Transcendentalism was a
group of new ideas in literature,
religion, culture,
and philosophy that emerged in New England
in the early to middle 19th century. It is
sometimes called
American transcendentalism to
distinguish it from other uses of the word
transcendental.
Transcendentalism began as a protest against
the general state of culture and society,
and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard
and the
doctrine of the Unitarian church taught
at Harvard Divinity
School
. Among transcendentalists' core beliefs was
an ideal
spiritual state that
'transcends' the
physical and
empirical and is only realized through the
individual's
intuition, rather
than through the
doctrines of established
religions.
Prominent transcendentalists included
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau,
Orestes Brownson,
William Henry Channing,
James Freeman Clarke,
Christopher Pearse Cranch,
Convers Francis,
Margaret Fuller,
Frederick Henry Hedge,
Sylvester Judd,
Elizabeth Peabody,
George Ripley,
Amos Bronson Alcott, and
Jones Very.
History
The publication of
Emerson's
1836 essay
Nature is usually
taken to be the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became
a major cultural movement. Emerson wrote in his essay "
The American Scholar": "We will walk on
our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
Divine Soul which also inspires
all men." Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in
human consciousness to emerge from the new idealist
philosophy:
In the
same year, transcendentalism became a coherent movement with the
founding of the Transcendental
Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts
, on September 8,
1836, by prominent New England intellectuals
including George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry Hedge. From
1840, the group published frequently in their journal
The Dial, along with other venues. The
movement was originally termed "Transcendentalists" as a
pejorative term, suggesting their position
was beyond sanity and reason.
The practical aims of the transcendentalists were varied; some
among the group linked it with utopian social change and, in the
case of
Brownson, it joined
explicitly with early
socialism, while
others found it an exclusively individual and idealist project.
Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture "
The Transcendentalist", Emerson
suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life
was impossible to attain in practice:
By the 1850s, Emerson believed the movement was dying out,
especially after the death of Margaret Fuller in 1850. "All that
can be said", Emerson wrote, "is, that she represents an
interesting hour & group in American cultivation".
Origins
Transcendentalism was rooted in the
transcendental philosophy of
Immanuel Kant (and of
German Idealism more generally), which the
New England intellectuals of the early 19th century embraced as an
alternative to the
Lockean "
sensualism" of their fathers and of the
Unitarian church, finding the alternative in
Vedic thought,
German idealism, and English
Romanticism.
The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and
philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on,
or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the
inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human. Immanuel Kant had
called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with
objects but with our mode of knowing objects." The
transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with
German philosophy in the original, and
relied primarily on the writings of
Thomas Carlyle,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Victor Cousin,
Germaine de Staël, and other English
and French commentators for their knowledge of it. In contrast,
they were intimately familiar with the English
Romantics, and the transcendental movement may
be partially described as a slightly later, American outgrowth of
Romanticism. Another major influence was the mystical spiritualism
of
Emanuel Swedenborg.
Thoreau in
Walden spoke of the debt to the Vedic thought
directly, as did other members of the movement:
Criticism
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel,
The Blithedale
Romance (1852), satirizing the movement, and based it on
his experiences at Brook
Farm
, a short-lived utopian community founded on
transcendental principles. Edgar Allan
Poe had a deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its
followers "Frogpondians" after the pond on Boston
Common
. He ridiculed their writings in particular
by calling them "
metaphor-run," lapsing
into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "
mysticism for mysticism's sake." One of his short
stories, "
Never Bet the
Devil Your Head", is a clear attack on transcendentalism, which
the narrator calls a "
disease". The story
specifically mentions the movement and its flagship journal
The
Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific
targets.
Influence on other movements
Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the
individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked
with those of the Romantics.
The movement directly influenced the growing movement of
Mental
Sciences of the mid 1800s which would later become known as
the
New Thought movement. New Thought
draws directly from the transcendentalists, particularly Emerson.
New Thought considers Emerson its intellectual father.
Emma Curtis Hopkins "the teacher of
teachers",
Ernest Holmes founder of
Religious Science , The Fillmores
the founders of
Unity:
Malinda Cramer and
Nona L. Brooks
Founders of
Divine Science were all
greatly influenced by Transcendentalism.
Other meanings of transcendentalism
Transcendental idealism
The term
transcendentalism sometimes
serves as shorthand for "
transcendental idealism," which is
the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant and
later Kantian and German Idealist philosophers.
Transcendental theology
Another alternative meaning for
transcendentalism is the classical
philosophy that God transcends the manifest world. As
John Scotus Erigena put it to
Frankish king
Charles the Bald in the year 840 A.D., "We
do not know what God is. God himself doesn't know what He is
because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He
transcends being."
See also
References
- Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2007: 7–8. ISBN 0-8090-3477-8
- Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself.
University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520226879. p. 185
- Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement,
1830–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981: 208.
ISBN 0-300-02587-4
- McFarland, Philip. Hawthorne in Concord. New York:
Grove Press, 2004. p. 149. ISBN 0802117767
- Royot, Daniel. "Poe's humor," as collected in The Cambridge
Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Kevin J. Hayes, ed. Cambridge
University Press, 2002. pp. 61-2. ISBN 0521797276
- Ljunquist, Kent. "The poet as critic" collected in The
Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Kevin J. Hayes, ed.
Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 15. ISBN 0521797276
- Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York:
Checkmark Books, 2001. p. 170. ISBN 081604161X
- New Thought at MSN Encarta. Retrieved Nov. 16,
2007.
- intachrt.htm INTA New Thought History Chart
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