imply nothing about human thought or experience’ (for example, that things exist outside us in space and time, or that there are other minds) ‘[can] be shown to be genuinely necessary conditions of such psychological facts as that we think and experience things in certain ways, from which the proofs begin’. Stroud goes on: ‘It would seem that we must find, and cross, a bridge of necessity from the one to the other. That would be a truly remarkable feat, and some convincing explanation would surely be needed of how the whole thing is possible’ (Stroud 1994 [2000b: 158–9; cf. also 212]). Thus, Stroud is prepared to allow ‘that we can come to see how our thinking in certain ways necessarily requires that we also think in certain other ways, and so perhaps in certain other ways as well, and we can appreciate how rich and complicated the relations between those ways of thinking must be’ (Stroud 1994 [2000b: 158–9]); but he believes that anything more than this, which asserts that ‘non-psychological facts’ about the world outside us constitute necessary conditions for our thinking, is problematic.

Then, having apparently established that the strongest defensible transcendental claims concern merely how things must appear to us or what we must believe, the second stage of Stroud’s argument is that in order to bridge the gap that this has opened up, and to get to a conclusion about how things actually are , one must opt either for verificationism or idealism. The former holds that in order to be meaningful, a sentence must say something that we can determine to be true or false. If so, then we cannot be left in the limbo of sceptical doubt behind a veil of appearances wondering where the truth lies. The latter sees no gap between how the world is and how we think things are or merely appear to us. However, aside from the potentially problematic nature of both these positions, an appeal to either verificationism or idealism is also dialectically unsatisfactory, as any such appeal would appear to render the transcendental argument itself redundant—for each on its own is powerful enough to disarm sceptical worries, without the transcendental manoeuvre now being required (cf. Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24–5]). In this way, Stroud has convinced many that the proponent of transcendental arguments faces an unattractive dilemma: either to dispense with verificationism or idealism, but fall short of the anti-sceptical conclusion concerning how things are; or to accept verificationism or idealism, but then make the transcendental argument itself superfluous.

The problem that Stroud has highlighted may be briefly illustrated by returning to the exemplars of transcendental arguments that we considered in Section 1 . Thus, when it comes to Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, it can be said that the most that Kant really establishes is that we have experience as of things outside us in space, while all that Strawson’s objectivity argument shows is that we must apply the is/seems distinction to our experience, and so believe that things exist without us experiencing them, but that this doesn’t do enough to show that this distinction is really a valid one (cf. Wilkerson 1976: 57, Brueckner 1989). Likewise, against Putnam it is argued that the sceptic can challenge his externalist theory of reference, where on a more internalist view, you could then think about being in a vat even if you were in one, as the meaning of ‘vat’ no longer depends on your relations to the world; or, if Putnam insists on his externalism, it could be claimed that this is already a position that rules out scepticism because it assumes that the mind and world are linked in important ways, making it unnecessary to make appeal to the specific transcendental argument that Putnam rests upon it (cf. McCulloch 1999). Similarly, against Davidson it can be argued that thought would be possible, even if the ‘others’ with which one ‘triangulated’ were nothing but robots or automata; or again, if this is ruled out by appeal to some form of semantic externalism, this then renders the transcendental argument redundant. In all these cases, therefore, it may appear that Stroudian objections can be used to damaging effect.

Thus, applying Stroud’s concerns to a range of arguments in this way may seem to support the view that the transcendental arguments so far produced succumb to his dilemma (although, of course, attempts to bolster the arguments can also be made). Nonetheless, it might be felt that unless Stroud can substantiate his more principled objection to the very possibility of crossing the ‘bridge of necessity’ that is required by any sort of world-directed transcendental claim, he has still not yet established conclusively that no transcendental argument can be made to work, and must always either fall short or end up being superfluous. So the question arises: how powerful is his suggestion that a ‘truly remarkable feat’ is required here, one that we have good reason to think cannot feasibly be accomplished?

Perhaps one difficulty that can be raised for Stroud, is that while he thinks there is something inherently problematic in making a claim about how the world must be as a condition for our thought or experience, he does not think that there is anything particularly problematic about claiming that our thought or experience is a necessary condition for some other aspect of our thought or experience—indeed, he exploits such claims himself in his own arguments against the sceptic (cf. Stroud 1994 [2000b: 165–76]). But how can claims of necessary connections between some thoughts or experience and some others be defended more cogently than claims of necessary connections between some thoughts or experience and the world? Why are such ‘bridges’ or modal connections easier to make ‘within thought’ than between how we think and how the world must be to make that thought possible? Now, one might take this symmetry between the two to be reason to be suspicious of claims of necessary connections both between some thoughts and the world and between some thoughts and other thoughts about the world: but as we have seen, Stroud himself seems to think they are viable between ‘psychological facts’ (cf. Stroud 2000a [2000b: 224–44]). If so, it could be argued, he needs to give us some account of why they are less problematic here than between our thought and the world; but in fact he just seems to take it to be obvious, and so provides no such account (cf. Cassam 1987: 356–7; Glock 2003: 38–9).

However, even if Stroud’s position is indeed weaker than it may at first appear, this does not mean that transcendental arguments are in the clear when it comes to the world-directed transcendental claims they embody. For, a different worry to the same effect can also be urged against them, which in this case relates to the dialectics of our engagements with scepticism (cf. Stern 2007). The central thought is this: On the one hand, the sceptic is often conceived as grounding her doubts on the fallibility of our ordinary belief-forming processes, such as perception and memory. On the other hand, the proponent of a transcendental argument hopes to answer her doubts by advancing the claim that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y and so deduce the former from the latter. But the dialectical concern this raises is this: why, if the sceptic is dubious about cognitive methods like perception and memory, should she be any more sanguine about the methods we have used (whatever these are) to arrive at the modal claims embodied in the transcendental argument?

Now, one line of response might be to say that the doubts the sceptic raises over our modal knowledge here can themselves be blocked or shown to be spurious, for example, by providing evidence for the reliability of our methods in the modal case, or questioning the right of the sceptic to use the mere possibility of error against such knowledge. But then, it seems likely that similar claims could also be used to bolster the credentials of our non -transcendental bases for knowledge, such as perception and memory, in a way that would then render the transcendental argument redundant.

