essay on transcendentalism

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The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism

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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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Emerson's Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature Notes
Understanding Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography
Summary and Analysis of Nature
About Nature
Introduction
Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar
About The American Scholar
Paragraphs 1-7
Paragraphs 8-9
Paragraphs 10-20
Paragraphs 21-30
Paragraphs 31-45
Summary and Analysis of The Over-Soul
About The Over-Soul
Paragraphs 1-3
Paragraphs 4-10
Paragraphs 11-15
Paragraphs 16-21
Paragraphs 22-30
Summary and Analysis of Self-Reliance
About Self-Reliance
Paragraphs 1-17
Paragraphs 18-32
Paragraphs 33-50
Summary and Analysis of The Transcendentalist
About The Transcendentalist
Paragraphs 1-5
Paragraphs 6-14
Paragraphs 15-30
Summary and Analysis of The Poet
About The Poet
Paragraphs 1-9
Paragraphs 10-18
Paragraphs 19-29
Paragraphs 30-33
Critical Essays
Emerson Unitarianism, and the God Within
Emerson's Use of Metaphor
Full Glossary for Emerson's Essays
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

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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Transcendentalism

By: History.com Editors

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

A painting from the Hudson River School: "View Towards the Hudson Valley" by Asher Brown

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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Course: US history > Unit 4

The Second Great Awakening - origins and major ideas
The Second Great Awakening - influence of the Market Revolution
The Second Great Awakening - reform and religious movements

Transcendentalism

The development of an American culture
Antebellum communal experiments
The early temperance movement - origins
The early temperance movement - spread and temporary decline
Women's labor
Women's rights and the Seneca Falls Convention
African Americans in the Early Republic
The Cotton Kingdom
The society of the South in the early republic
Culture and reform in the early nineteenth century
The philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely material world of reason and rationality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous and influential transcendentalists.
Some influential transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller , were early pioneers of feminism .

The philosophy of transcendentalism

Women and transcendentalism, transcendentalism and reform, what do you think.

For more on the philosophy of transcendentalism, see Philip K. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008).
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin Classics reprint, 1986), 346.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2000), 138.
For more on Seneca Falls, see Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
For more on the writings of the transcendentalists, see The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings , ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2006).
For more on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, see Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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185.147.128.134

Transcendentalism

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

1. Origins and Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth, whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820's. Wordsworth's depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping power of the mind that his collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of such power pervades Emerson's Nature , where he writes of nature as “obedient” to spirit and counsels each of us to “Build … your own world.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845 ), a revision of her “Great Lawsuit” manifesto in The Dial , is Fuller's major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and femininity pass into one another, that there is “no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (T, 418). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them. What they most want is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom Fuller holds to be necessary not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, she calls for periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of “distraction” and “imbecility,” and a return only after “the renovating fountains” of individuality have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage. “Union,” she holds, “is only possible to those who are units” (T, 419).

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

Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in Emerson's Nature , which it followed by eighteen years. Nature becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau's subjects. Thoreau takes a receptive stance. He finds himself “neighbor to” rather than a hunter of birds; and a dweller in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he properly sits. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds, he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer, who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his operations. In Walden 's opening chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did in The Republic , what are life's real necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a “life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust” (W, 15). Instead, he finds that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (W, 8). Thoreau's “experiment” at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality — a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor — he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of “improving the nick of time” (W, 17).

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

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

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

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

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

Emerson's 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, who owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a removal agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a minority faction to agree to removal of the tribe to territories west of the Mississippi. Despite the opposition of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, the Cherokees — many of whom died along the way — were removed under President Van Buren in 1835. In his letter, Emerson called this “a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?” (A, 3).

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

The distinction between morality and law is also the basis for Thoreau's “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed “in letting one another alone” (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also” (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a “peaceable revolution,” he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76). Thoreau thus envisions nonviolent action in “Resistance to Civil Government,” but he later supported the violent actions of John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau portrays Brown as an “Angel of Light” (R, 137) and “a transcendentalist above all” (115) who believed “that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave” (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown's life and actions.

Primary Sources

Other Primary Sources:

Buell, Lawrence. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings . New York: Modern Library, 2006. [Anthology with commentary]
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Robert B. Spiller et al. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1971–
–––, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson . New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939. 6 vols.
Fuller, Margaret, Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844-1846 , ed. Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
–––, “ These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850 , ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Hochfield, George, ed. Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists . 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 (orig. 1966). [Anthology]
Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology . Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1971 (orig. 1950). [Anthology with commentary]
Thoreau, Henry David, Cape Cod , ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
–––, Journal , ed. John C. Broderick, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984
–––, The Maine Woods , ed. Joseph J.Moldenhauaer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.
–––, Political Writings/Thoreau , ed. Nancy L. Rosenbaum. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
–––, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , ed. Carl Hovde et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Secondary Sources

