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Transcendentalism

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Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late
1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the
inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the
purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant
heaven. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather
than discrete entities.

Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States;[4] it is
therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Emphasizing subjective intuition
over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely
original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest
against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.[5] The doctrine of the Unitarian
church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of
Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume",[1] and the
transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis
regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.[6][7] It
was also strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the
Upanishads.

Origin
Transcendentalism is closely related to Unitarianism, a religious movement in Boston in the early
nineteenth century. It started to develop after Unitarianism took hold at Harvard University,
following the elections of Henry Ware as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of John
Thornton Kirkland as President in 1810. Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism;
rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the
value of intellectual reason. The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and
calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead, they longed for a more intense spiritual experience. Thus,
transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement
to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians.[8]

Transcendental Club

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Transcendentalism became a coherent movement and a sacred

organization with the founding of the Transcendental Club in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1836, by prominent
New England intellectuals, including George Putnam (Unitarian
minister),[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Henry Hedge.
Other members of the club included Sophia Ripley, Margaret
Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, and Caroline
Sturgis Tappan. Male members included Amos Bronson Alcott,
Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau,
William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher
Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd, Jones Very, and
Charles Stearns Wheeler. From 1840, the group frequently
published in their journal The Dial, along with other venues.

Second wave of transcendentalists

By the late 1840s, Emerson believed that the movement was dying
out, and even more so after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All that can be said", Emerson wrote, "is that she represents an
interesting hour and group in American cultivation".[10] There
was, however, a second wave of transcendentalists later in the 19th century, including Moncure
Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.[11] The
transcendence of the spirit, most often evoked by the poet's prosaic voice, is said to endow in the
reader a sense of purpose. This is the underlying theme in the majority of transcendentalist essays
and papers—all of which are centered on subjects which assert a love for individual expression.[12]
The group was mostly made up of struggling aesthetes, the wealthiest among them being Samuel Gray
Ward, who, after a few contributions to The Dial, focused on his banking career.[13]

Beliefs
Transcendentalists are strong believers in the power of the individual. It is primarily concerned with
personal freedom. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics, but differ by an
attempt to embrace or, at least, to not oppose the empiricism of science.

Transcendental knowledge

Transcendentalists desire to ground their religion and philosophy in principles based upon the
German Romanticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Transcendentalism
merged "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, the
skepticism of Hume",[1] and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German
idealism more generally), interpreting Kant's a priori categories as a priori knowledge. Early
transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original and relied

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primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de
Staël, and other English and French commentators for their knowledge of it. The transcendental
movement can be described as an American outgrowth of English Romanticism.

Individualism

Transcendentalists believe that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and
political parties—corrupt the purity of the individual.[14] They have faith that people are at their best
when truly self-reliant and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community can
form.

Even with this necessary individuality, transcendentalists also believe that all people are outlets for
the "Over-Soul". Because the Over-Soul is one, this unites all people as one being.[15] Emerson alludes
to this concept in the introduction of the American Scholar address, "that there is One Man, - present
to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to
find the whole man".[16] Such an ideal is in harmony with Transcendentalist individualism, as each
person is empowered to behold within him or herself a piece of the divine Over-Soul.

In recent years there has been a distinction made between individuality and individualism. Both
advocate the unique capacity of the individual. Yet individualism is decidedly anti-government,
whereas individuality sees all facets of society necessary, or at least acceptable for the development of
the true individualistic person. Whether the Transcendentalists believed in individualism or
individuality remains to be determined. Whitman embraced all facets of life, which seems more like
individuality, which is more in tune with what the Indian spiritual tradition advocates; i.e. the True
Individual, the yogic attainment of true individuality.

Indian religions

While firmly rooted in the western philosophical traditions of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and German
idealism, Transcendentalism was also directly influenced by Indian religions.[17][18][note 1] Thoreau in
Walden spoke of the Transcendentalists' debt to Indian religions directly:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous

and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta,
since whose composition years of the gods have
elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern
world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I
doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a
previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity
from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to
my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of
the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra,
who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the
Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and
Henry David Thoreau water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for
his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in
the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with
the sacred water of the Ganges.[19]

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In 1844, the first English translation of the Lotus Sutra was included in The Dial, a publication of the
New England Transcendentalists, translated from French by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.[20][21]

Idealism

Transcendentalists differ in their interpretations of the practical aims of will. Some adherents link it
with utopian social change; Brownson, for example, connected it with early socialism, but others
consider it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842
lecture "The Transcendentalist", he suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life
was impossible to attain in practice:

You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a transcendental party; that there
is no pure transcendentalist; that we know of no one but prophets and heralds of such a
philosophy; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in
doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners;
but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man
who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who, trusting to his
sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself
fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was
done by his own hands. ...Shall we say, then, that transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or
excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only
when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish.