Thus, even if Stroud’s own critique of transcendental arguments is found wanting, it seems that another along these lines can be put in its place, leading to a similar dilemma: either transcendental arguments are offered to try to establish what the sceptic questions, but are then vulnerable to sceptical doubts concerning the truth of the modal claims they employ; or they can successfully respond to those doubts, but in ways that then seem likely to render our non-transcendental grounds for knowledge legitimate too, so that our conviction concerning such knowledge no longer seems to need to make any appeal to a transcendental argument.

One further thought is that perhaps the main problem is a consequence of mistakenly supposing that transcendental arguments should be deductively valid. Note that Kant himself used the corresponding German phrase of ‘deduction’ in a different sense (see the entry on Kant’s Transcendental Arguments). One possibility is that such arguments should be taken as abductive ones, involving inference to the best explanation (Hoffmann 2019, Allen 2021, Reynolds 2022): the idea is that although one cannot deductively infer X from the possibility of Y , one can claim that X is the best explanation of Y ’s being possible. In making such an inference, one needs to list various candidate explanations and give good reason to think that the one being favored is indeed the best explanation. If this path is taken, it might engender worries about the distinctness and power of transcendental arguments. In the next section we will see more responses to the above objections.

While it would be premature to say that attempts to construct ambitious world-directed transcendental arguments have been entirely abandoned (see e.g., Peacocke 1989, Grundmann & Misselhorn 2003), nonetheless the most common way of responding to these Stroudian difficulties has been to re-think how transcendental arguments might be best used, and to come up with strategies that are in various ways more modest than those we have discussed so far. What characterises such modest responses is the idea that Stroud is indeed right that all we can really substantiate by way of a transcendental claim is how things must appear to us or how we must believe them to be—but then attempt to make this weakened claim do some anti-sceptical work. We will briefly consider four such responses: one from Strawson’s earlier work; one from his later writings; one from Stroud; and one from Stern 2000. (For other recent examples of less ambitious transcendental arguments, see Chang 2008 and Massimi 2014; also see Coates 2017 on Strawson 1962).

The first response takes its inspiration from a re-consideration of the Strawsonian transcendental arguments that were criticised by Stroud, but offers a different interpretation of them in the light of that critique. Thus, it is suggested, the mistake is to see Strawson’s argument as straightforwardly world-directed in the way that it was presented earlier, as offering a direct response to the sceptic by proving what the sceptic doubts. Rather, it is said, the strategy is more like Aristotle’s elenchic response to the sceptic who doubts the principle of non-contradiction: namely, to show that her doubts cannot be intelligibly stated or expressed, as acceptance of this principle is a necessary condition for having meaningful thought at all. Likewise, therefore, it can be suggested that Strawson intended his transcendental approach to operate in the same way, where (as Strawson puts it) ‘[the sceptic’s] doubts are unreal, not simply because they are logically unresolvable doubts, but because they amount to the rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense’ (Strawson 1959: 35; cf. also 106 and 109, and also Glock 2003: 35–6 and Illies 2003: 44–56). Thus, it may seem, a modest transcendental claim is all that we require, to the effect that the sceptic cannot raise a doubt to challenge us here, given what she must believe in order for her to think or utter anything intelligible at all. The transcendental argument is effective, therefore, not by showing that what the sceptic doubts is false, but by showing that those doubts have violated the conditions of meaningfulness, and thus require no positive answer or response.

Now, whether or not this is the most charitable way of reading Strawson’s earlier position, he himself does not seem to have adopted quite this first response when he came to reply to Stroud in his later work. Rather, while he accepts Stroud’s insistence that the transcendental claim must be weakened (cf. Strawson 1985: 9), he then also offers what he call a naturalistic reply to the sceptic based on Hume and also on some Wittgensteinian ideas developed in On Certainty , according to which the right approach to sceptical doubts is not to try to answer them with an argument, but to show them to be ‘idle’, as unable to shift those core beliefs which are implanted in us by nature or which lie at the centre of our ways of thinking (cf. Strawson 1985: 13). Here, then, the approach is not about the meaninglessness or unintelligibility of sceptical doubt (as on the first response), but on its inability to shift or dislodge our beliefs because of their embeddedness within our thinking (where semantic issues need not be the only consideration in rendering them embedded in this way). Within this naturalistic approach, therefore, Strawson suggests that transcendental arguments can do valuable work, in precisely helping us to show the sceptic that some beliefs are fundamental to us in this way, and thus impervious to sceptical doubt just as the naturalist claims—but where to play this role, the transcendental claim only has to be a modest one, concerning what we must believe, not how things are (cf. Strawson 1985: 21–23; see also Grayling 1985 and Callanan 2011).

A third type of modest approach is offered by Stroud himself, where he claims that even a transcendental argument which shows what we must believe can have anti-sceptical value, in showing that these beliefs are indispensable and invulnerable , in the sense that we not only cannot abandon them, but also we cannot find them to be false in ourselves or others, because to so find them would be to give up believing anything at all. However, Stroud allows that this sort of status for the belief in question—for example, the belief that there are enduring particulars, or other minds—does not go as far as ruling out the possibility that belief of this sort are in fact not true (see Stroud 1994, 1999).

Finally, in Stern 2000, it is argued that modest transcendental arguments can be shown to be useful against scepticism, once we distinguish sufficiently carefully between the kinds of scepticism there are, and go for the right target or targets—where a less demanding form of scepticism may perhaps be defeated by a less ambitious transcendental claim. So, for example, if we take the target to be a sceptic who demands certainty, then a modest transcendental argument will not suffice. But if we take the sceptic to be one who demands merely justification that may nonetheless be fallible, and who claims we do not have even this because our beliefs are not properly supported by our generally accepted cognitive norms, then (it is claimed) a modest transcendental argument can indeed be useful. So, for example, the justificatory sceptic may claim that our belief in other minds seems to be grounded on nothing but the link between behaviour and mentality that we observe in our own case; but then, she can argue, it is based on little more than a poor argument from analogy, which we are not properly warranted in extending to others, as we are arguing from only a single instance (viz., ourselves), which is an inadequate inductive base on which to reason in this way. In response, however, it could be argued that unless others appeared to us as more than mere bodies, but instead as persons with minds, we could not acquire the capacity to apply mentalistic predicates to ourselves, and thus become self-conscious. This argument remains ‘modest’ because its transcendental claim extends only to how others must appear to us, and so is not ‘world-directed’ in the manner of more ambitious transcendental arguments; but even so, the idea is, it is still sufficient to show that our belief in these other minds is not merely based on a faulty inference in the way that the justificatory sceptic supposes, but rather on the nature of our experience—where as such, it can therefore be used to show that this belief is warranted, even if it could still be false.

