Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism. “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1842 essay of the same name. Others have since variously seen the movement as a group of intellectuals sharing a commitment to liberal thought; a largely indigenous school of American literature and philosophy; a religious reform and a form of spirituality; or an impetus for social reform and communitarianism. Along with Emerson, those numbered as transcendentalists include Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), George Ripley (1802–1880), Theodore Parker, and Bronson Alcott (1799–1888). What finally united this diverse group? Their origins in the liberal religionist tradition of Unitarianism, centered in the Boston area, was one common denominator. So, too, was their adoption of a radically monistic worldview, based in contemporary idealist European philosophy and in some aspects of Asian spirituality. A third commonality was a tendency to criticize contemporary society and to propose the systematic reconfiguration of existing institutions on the basis of standards of judgment and behavior originating in individual moral intuition. The transcendentalists articulated their position through lectures, dialogues, conversations, and works of literature.

The Harvard literary scholar Perry Miller, in his 1950 anthology The Transcendentalists, located the first publications consciously influenced by the new idealist philosophy in the early 1830s, with Emerson's 1836 essay Nature marking a major watershed. The Christian Examiner, a Boston Unitarian periodical, published articles throughout the 1830s debating the new religio‐philosophical ideas based largely on the romantic idealism of such German philosophers as Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling, and on their popularizers, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England and Victor Cousin in France. Their chief difference from Lockean materialism, on which the Unitarian worldview was in part based, lay in their insistence that ideas existed independently of sensations and were consonant with the structure of an ideal moral and natural order of which they were a part. Those interested in the new ideas met irregularly beginning in 1836, most often during the Boston visits of liberal minister and moving spirit Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–1890), pastor of the Unitarian church in Bangor, Maine, from 1835 to 1850.

The belief that individuals could have immediate access to moral sentiment opened the proponents of the “new thought,” as it was called, to charges of antinomianism. The split between liberal Unitarians influenced by the new German philosophy and those holding to more traditional Lockean premises came to a head with Emerson's Divinity School Address (1838). Theodore Parker, another Unitarian minister, translated the sometimes esoteric language of transcendentalism into sentiments intelligible to a wider audience. Parker's Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841) resulted in his ostracism from most Unitarian pulpits. He subsequently undertook an independent ministry focused heavily on reform causes. The Dial (1840–1844), a periodical edited mainly by Fuller and Emerson, provided a venue for transcendental literary expression.

As befitted a movement valuing individual impulses, transcendentalism spawned a variety of experiments. Emerson and Thoreau not only produced the movement's most significant literary expressions, they also self‐consciously embodied the transcendentalist vision. The best‐known collective effort, Brook Farm in Roxbury, Massachusetts (1841–1847), was a communitarian experiment in individual freedom and economic justice. Margaret Fuller's variegated personality blossomed in educational efforts for women, in writing and criticism, and finally in revolutionary politics in Italy. Bronson Alcott's school experimented with alternative forms of moral education for children, described in his Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836).

As intellectuals, the transcendentalists were probably the first group in America to establish a substantial cultural presence without church or state sponsorship. Although some, like Emerson and George Ripley, began as Unitarian ministers, by the transcendental heyday of the 1840s most had left that calling for lecturing, publishing, freelance teaching and writing, or subsistence pursuits that left time free for philosophizing and writing. Both their insistence on the radical integrity of individual judgment and their reliance on new forms of disseminating their ideas secure their status as the first intellectual flowering of American democratic culture. Not that transcendentalists joined the Democratic party; most, in fact, to the extent that they were overtly political, supported the Whig party's moralistic programs of self‐culture and reform. Their relationship to the marketplace, moreover, was ambivalent, as they utilized the burgeoning commercial medium of print to criticize the new economic order.

By the late 1850s, transcendentalism as a distinct movement had disbanded. But enough of the transcendental worldview had filtered into the popular imagination that one can say not that the movement collapsed, but rather that the culture absorbed it.
See also Antebellum Era; Religion; Romantic Movement; Unitarianism and Universalism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Octavius B. Frothingham , Transcendentalism in New England: A History, 1876.
Perry Miller , The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, 1950.
William R. Hutchison , The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance, 1959.
Anne C. Rose , Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850, 1981.
Charles Capper , Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life—The Private Years, 1992.
Richard F. Teichgraeber , Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market, 1995.

Mary Kupiec Cayton