Importance of nature

Transcendentalists have a deep gratitude and appreciation for nature, not only for aesthetic purposes,
but also as a tool to observe and understand the structured inner workings of the natural world.[5]
Emerson emphasizes the Transcendental beliefs in the holistic power of the natural landscape in
Nature:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,
— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on
the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all
mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.[22]

Influenced by Emerson and the importance of nature, Charles Stearns Wheeler built a shanty at
Flint's Pond in 1836. Considered the first Transcendentalist outdoor living experiment, Wheeler used
his shanty during his summer vacations from Harvard from 1836 to 1842. Thoreau stayed at
Wheeler's shanty for six weeks during the summer of 1837, and got the idea that he wanted to build
his own cabin (later realized at Walden in 1845).[23]The conservation of an undisturbed natural world
is also extremely important to the Transcendentalists. The idealism that is a core belief of
Transcendentalism results in an inherent skepticism of capitalism, westward expansion, and
industrialization.[24] As early as 1843, in Summer on the Lakes, Margaret Fuller noted that "the noble
trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron",[25] and in 1854, in Walden, Thoreau

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regards the trains which are beginning to spread across America's landscape as a "winged horse or
fiery dragon" that "sprinkle[s] all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for
seed".[26]

Influence on other movements

Transcendentalism is, in many aspects, the first notable American intellectual movement. It has
inspired succeeding generations of American intellectuals, as well as some literary movements.[4]

Transcendentalism influenced the growing movement of "Mental Sciences" of the mid-19th century,
which would later become known as the New Thought movement. New Thought considers Emerson
its intellectual father.[27] Emma Curtis Hopkins ("the teacher of teachers"), Ernest Holmes (founder
of Religious Science), Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (founders of Unity), and Malinda Cramer and
Nona L. Brooks (founders of Divine Science) were all greatly influenced by Transcendentalism.[28]

Transcendentalism is also influenced by Hinduism. Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), the founder of the
Brahmo Samaj, rejected Hindu mythology, but also the Christian trinity.[29] He found that
Unitarianism came closest to true Christianity,[29] and had a strong sympathy for the Unitarians,[30]
who were closely connected to the Transcendentalists.[17] Ram Mohan Roy founded a missionary
committee in Calcutta, and in 1828 asked for support for missionary activities from the American
Unitarians.[31] By 1829, Roy had abandoned the Unitarian Committee,[32] but after Roy's death, the
Brahmo Samaj kept close ties to the Unitarian Church,[33] who strove towards a rational faith, social
reform, and the joining of these two in a renewed religion.[30] Its theology was called "neo-Vedanta"
by Christian commentators,[34][35] and has been highly influential in the modern popular
understanding of Hinduism,[36] but also of modern western spirituality, which re-imported the
Unitarian influences in the disguise of the seemingly age-old Neo-Vedanta.[36][37][38]

Major figures
Major figures in the transcendentalist movement were Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and
Amos Bronson Alcott. Some other prominent transcendentalists
included Louisa May Alcott, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes
Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing,
James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan
Dwight, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, Frederic Henry
Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer
Peabody, George Ripley, Thomas Treadwell Stone, Jones Very,
and Walt Whitman.[39]

Criticism
Margaret Fuller
Early in the movement's history, the term "Transcendentalists"
was used as a pejorative term by critics, who were suggesting their
position was beyond sanity and reason.[40] Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel, The Blithedale
Romance (1852), satirizing the movement, and based it on his experiences at Brook Farm, a short-
lived utopian community founded on transcendental principles.[41]

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Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" (1841), in which he embedded
elements of deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its followers "Frogpondians" after the pond on
Boston Common.[42] The narrator ridiculed their writings by calling them "metaphor-run" lapsing
into "mysticism for mysticism's sake",[43] and called it a "disease". The story specifically mentions the
movement and its flagship journal The Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific targets.[44] In
Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), he offers criticism denouncing "the excess of the
suggested meaning... which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of
the so-called transcendentalists".[45]

See also
Dark romanticism
Freemasonry
Immanentism
Natural Supernaturalism
Self-transcendence
Transcendence (religion)
Fruitlands
The Machine in the Garden

References

Notes
1. Versluis: "In American Transcendentalism and Asian religions, I detailed the immense impact that
the Euro-American discovery of Asian religions had not only on European Romanticism, but
above all, on American Transcendentalism. There I argued that the Transcendentalists' discovery
of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other world scriptures was critical in the
entire movement, pivotal not only for the well-known figures like Emerson and Thoreau, but also
for lesser known figures like Samuel Johnson and William Rounsville Alger. That
Transcendentalism emerged out of this new knowledge of the world's religious traditions I have no
doubt."[18]