Now, none of these approaches is unobjectionable, and it remains to be seen which, if any, is to be preferred. Concern about the Aristotelian approach can relate to whether it can show that belief in X is necessary for intelligible thought in general , or for thought by creatures like us —where if it only establishes the latter, the possibility of a sceptic raising intelligible doubts about it would seem to remain, while establishing the former seems extremely demanding if not impossible (cf. Körner 1967). Further, the worry might be raised in a Stroudian spirit, that all this approach shows is that doubts cannot be coherently expressed concerning X , but where that then seems to fall short of establishing that X is really the case. And finally, while it may perhaps seem right to say that there is something unintelligible or meaningless about questioning the principle of non-contradiction (although this can also be challenged: cf. Priest 1987), other sceptical doubts do not seem problematic to the same degree. (For further discussion points of this sort, see Illies 2003: 54–63.) Along similar lines, critics have also questioned Strawson’s naturalistic approach, as not fully answering the sceptical challenge: for even if a doubt here is ‘idle’, it does not follow that what is questioned is really true (cf. Valberg 1992: 168–96, Sen 1995). Likewise, when it comes to Stroud’s position, as he himself admits, the indispensability and invulnerability he speaks of ‘might not seem like much reassurance in the face of a general scepticism’ (Stroud 1999: 168), given that it not only does not rule out the possibility of falsity, but also seemingly gives no additional reasons for taking that possibility less seriously. Moreover, it has been suggested that Stroud’s position is unstable, as the claim that certain beliefs are invulnerable on the one hand, and the acceptance that they might be untrue on the other, seem to stand in tension with one another (see Brueckner 1996). The position proposed in Stern 2000 tries to get round these difficulties, but has also been accused of ducking important aspects of the sceptic’s challenge (see e.g., Sacks 1999 and 2000: 276–85; and for Sack’s own positive proposals, see Sacks 2005a, 2005b and 2006). Finally, for an attempt to adopt an approach that is neither ambitious or modest, but somewhere between the two, see McDowell 2006.

Whatever their respective strengths and weaknesses, one thing these modest strategies have suggested is that some of the central features of transcendental arguments outlined above do not fit arguments of this less ambitious sort. Thus, these arguments are not world-directed, but are self-, experience-, or belief-directed. Secondly, they do not expect the transcendental arguments to refute the sceptic on their own (as it were), but in conjunction with broader epistemological or anti-sceptical considerations (such as naturalism, or perceptual and other epistemic norms). Thirdly, by offering an approach that is more modest, they raise the question of how much adequate responses to scepticism are entitled to assume and what kinds of reassurance they are meant to provide (cf. Hookway 1999; Cassam 2007: 51–84; Wang 2012). And in all these ways, they have raised exegetical issues about how Kant’s place in the canon discussed above might be understood differently, concerning his attitude to scepticism and whether in the end his intentions are best interpreted in ‘modest’ or more ambitious terms (cf. Callanan 2006; Bardon 2006; Stapelford 2008).

In listing key features of transcendental arguments in section 2, it was indicated that metaphysical necessity might be the right kind of modality for transcendental arguments, and this brings the discussion to the realm of modal metaphysics. To begin with, if one is sceptical about modality anyway (Quine 1953), then using modality to understand transcendental arguments is a non-starter. However, if one is comfortable with modality in general, it is then a natural way to analyse transcendental arguments. After all, transcendental arguments can be seen as offering certain kind of philosophical explanation —‘transcendental explanation’, as it is sometimes called—and given this, metaphysical explanations of various sorts are natural candidates. More specifically, with our schema above, we should say that X transcendentally explains the possibility of Y , or more succinctly, X possibilitates Y , and this relation should be understood with metaphysical modalities. This picture is not universally shared: some hold that in answering transcendental how-possible questions, identifying the necessary conditions for the targets is explanatorily idle (Cassam 2007).

Modal metaphysics is itself a difficult area that involves all kinds of sophisticated theories, such as realism, ersatzism, fictionalism, to name just a few (see entry on varieties of modality). Fortunately, to analyse transcendental arguments with metaphysical modality, there is no need to commit to any theory of the nature of metaphysical necessity. In effect, what is more relevant is modal epistemology; more specifically, how one manages to know whether a given modal claim is true or not. To see how this is so, let’s use this toy example:

Kantian categories are necessary conditions for the possibility of objective cognition.

We will use “Kantian categories” as a placeholder for any candidates for being the relevant conditions. To analyse this with metaphysical necessity, this statement can be paraphrased as follows:

It is metaphysically necessary that if there is objective cognition, then Kantian categories are in place.

Now, how do we know, or at least try to figure out, the truth or falsity of such a statement? This is where modal epistemology enters the scene. As with many other areas in philosophy, the territory is often divided into rationalism and empiricism, though admittedly such division can also miss the subtleties among different views. In any case, one major view within the rationalist tradition is the conceivability approach (Yablo 1993; Chalmers 1996, 2010). According to such an approach, knowledge of the above statement about metaphysical necessity is based on knowledge of the following:

It is inconceivable that there is objective cognition without there being categories in place.

The rationale for this move is that according to such an approach, conceivability is a guide to metaphysical possibility, while inconceivability is a guide to metaphysical impossibility. Given this, if it is metaphysically necessary that if A then B, then it is not metaphysically possible that there is A without B. Now it is natural to expect that the difficulties with the conceivability approach will thereby translate into this rendering of transcendental arguments, in roughly this way: this rendering assumes that inconceivability entails metaphysical impossibility, but such entailment does not hold, because inconceivability might just reflect human’s lack of imagination, and therefore transcendental arguments are in trouble (Mizrahi 2017). When Mizrahi makes this claim, he uses Kant’s Refutation of Idealism as the prime example, but he intends this point to be applied to other transcendental arguments too.

