Transcendentalism is a philosophical and religious way of thinking that manifested itself in particular, if not necessarily uniform, ways. Though some of its ideas about individualism and nature can be traced to the late eighteenth century and to European thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Immanuel Kant, Transcendentalism flourished as an indigenous American movement from the 1830s through the 1860s. It overlapped chronologically with Romanticism, with which it shared some key concepts, and was identified with a group of New England writers, chief among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the theologian and social reformer Theodore Parker; the educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; and the visionary philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott.
Pressed to explain themselves, those associated with Transcendentalism offered various definitions at the time. Emerson, in his lecture “The Transcendentalist” (1842), called it “Idealism as it exists in 1842.” William Henry Channing, in his section of the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), called it “a vague yet exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit.” One of the first historians of the movement, Octavius B. Frothingham, called it in Transcendentalism in New England (1876) “an assertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct.”
What emerges from these contemporary definitions, and from the writings of the Transcendentalists themselves, are some recurring ideas:
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The indwelling of the divine in the human soul
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The superiority of the individual over society or its institutions
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Intuition, imagination, and vision as the ways of understanding the world
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Nature as both a field of study and an inspiration to self-development
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A confidence that the universe is organic, welcoming, and inherently good
These ideas are interconnected. Because the divine dwelled within every soul, Transcendentalists generally accepted the paramount importance of each human being. (Alcott called the individual “a god in ruins.”) Therefore, in Emerson’s term, the watchword of life was “self-reliance,” not reliance on society, its institutions, its traditions, or its ideas. Because logic and sensory knowledge limited what the individual could know to the realm of experience, the Transcendentalists believed that intuition—a higher, mystical, poetic awareness—revealed a truer sense of the world as organic and divine. With that bracing revelation about the world came the challenge to live up to our place in it. As Thoreau put it in Walden (1854), “Our whole life is startlingly moral”—that is, our every action either advances or retards our spiritual development.
Henry David Thoreau
Though the Transcendentalists gravitated toward certain important topics, it is impossible to define Transcendentalism with complete accuracy. First, it was a term of disparagement that most members of the group disliked, and it implied a coherent dogma that all of them rejected. Second, defining Transcendentalism is an inherently contradictory act, for to define means to fix the limits of something and to transcend means to go past them. One of the most famous brief definitions was reportedly offered by one of Emerson’s friends in 1836; the term Transcendentalism meant, she supposed, “a little beyond.” The Transcendentalists themselves preferred terms like “the new school” or “the newness.”
Transcendentalism was a product of its times. As a “creedless” religious phenomenon, Transcendentalism reacted to some of the dogmatism and sectarianism that characterized American Protestantism in the mid nineteenth century. The Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing promoted the idea that individual people had a “likeness to God,” but it remained for the Transcendentalists to assert the true divinity of human beings, and many of them would have agreed with Emerson in his “Divinity School Address” (1838) in finding contemporary religion too scholastic, dogmatic, and emotionally cold. As a philosophy, Transcendentalism accepted the Enlightenment idea that nature reveals the divine will, while recognizing a higher “Reason” than mere scientific observation.
Most characteristically, the Transcendentalists valued individualism, expressed in a variety of ways. Fuller referred to “self-dependence,” Thoreau to “living deliberately,” Emerson to “the infinitude of the private man.” Yet, Transcendentalism had some definite social manifestations. The Transcendental Club flourished from 1836 to about 1848, a loose confederation of the “like-minded” who met in the Boston area for conversation and inspiration. One of the Club’s main projects was the Dial (1840–1844), a magazine of literature and ideas edited by Emerson and Fuller. In 1840, George and Sophia Ripley founded the Brook Farm community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a working farm and communal society intended to fuse intellectual and manual labors. Largely skeptical of existing social institutions, Transcendentalists were active in the reform movements of the day that promised to free individuals from the constraints of unfair laws and practices. Thoreau claimed in “Resistance to Civil Government” (1848) that our proper duty was to ourselves, not to remedying evil; yet, he became one of the most committed opponents of slavery. Fuller and Sophia Ripley championed women’s rights; Parker and Emerson advocated abolitionism; Alcott and Peabody pioneered educational reform.
After the Civil War, Transcendentalism’s influence began to wane. Individual Transcendentalists like Emerson were upheld as cultural icons; less popular ones like Fuller and Thoreau were rediscovered and had their reputations adjusted to meet the genteel standards of the Gilded Age. But in the face of industrialization, big business, and new science, particularly evolutionism and its outgrowth “Social Darwinism,” Transcendentalism seemed to some a quaint irrelevance. Yet, the Transcendentalists’ ideas about self-reliance, the beauty of nature, and the importance of principled living continue to animate and inspire readers.
Topics for Discussion and Research
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Walt Whitman’s poetry shows definite Emersonian influence, while Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) may be read as a critique of Transcendental individualism. What other authors reacted to the Transcendentalists, in their time and later? Begin with Roger Asselineau’s Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature (1980).
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While scholars and teachers often focus on the American phenomenon of Transcendentalism and its expression by Emerson and others, in fact, the movement was influenced by thinkers from Great Britain and continental Europe. Consider what the Transcendentalists were reading as they wrote. What was the effect of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Transcendentalism?
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Transcendentalism flourished at the same time as the antislavery, the women’s rights, and the educational reform movements. What assumptions did these movements share? Compare and contrast, for instance, the views of an educator such as Alcott, who entered into mature dialogue with his students, with the more common views of the time that education meant discipline and memorization. See the comprehensive discussions in Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (1981).
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Frothingham wrote in 1876 of Transcendentalism’s far-reaching influence: “It affected thinkers, swayed politicians, guided moralists, inspired philanthropists, created reformers.” To what extent are the Transcendental writers still influential? Using a single text such as Thoreau’s Walden or “Civil Disobedience,” Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” or Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, trace its continuing effect in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Who in the political, environmental, or reform arenas today has cited the text, and for what reasons? You might begin by searching indexes to contemporary newspapers and periodicals for references to the works. Alternatively, you might search online to see in what contexts certain key phrases from the Transcendentalists (Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” for instance) show up on the Internet. Michael Meyer’s study Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America (1977) is a model of this type of investigation.
Resources
Paul F. Boller Jr., American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: Putnam’s, 1974).
Traces the development of American Transcendentalism and its religious, philosophical, and social origins.
Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
An essential introduction to the movement as a conscious redirection of the American democratic experiment, placing authority in the human heart. Detailed and grounded in individual thinkers and their lives.
Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
A comprehensive collection of commentary and analysis, from the earliest reactions to modern scholarship.
Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
A thoughtful and gracefully written introduction, focusing on social and religious reform. Originally published in The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume 2, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Philosophy
The Sublime
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