Citations
1. Goodman, Russell (2015). "Transcendentalism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalis
m/). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Transcendentalism is an American literary, political,
and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo
Emerson."
2. Wayne, Tiffany K., ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=hckauAdkix0C). Facts On File's Literary Movements. ISBN 9781438109169.
3. "Transcendentalism" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendentalism). Merriam
Webster. 2016."a philosophy which says that thought and spiritual things are more real than
ordinary human experience and material things"
4. Coviello, Peter. "Transcendentalism" The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford
University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 23 Oct. 2011

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5. Finseth, Ian. "American Transcendentalism" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130416154939/http://t

horeau.eserver.org/amertran.html). Excerpted from "Liquid Fire Within Me": Language, Self and
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from the original (http://thoreau.eserver.org/amertran.html) on 16 April 2013. Retrieved 18 April
2013.
6. Miller 1950, p. 49.
7. Versluis 2001, p. 17.
8. Finseth, Ian Frederick. "The Emergence of Transcendentalism" (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma95/f
inseth/trans.html). American Studies @ The University of Virginia. The University of Virginia.
Retrieved 9 November 2014.
9. "George Putnam", Heralds (https://web.archive.org/web/20130305153702/http://www.harvardsqua
relibrary.org/Heralds/George-Putnam.php), Harvard Square Library, archived from the original (htt
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of Transcendentalist Writers. New York: Facts on File, 2006: 308. ISBN 0-8160-5626-9
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American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-reliance (https://archive.org/details/understandingem
e0000sack). Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691099828. "institutions."
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son/essays/oversoul.html). American Transcendentalism Web. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
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17. Versluis 1993.
18. Versluis 2001, p. 3.
19. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston: Ticknor&Fields, 1854.p.279. Print.
20. Lopez, Donald S. Jr. (2016). "The Life of the Lotus Sutra" (https://tricycle.org/magazine/lotus-sutra
-history/). Tricycle Magazine (Winter).
21. Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Fuller, Margaret; Ripley, George (1844). "The Preaching of Buddha" (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=VnsAAAAAYAAJ). The Dial. 4: 391.
22. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature" (https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/auth
ors/emerson/essays/naturetext.html#1). American Transcendentalism Web. Retrieved
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23. Eidson, John Olin (1951). Charles Stearns Wheeler – Friend of Emerson.
24. Miller, Perry (1967). Nature's nation. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
ISBN 0674605500. OCLC 6571892 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6571892).
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g/files/11526/11526-h/11526-h.htm). www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
26. "Walden, by Henry David Thoreau" (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm#chap1
8). www.gutenberg.org. Retrieved 2019-04-15.

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27. "New Thought", MSN Encarta (https://web.archive.org/web/20091102072530/http://encarta.msn.c

om/encyclopedia_761571544/New_Thought.html), Microsoft, archived from the original (https://en
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m/alan/intachrt.htm), Websyte, archived from the original (http://www.websyte.com/alan/intachrt.ht
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29. Harris 2009, p. 268.
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31. Kipf 1979, p. 7-8.
32. Kipf 1979, p. 15.
33. Harris 2009, p. 268-269.
34. Halbfass 1995, p. 9.
35. Rinehart 2004, p. 192.
36. King 2002.
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40. Loving, Jerome (1999), Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, University of California Press, p. 185,
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mcfa/page/149), New York: Grove Press, p. 149 (https://archive.org/details/hawthorneinconco00m
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cuments/Sharf1995,%20Buddhist%20Modernism.pdf) (PDF), Numen, 42 (3): 228–283,
doi:10.1163/1568527952598549 (https://doi.org/10.1163%2F1568527952598549),
hdl:2027.42/43810 (https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42%2F43810), archived from the original (http://bu
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Further reading
Dillard, Daniel, “The American Transcendentalists: A Religious Historiography”, 49th Parallel
(Birmingham, England), 28 (Spring 2012), online (http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk)
Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History (2007)
Harrison, C. G. The Transcendental Universe, six lectures delivered before the Berean Society
(London, 1894) 1993 edition ISBN 0 940262 58 4 (US), 0 904693 44 9 (UK)
Rose, Anne C. Social Movement, 1830–1850 (Yale University Press, 1981)

External links
Topic sites

The web of American Transcendentalism (https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentali

sm/index.html), VCU
The Transcendentalists (http://www.transcendentalists.com/)
"What Is Transcendentalism?", Women's History (http://womenshistory.about.com/bltranscend.ht
m), About
The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism (https://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/transcen
d.html)

Encyclopedias

"American Transcendentalism" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/am-trans). Internet Encyclopedia of

Philosophy.
"Transcendentalism", Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentali
sm/), Stanford, 2019}

Other

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Ian Frederick Finseth (1995), Liquid Fire Within Me: Language, Self and Society in
Transcendentalism and early Evangelicalism, 1820-1860, M.A. Thesis in English, University of
Virginia (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma95/finseth/thesis.html)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transcendentalism&oldid=1166701475"

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