However, note that defenders of transcendental arguments have at least two ways to respond to such a challenge. First, to understand the transcendental conditionals (i.e., claims asserting that the possibility of Y requires or presupposes X ) as (in)conceivability claims is not mandatory. Second, even if we understand the conditionals this way, there is a weaker version of the conceivability approach which holds that (in)conceivability is only a guide to (im)possibility, which is obviously much more defensible than the stronger version that involves entailment. To be sure, some might find this version too weak to secure the distinctiveness of certain arguments being ‘transcendental.’ If one goes down the first route, one can opt for other approaches in modal epistemology. For example, another camp of rationalism in this area is the essentialist approach (Fine 1995; Lowe 2011, 2012, 2013). According to such an approach, knowledge of the above statement about metaphysical necessity is based on knowledge of the following:

It is part of the essence of objective cognition that if there is objective cognition, then categories are in place.

Now again, this rendering inherits all the problems with such approaches, which will not be covered here (see the entry on the epistemology of modality). One can then reject rationalism in this area and opt for an entirely different camp, for example the counterfactual approach (Williamson, 2005, 2007, 2016). According to such an approach, knowledge of the above statement about metaphysical necessity is based on knowledge of the following:

If there were objective cognition without there being categories in place, then there would be a contradiction.

Objective cognition without categories counterfactually implies a contradiction.

This approach invokes certain notion of ‘imaginative simulation’ to model the inference, and it is sometimes said that such an exercise is neither a priori nor a posteriori , but ‘armchair’ (Williamson 2013). Whether this threefold distinction is reasonable is controversial, as it is generally thought that armchair inferences are a priori inferences. Now, note that the same dialectic recurs: this rendering inherits all the problems with such approach, and one might therefore wish to opt for a different analysis (for more on connecting transcendental arguments and counterfactuals, see Kannisto 2020).

The point of the above discussion is not to present all the approaches in modal epistemology; for example, there are other approaches such as the one that invokes analogical inferences (Roca-Royes 2017). There are also approaches that might combine several ideas, for example Husserl’s ‘imaginative variation’ that combines conceivability and essence (1931/2012). The key message here is that if transcendental conditionals can be thought to embody claims about metaphysical modalities, then both considerations from modal metaphysics and modal epistemology—especially the latter—will influence what we should say about such conditionals. Another potential direction is to see whether metaphysical grounding can be an explanation of transcendental conditionals (see the entry on metaphysical grounding). Although it can be tempting and potentially enlightening to connect these contemporary approaches to the historical tradition, no claim about a direct historical connection is made here: it should not be assumed—without textual analyses anyway—that any above approach captures what Kant, Fichte, and other historical figures had in mind when they invoked such arguments.

As we have seen, then, when it comes to transcendental arguments in epistemology, most of the effort in recent years has been concentrated at the meta-level, concerning what transcendental arguments are and what they can be expected to achieve: when it comes to examples of transcendental arguments themselves, very few new ones have actually been proposed (for exceptions, see Lockie 2018, Cheng 2022). However, the picture is different in ethics, where attempts to produce such arguments are still being made, so that while epistemology perhaps remains their natural home, the use of transcendental arguments in ethics is of undoubted significance (see for example Brune, Stern and Werner (eds.) 2017). Moreover, as with such arguments in epistemology, when it comes to transcendental claims in ethics, Kant may again be taken as an important inspiration, especially Kant 1785.

In fact, in view of what was said previously regarding the problems of transcendental arguments, it is perhaps not really surprising that ethicists have had fewer qualms in producing them. For, as we saw, the difficulty when it comes to external world scepticism, other minds scepticism, and the like, is in finding an argument that will successfully cross Stroud’s ‘bridge of necessity’, and establish a conclusion concerning how things are, rather than how things must appear or how we must believe them to be, and so reach a conclusion that will satisfy the realist about such matters. However, in ethics, it is much more acceptable to reject realism, and to adopt a more anti-realist position of some sort at the outset (cf. Rähme 2017); as a result, the most that will be called for is a modest transcendental argument which is not world-directed, as many ethicists do not want to treat moral values and norms as part of the ‘world’ anyway, and so see no victory for the sceptic in failing to establish any more ambitious conclusion, where this may still be a worry in the epistemological cases.

While until recently there was only a limited discussion of transcendental arguments in ethics within the ‘analytic’ tradition of Anglo-American philosophy (see e.g., Phillips-Griffiths 1957–8; Watt 1975; Harrison 1976; Cooper 1976; Finnis 1977 argues for the value of truth), they have played a significant role in the social philosophy of thinkers such as Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas (for a broader discussion of transcendental arguments concerning intersubjectivity in the ‘continental’ tradition more generally, see Chase & Reynolds 2011: 89–114 and Russell & Reynolds 2011). Apel has argued that an ethical perspective is required as a condition for a commitment to truth, inquiry and successful communication. Habermas denies this, where instead he thinks that we are committed to communication and discourse by the pragmatic implications of speech oriented towards reaching understanding of each other, which for us, as speaking beings, is unavoidable. Both may be said to be inspired by C. S. Peirce’s insistence on the relation between truth and consensus, where the search for consensus is said to require as a necessary condition that we have certain ethical attitudes to others, such as equal respect and tolerance for their views and commitments. In this way the suggestion is also made in the practical case, it is easier for transcendental arguments to take a so-called ‘retorsive’ rather than a deductive form, aiming to more modestly show that to make inquiries in this context we simply must not question certain things to make inquiries in this context (See Apel 1976b vol II/1980 and 1976a; Habermas 1983. For further discussion see Benhabib and Dallmayr (eds.) 1995; Illies 2003: 64–92 and Kuhlmann 2017. A comparable form of transcendental argument is attributed to Emmanuel Levinas in Perpich 2008: 124–149; For a critical discussion of the value of this approach see Stern 2016).