Buell, Lawrence, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance . Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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Cameron, Sharon, Writing Nature . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985
Capper, Charles, Margaret Fuller: an American Romantic Life New York: Oxford University Press, vol. 1, 1994, vol. 2, 2007.
Cavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition , San Francisco: North Point Press, and University of Chicago Press, 1981.
–––, “Introduction” and “Aversive Thinking,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
–––, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, , ed. David Justin Hodge, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Clebsch, William, American Religious Thought: a history , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Firkins, Oscar W., Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.
Goodman, Russell B., American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
–––, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 1990, pp. 625–45.
Grusin, Richard, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible . Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
Horsman, Reginald, Expansion and American Indian policy, 1783–1812 . Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
–––, Race and Manifest Destiny: the origins of American racial ango-saxonism . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Kateb, George, Emerson and Self-Reliance , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995
Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Miller, Perry, Nature's Nation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Myerson, Joel, The New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and its Contributors . Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.
–––, The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995
Packer, B. L., Emerson's Fall , New York: Continuum, 1982.
–––, “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 329–604. Reprinted as The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Poirier, Richard, T he Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House, 1987.
–––, Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
Sacks, Kenneth S., Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Versluis, Arthur, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Von Frank, Albert J., The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America . Boston: Becaon, 1957.
–––, The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History . Boston: Beacon, 1970.
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Transcendentalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. ... Essays on American Intellect and Intuition, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Furtak, Rick Anthony, James Ellsworth, and Jonathan D. Reid (eds.), 2012.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism, 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. ...
Introduction
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 ...
Understanding Transcendentalism
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.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism, a 19th-century school of American theological and philosophical thought, embraced nature and the concept of a personal knowledge of God. ... Emerson's essay "Nature ...
Transcendentalism (article)
The philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely material world of reason and rationality. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous and influential ...
Transcendentalism
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. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendentalism
These twenty essays drawn from a 1997 conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society constitute the best available compilation of scholarly essays on transcendentalism. The introductory essay by Charles Capper (pp. 3-45) is an informative survey of the historiography of transcendentalism, and Lawrence Buell's concluding essay (pp. 605 ...
Transcendentalism Essays and Criticism
Source: Judi Ketteler, Critical Essay on Transcendentalism, in Literary Movements for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Cite this page as follows: "Transcendentalism - The Political Dimension of the ...
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the ...
Introduction: Transcendentalism Revisited
The next three essays are less historically inclined and approach Transcendentalism from a slightly decentered perspective, in the process demonstrating that it has lost none of its questioning force. Dan Malachuk's essay takes a provocative tack on Transcendentalism. Whereas Transcendentalism and the Gothic have traditionally been regarded
Transcendentalism Essay
Transcendentalism Essay. Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement created in the 1830's by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author of Nature and Self Reliance, which refuted the intellectual and spiritual culture at the time. Although the movement eventually succumbed to the winds of time, it did not die quietly and it can still be heard today.
EMERSON
The Transcendentalist. The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is ...
Transcendentalism :: Uncollected Prose
Transcendentalism. ›. The more liberal thought of intelligent persons acquires a new name in each period or community; and in ours, by no very good luck, as it sometimes appears to us, has been designated as Transcendentalism. We have every day occasion to remark its perfect identity, under whatever new phraseology or application to new facts ...
What Is Transcendentalism? Understanding the Movement
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 ...
Walden
Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854 and considered his masterwork. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau's experiment in simple living on Walden Pond in Massachusetts (1845-47). It focuses on self-reliance and individualism.
American Transcendentalism
Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism (1842) "That belief we term Transcendentalism which maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world. . . ."
Essay on Transcendentalism
Essay on Transcendentalism vs. Anti-Transcendentalism During the 1830s and 1840s, Transcendentalism was influenced mostly by Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the idea was first created, Emerson and a small group of people got together to discuss philosophy, religion,
Transcendentalism Theme in Self-Reliance
Transcendentalism Theme Analysis. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Self-Reliance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the central figures associated with the American philosophical and literary movement known as transcendentalism. Transcendentalism thrived during the late ...
An Essay on Transcendentalism
An Essay on Transcendentalism. Charles Mayo Ellis. Crocker and Ruggles, 1842 - Philosophy - 104 pages . ... beautiful Rome rule Sabbath Saviour scendentalism seek sense of right sensual soul spiritual standard tain theology things thought tion Transcendentalism truth Utopia violated worship wrong and injustice ...
Tenets Of Transcendentalism Analysis: [Essay Example], 686 words
At the heart of Transcendentalism analysis lie several key tenets that shape its philosophy and guide its followers. These tenets include the belief in the inherent goodness of humanity, the divinity of nature, and the importance of self-reliance and nonconformity. Firstly, Transcendentalists hold a deep conviction in the inherent goodness of ...
74 Transcendentalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
Transcendentalism in American Literature. The emergence of new transcendental ideas reshaped the American literature introduced in the works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman in such a way that it contributed to the excellence and maturity of the literary world […] We will write. a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts.
Transcendentalism And Romanticism Similarities: [Essay Example], 583
Transcendentalism and Romanticism championed the individual as a powerful agent of change. Both movements rejected the notions of conformity and societal norms, instead celebrating individual freedom and autonomy. Transcendentalists claimed that every person possessed an inner spark of divinity and, through self-reliance and intuition, could ...

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

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