Moreover, transcendental claims have been given a more prominent role within recent Anglo-American ethical theory, largely through the work of Alan Gewirth and Christine Korsgaard. These arguments start not from claims about truth and communication, but from claims about our nature as human agents, and what we must then presuppose about the moral status of ourselves and others. As in epistemology, the promise of such arguments in ethics has generated much interest and attention. For illustration, we will discuss a transcendental argument in ethics proposed by Korsgaard. (For Gewirth, see Gewirth 1981; Beyleveld 1991; and Illies 2003: 93–128.)

Korsgaard’s use of a transcendental argument in fact forms only part of a wider response to sceptical worries about the demands of morality (‘the normative question’), and is deployed merely to convince the sceptic that her own humanity has value, from which a further argument concerning the publicity of reasons is used to show that she must also then value the humanity of others. The transcendental argument that Korsgaard proposes is modelled on a position which she finds in Kant and which she outlines as follows:

[Kant] started from the fact that when we make a choice we must regard its object as good. His point is the one I have been making—that being human we must endorse our impulses before we can act on them. He asked what it is that makes these objects good, and, rejecting one form of realism, he decided that the goodness was not in the objects themselves. Were it not for our desires and inclinations—and for the various physiological, psychological, and social conditions which gave rise to those desires and inclinations—we would not find their objects good. Kant saw that we take things to be important because they are important to us—and he concluded that we must therefore take ourselves to be important. In this way, the value of humanity itself is implicit in every human choice. If complete normative scepticism is to be avoided—if there is such a thing as a reason for action—then humanity, as the source of all reasons and values, must be valued for its own sake. (Korsgaard 1996: 122)

This argument can be laid out as follows:

Consider this example. To rationally choose to eat this piece of chocolate cake, I must think that eating the cake is good in some way. How can I regard it as good? It seems implausible to say that eating the cake is good in itself, of intrinsic value. It also seems implausible to say that it is good just because it satisfies a desire as such: for even if I was bulimic it might do that, but still not be regarded as good. A third suggestion, then, is that it can be seen as good because it is good for me, as satisfying a genuine need or desire of mine. But if I think this is what makes eating the piece of cake good, I must value myself, as otherwise I could not hold that satisfying me is sufficient to make something good enough for it to be rational for me to choose to do it; so I must regard myself as valuable. Put conversely: suppose that you thought that you and your life were utterly worthless, pointless, meaningless—that in your eyes, you were valueless. And suppose that you are faced with a piece of cake: on what basis would you choose it eat it? It seems unlikely that there is something intrinsically good about eating it, or that you should do so just because you find yourself with a desire to do so, even while finding your existence valueless. It seems that the only reason to do so would be if you thought eating the cake brought you some genuine benefit—but if you thought your life was worthless, how could you see this as a reason either? Why is bringing benefit to something that in your eyes is so utterly without value a reasonable thing to do?

There are some dangers in this argument, however. One, which Korsgaard considers, is that it might lead to ‘self-conceit’ (Korsgaard 1998: 54. Cf. also Korsgaard 1996: 249–50): that is, I might conclude from this that I am supremely valuable, simply as myself, which could obviously then get in the way of my ethical treatment of others. But, this worry might be lessened by the thought that while the argument gets me to see that I must find something valuable about me, it need not be anything about me in particular, and perhaps could instead be something about me that is more general—such as my humanity or personhood. However, while Korsgaard says that reflection will indeed lead us in this more general direction, we will need to see how. A second, perhaps related, worry is that this argument has a troubling parallel in the case of Satan, where Satan goes through (1) to (4) above, and concludes that he must regard his devilish nature as valuable. If this argument somehow entitles us to regard our own humanity or personhood as valuable, why doesn’t it entitle Satan to think the same about his nature? This is not the same as self-conceit, because he is not valuing himself as Satan just qua Satan; he is valuing his nature, just as we are valuing ours. Nor does devilishness seem any less central to his nature than humanity is to ours. So it is hard to see how the Satanic parallel can be avoided by the argument as it stands.

Nonetheless, it is possible that something can be built on the central idea of the argument, which seems to be this: As long as we think we can act for reasons based on the value of things, but at the same time reject any realism about that value applying to things independently of us, then we must be treated as the source of value and in a way that makes rational choice possible. We can therefore see Korsgaard’s second argument as attempting something along these lines, using her notion of practical identity to perhaps avoid the two problems we have identified with the Kantian argument.

Here, then, is an outline of Korsgaard’s second argument:

The first step is now familiar: To act is to do or choose something for a reason that may be conscious or uncomscious. The second step is based on Korsgaard’s idea that we have reasons to act because of our practical identities (such as one’s identity as a father, or lecturer, or Englishman), not because acts have reasons attached to them in themselves. Once again, realists might demur, claiming that some actions are rational things to do, because some things have value as such: so, perhaps knowledge is valuable in itself, thereby making it rational to seek it. But let us leave such worries aside and assume with Korsgaard that nothing is objectively rational for us to do.

The third step asks how a practical identity can make something into a reason for an agent: how can the fact that I am a father make it rational for me to buy my daughter this toy? The thought here is that it can only do so if you see value in that identity. Korsgaard stresses this when she writes:

The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. (Korsgaard 1996: 101)

So, being a father, whether contingently or essentially, gives one no reason to be a caring or devoted father of a sort that would have good reason to buy a daughter a gift; rather, valuing one’s fatherhood does this.

But (moving on to step (4)), how can I see my particular practical identity as valuable? Korsgaard’s position here is that I cannot see any value in any particular practical identity as such: for, to do so would mean being committed to realism, to thinking that being a father, an Englishman, a university lecturer or whatever matters as such; or (in a way that is in the end equally realist), it matters because of the intrinsically valuable things it leads you to do. But, Korsgaard takes such realist positions to be problematic, and so thinks this will not do as an answer.

So suppose we allow that no particular practical identity can be seen to have value in itself; Korsgaard then offers as the only remaining explanation of its value to the agent that has that identity, that such identities have the general capacity of enabling the agent to live a life containing reasons: because I have whatever particular practical identities I do (father, Englishman, university lecturer…), I can then find things to be valuable and act rationally accordingly, in a way that gives me unity as a subject.

But then (step (5)), to think that this makes having some sort of particular practical identity important, you must think that it matters that your life have the sort of rational structure that having such identities provides; but (step (6)), to see that as mattering, you must see value in your leading a rationally structured life. And then, finally, to see value in your leading such a life, you must see your rational nature as valuable, which is to value your humanity.

Does this Korsgaardian argument avoid the pitfalls of the Kantian one discussed earlier? It seems to avoid the problem of self-conceit, because it does seem that what you end up valuing is not yourself simply as such, but yourself qua rational agent. And as presented here, it avoids the problem of the Satanic parallel, because all it shows is that Satan must value his rational nature, not his devilishness.

For both these problems to be avoided, however, it is important to run the argument as outlined above, not as it is sometimes presented by Korsgaard, which is via the notion of need (cf. Korsgaard 1996: 121 and 125). This would follow the same premises as before for (1)–(5), and then go as follows:

The difficulty with (6*)–(8*), we think, is that (8*) does not stipulate what it is about yourself that you are required to value, so that this could be my sheer particularity (self-conceit), or if I am not in fact human, my non-human nature (Satan). This is because (6*) just identifies a need, and says that this need could not be important unless the agent who has the need were seen to be valuable somehow—whereas the previous argument narrows value down to rational agency, and so rules out both self-conceit and devilishness.

We have therefore reconstructed that part of Korsgaard’s strategy who offers an argument to the effect that you must value your humanity, as a transcendental argument: it is transcendental as it claims that valuing humanity is a necessary condition of being an agent which makes rational choice. It turns out that if it is to be made plausible in this way, a lot depends on accepting Korsgaard’s arguments against realism; but then, as we have seen, many have always suspected that some commitment to anti-realism is required to make a transcendental argument convincing. A further worry when it comes to external world scepticism, as we discussed above ( §3 ), is that this commitment can appear to make the argument redundant, because anti-realism appears sufficient as a response to scepticism on its own. However, in this ethical case, this worry is perhaps less of a concern, because a sceptic could endorse an anti-realist position in metaethics, without accepting that they or others have value as a matter of their normative ethics, so that there is still work left for the transcendental argument to do. To this extent, therefore, it is not surprising that Korsgaard’s claims have given further impetus to the debate concerning what transcendental arguments are, and what they can contribute. (For further discussion of Korsgaard’s position as an interpretation of Kant, see Wood 1999: 125–32 and Timmermann 2006; and for further discussion, see Skorupski 1998, Skidmore 2002, Enoch 2006, Stern 2011, Stern and Watts 2019).

In addition to ethics, transcendental arguments are also widely use in other areas of philosophy. There are certain prominent examples in philosophy of psychology and perception. For the former, one idea is that the possibility of intentional action requires or presupposes the subject’s sensation-based bodily awareness (O’Shaughnessy 1980, 1989, 1995; Bermúdez 1995). This general idea has been cashed out in different ways. One such instance begins with the fact that we do perceive and act upon the world, and proceeds with the inference that the possibility of guiding actions via our perceptions of the world requires or presupposes spatial awareness of our bodily positions. Although here the starting point concerns perception in general, it is standard to think of these inferences from some examples of vision: our visual experiences of worldly objects enable us to act upon those objects only if the subjects are capable of mapping the information that they give about the spatial relations between our bodies and the objects in question. Another instance begins with the fact that we do experiences ourselves as performing bodily-directed intentional actions. This can be motivated by considering simple examples such as scratching one’s head. To do this, it is not enough to locate the spot on one’s head where one wishes to scratch. It is also needed to be able to locate that spot relative to the rest of one’s body. That is, the possibility of the above experiences requires or presupposes certain kind of representational awareness of one’s body. Some might even go further to hold that one needs to be aware of that spot as part of one’s body. Why is this so? The idea is that one normally scratches the spot with one’s hand, and in moving the hand to the location of the spot, it seems necessary to holistically represent one’s body, otherwise one would not be able to direct one’s hand to the spot smoothly.

One distinctive feature of these arguments is that they seem to make empirical claims about the world, so the status of such arguments can become a matter of dispute. It is often thought that transcendental arguments, or at least the conditionals involved, have to be a priori (Bermúdez 1995; Schwenkler 2012), but if they can be tested through cases in real life, specifically clinical cases from neuropsychology, it is then become unclear whether such conditionals are indeed a priori . Ian Waterman’s case might be the most discussed one in this context. He unfortunately lost all functions on the large myelinated sensory fibers below the neck, and as a result he almost had no sensation below the neck (Cole 1991). At the beginning of such a condition, he could barely move without falling on the ground, but after appropriate training, he became able to retrieve some capacities for walking and other actions through the help of sight. Now why is this relevant? Recall that the first transcendental conditional introduced in this section has it that the possibility of guiding actions via our perceptions of the world requires or presupposes spatial awareness of our bodily positions. After training, Waterman could guide his actions via his visual experiences of the environment, but this does not seem to require or presuppose the relevant kind of spatial awareness of our bodily positions. If so, then the conditional is falsified. As for the second transcendental conditional above, it states that the possibility of experiencing ourselves as performing body-directed intentional actions requires or presupposes certain kind of representational awareness of one’s body. Now the partly recovered Waterman could experience himself as performing body-directed intentional actions, but this does not seem to require or presuppose the relevant kind of representational awareness of one’s body, since he is now relying on his sight, not his body image or schema. In this way, cases from neuropsychology might bear on transcendental conditionals.

But doesn’t this make the relevant conditionals a posteriori ? After all, they can be falsified by empirical facts in the actual world. For those who insist that such conditionals are a priori , they might argue that since those conditionals are a priori necessary truths, they are true of all possible worlds, including the actual world; no wonder empirical cases in the actual world can be relevant. This involves very complicated issues: true logical and mathematical statements are supposed to be true of all possible worlds, including the actual world, but they cannot be refuted by empirical cases in the actual world. This links back to considerations about modal metaphysics (see §5 above), and about philosophy of language and epistemology too. Note that this issue is connected to another important issue concerning naturalisation (Bermúdez 1995): to bring transcendental conditionals to bear on actual cases is supposed to be a virtue, because it fits the current Zeitgeist , but given the empirical bearings, how can such conditionals be a priori ? It is not clear that the literature has engaged with this issue sufficiently. In a way, a priori statements bear on the empirical world: e.g., ‘any sister is a sibling’ bears on all sisters; however, this a priori statement cannot be refuted by empirical investigations of these individuals in the empirical world.

Philosophy of perception is another area that is filled with transcendental arguments, even though the users sometimes do not label them as such. For example, consider the view that the possibility of intentionality requires or presupposes that perceptual experiences have representational contents (McDowell 2008, against Travis, 2004, 2018; the ‘content view’ as it is sometimes called). The sub-arguments for such conditionals can be very complicated. It might rely on the idea that rational relations must be between contentful episodes, otherwise one might commit the notorious ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars 1956). Such pictures can demand an even stronger conditional, that the possibility of intentionality requires or presupposes that perceptual experiences’ representational contents are all conceptual (McDowell 1996). Relatedly, it is also proposed that the possibility of intentionality requires or presupposes the ‘disjunctive conception of perceptual evidence’ (McDowell 1982, 1995, 2008). If the force of transcendental arguments is in doubt, then many arguments in philosophy of perception would be problematic. (For more on McDowell, see Cheng 2021b). To be sure, there can always be disagreements about whether these arguments are transcendental at all. To settle this, one needs to check whether these arguments fit the six characteristics listed in section 2. However, one difficulty is that it is unclear whether we should take them as individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Another difficulty is that other practitioners would presumably disagree with some of the characteristics listed above. Here we regard the above examples as transcendental arguments primarily because they fit the schema offered at the beginning of this entry, but the relations between these arguments and the characteristics listed in section 2 are of course complicated and controversial.

In addition to the above examples, there are some notable recent developments in this area. One prominent theory in this area is naïve realism, the view that the phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences are partially constituted by their objects (Campbell 2002; Martin 2006). As such, it is not obviously transcendental in any sense. However, there is a recent twist that builds the transcendental element into the theory: according to this new version, naïve realism is an integral part of the transcendental project of explaining how it is possible that perceptual experiences have the distinctive characters that they do. That is, naïve realism is not only the best explanation of the relevant phenomenal characters; it is the only viable explanation for why certain perceptual experiences have the kind of phenomenal characters they do (Allen 2017, 2020). Another recent example concerns the relation between perceptual experiences and imaginative reflection on the phenomenal characters of such experiences (Gomes 2017): more specifically, imaginative reflection ‘draws on the knowledge we possess of the phenomenal character of our perceptual experience and exploits various of our imaginative and reflective capacities to provide us with support for modal claims about whether certain non-actual types of perceptual experience could support various forms of thought’ (p. 140). In this context, it is crucial to emphasise that transcendental arguments can at best reveal properties that perceptual experiences must have, or must lack, given the modal force of such arguments. For example, one might think that visual experiences must have a field-like structure, as visual objects need to be placed within an overarching space. This specific claim, to be sure, has proven to be highly contested (Campbell 2007; Schwenkler 2012; French 2018; Cheng 2019).

We have looked in some depth at the role of transcendental arguments that have been given in philosophy, not only in refuting the epistemological sceptic, but also in ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of perception. As we have seen, such arguments clearly face challenges, both in their details but also at a more general level, concerning how much they can ever hope to achieve. However, while these challenges are certainly significant, it would be wrong to exaggerate them: for, as we have also seen, the range of potential uses for such arguments is wide, while it seems that their intriguing power, as well as their alluring promise, will mean that philosophers will continue to be drawn to them. As a result, therefore, it seems unlikely that those engaged in the subject will ever cease to feel that ‘tenderness for transcendental arguments’ (Strawson 1985: 21) instilled in them by Kant and others.

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Principles of Transcendentalism by Thoreau Essay

Introduction, works cited.

The ideas articulated in the works by Thoreau and the basic principles of Transcendentalism are consistent with the social, political, cultural, and economic changes that happened in the United States in the middle of the 19th century. It is necessary to mention the emergence of the market economy, the formal end of slavery, the beginning of the feminist movement, and the loss of the church’s authority. These reforms changed the way people started to perceive themselves and society. For instance, Transcendentalism was marked by the rise of individualism, emphasis on the spiritual connection between people and the surrounding world, an intuitive side of knowledge, and a high degree of idealism. The central concepts of Thoreau’s works were the notions of a good life, self-reliance, individuality, and anti-materialism, which correspond to the main ideas of Transcendentalism. Thoreau’s perception of human life and personality reflected the changes that occurred in the American society of the 19th century and determined the subsequent cultural development.

The concepts of the good life, self-reliance, individuality, and anti-materialism are interconnected in the works by Thoreau. The notion of self-reliance reflected the desire of the philosopher to concentrate on the ability of the person to achieve inner balance and motivation in solitude and contemplation of nature. This perspective is consistent with the Romantic ideas that were popular during the same period, reflecting the time’s spirit (Ilkin 112). The peculiar detail is that socialist and communal ideas have also become popular among Americans, and this Romantic contemplation of nature was opposite to their views. Thoreau wrote about the existence of the Over-Soul that people could see only if they practiced self-reliance (Ilkin 114). The essential thing was finding a balance between participating in community life and self-reliance in the wilderness. It allows one to state that the Transcendental approach to self-reliance supposed individual growth instead of the open confrontation with society with its problems.

Individualism is one of the main characteristics of Transcendentalism Thoreau. This concept is interconnected with the emergence of the market economy in the United States and the appearance of numerous opportunities to improve own life. During this period, the notion of the self-made man appears, which supposes the individual quest for success and prosperity that people can achieve if they work hard and rely on themselves (Bernardini 1). In other words, Transcendentalism by Thoreau focuses on the abilities of the individual to achieve the goals the person sets without the help of the community.

Anti-materialism is another vital notion in understanding the views articulated by Thoreau. The process of contemplation in solitude and the focus on the spiritual growth of the individual suppose that people reject the needs that the material society imposes on them. The works by Thoreau describe the distinction between the physical world and spirituality that offers people the opportunities to understand their selves that real life cannot give. For instance, when Thoreau lived in the cabin near Walden Pond, he achieved spiritual perfection by reuniting with the surrounding nature (Bernardini 2). It was the culmination of anti-materialism that the philosopher could achieve in his life.

In general, the notion of the good life, according to Transcendentalism, combines the characteristics mentioned earlier. People who can fulfill their potential in individualism, self-reliance, and anti-materialism could feel satisfaction from life. It reflected the social, economic, and cultural crisis in American society. The faith did not provide people with enough guidance and support, and the market economy changed their views on success and motivation to work (Ross 80). As a result, the ideas of Transcendentalism proposed to people an alternative view of reality and their personalities.

Thoreau uses real-life examples to illustrate the concepts he discusses in his works. As already mentioned, the example of life in the cabin near the pond where other people could not disturb the philosopher was the illustration of the anti-materialistic desires of Thoreau (Ilkin 113). At the same time, it was also the illustration of the self-reliant individual who wants to achieve a good life through spiritual improvement and unification with nature. The image of the individual who contemplates nature in solitude is the most vivid illustration of the main concepts of Transcendentalism.

It is possible to assume that the benefit of pursuing the traits articulated by Thoreau was finding life’s meaning. In the 19th century, most people experienced the crisis of ideology that was evident not only in religion but also in their social and economic lives. Industrialization and the market economy made people understand that they were alienated from the results of their work (“The Market Revolution: Crash Course US History #12”). People understood that another person could easily substitute their work, and their contribution to life in the community was insignificant (“The Market Revolution: Crash Course US History #12”). As a result, many people could not find peace in their souls, and Transcendentalism gave them the meanings they lacked. These problems fit in with Transcendentalism because they define the problems that people of the 19th century experienced, while philosophy gave them possible solutions.

Even though American society reformed actively in the 19th century, and many people participated in the ideological fight for equal rights, Transcendentalism was not the philosophy of social change. It is unlikely that Transcendentalism would fight for abolitionism, women’s rights, and other reform movements. The main reason is the individualistic essence of this view on life and personality that supposed the alienation from society. The reforms required much revolutionary potential from the person, while Transcendentalism emphasized self-reliant improvement through contemplation. In other words, social movements and Transcendentalism were utterly different.

At the same time, Transcendentalists expressed a comparatively active position against the expansion of slavery, the war between the United States and Mexico, and the cruel treatment of Native Americans (“19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15”). It was the reflection of the dissatisfaction with the government and the society that Transcendentalists of the middle of the 19th century shared (“19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15”). Therefore, it is impossible to state that Transcendentalism was the opposite of all reforms and social movements. Even though its followers tried to achieve self-fulfillment, opposed the materialistic world, and emphasized the importance of individual spiritual improvement, they were not entirely outside the social discourse.

Thoreau’s works feature the main ideas of Transcendentalism, among which are the notions of the good life, self-reliance, individuality, and anti-materialism. These concepts reflected the needs of people who lived in the middle of the 19th century and experienced the crisis of spiritual and social life. Dramatic changes that occurred in the American society of that period marked the need to find a new motivation for life, work, and self-fulfillment. The views of Transcendentalism on the reunion with the surrounding nature, self-reliance, individualistic development, and the attempts to achieve a good life corresponded to the needs of that time society.

Bernardini, Craig. “Bringing Thoreau Back to the Woods.” The Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 301, 2018, pp. 1–2.

Green, John. “ 19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15 ” YouTube , uploaded by CrashCourse, 2013, Web.

Green, John. “ The Market Revolution: Crash Course US History #12 .” YouTube , uploaded by CrashCourse, 2013, Web.

Ilkin, Huseynli. “Thoreau and the Idea of John Brown: The Radicalization of Transcendental Politics.” The Pluralist, vol. 16, no. 3, 2021, pp. 112–125.

Ross, Austin Bernard. “Confucianism, Transcendentalism, and the ‘Dao’ of Henry David Thoreau.” The Concord Saunterer, vol. 26, 2018, pp. 80–124.

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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.

What's Next?

Taking the AP Literature exam? Check out our ultimate guide to the AP English Literature test and our list of AP Literature practice tests .

No matter what you're reading, it's important to understand literary devices. Here are 31 literary devices you should know.

There's a lot of imagery in transcendentalism poems and other writings. Learn everything you need to know about imagery by reading our guide.

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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NPR Editor's Critical Op-Ed Ignites Debate Over Political Bias in Journalism: 'This Essay Has It Backwards'

A scathing op-ed from NPR veteran and current senior business editor Uri Berliner published in The Free Press on Tuesday has intensified debates over whether the publicly funded news organization has adopted a partisan lean in recent years. 

In the piece , Berliner details a culture shift at the organization, in which "An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America."

Berliner argued that NPR is plagued with an "absence of viewpoint diversity," which he considers to be a result of leadership's emphasis on promoting diversity and inclusion on the basis of race and sexual orientation. He also claims that he found "87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin defended the organization in response to the piece, saying she the leadership team "strongly disagree with Uri's assessment of the quality of our journalism."

While Chapin backed the "exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she added that "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

According to NPR media reporter David Folkenflik , several journalists inside the organization question how they can proceed with Berliner as a colleague, with concerns about whether he can be a trusted member of NPR in the aftermath of the op-ed. Additionally, Berliner did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he seek comment from the organization ahead of time; though he does say in his piece that he sought to raise his concerns with leadership on several occasions.

Meanwhile, outside of the organization, debates regarding the content of Berliner's piece have sprouted up across social media, with many coming to the defense of the storied NPR institution. 

Some argued that the shift that occurred in political coverage across the media industry was forced on institutions due to the changing nature of the Republican Party since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. 

Some came to Berliner's defense, including former NPR vice president for news Jeffrey Dvorkin who vouched for the changes to the organization. 

The post NPR Editor's Critical Op-Ed Ignites Debate Over Political Bias in Journalism: 'This Essay Has It Backwards' appeared first on TheWrap .