TRANSCENDENTALISM

TRANSCENDENTALISM was a movement for religious renewal, literary innovation, and social transformation. Its ideas were grounded in the claim that divine truth could be known intuitively. Based in New England and existing in various forms from the 1830s to the 1880s, transcendentalism is usually considered the principal expression of romanticism in America. Many prominent ministers, reformers, and writers of the era were associated with it, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Theodore Parker (1810–1860), Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Orestes Brownson (1803–1876).

Various organizations and periodicals gave the movement shape. The earliest was the so-called "Transcendental Club" (1836–1840), an informal group that met to discuss intellectual and religious topics; also important was the "Saturday Club," organized much later (1854). Many transcendentalists participated in the utopian communities of Brook Farm (1841–1848; located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts), founded by George Ripley (1802–1880) and his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley (1803–1861), and the short-lived Fruitlands (1843–1844; located in Harvard, Massachusetts), founded by Alcott. A number of transcendentalist ministers established experimental churches to give their religious ideas institutional form. The most important of these churches were three in Boston: Orestes Brownson's Society for Christian Union and Progress (1836–1841); the Church of the Disciples (founded 1841), pastored by James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888); and Theodore Parker's Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society (founded 1845–1846). The most famous transcendentalist magazine was the Dial (1840–1844), edited by Fuller and then by Emerson; other major periodicals associated with the movement included the Boston Quarterly Review (1838–1842), edited by Brownson, and the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847–1850), edited by Parker.

Transcendentalism emerged from Unitarianism, or "liberal Christianity"—an anti-Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian, anticreedal offshoot of Puritanism that had taken hold among the middle and upper classes of eastern Massachusetts. The founders of transcendentalism were Unitarian intellectuals who came of age, or became Unitarians, in the 1820s and 1830s. From Unitarianism the transcendentalists took a concern for self-culture, a sense of moral seriousness, a neo-Platonic concept of piety, a tendency toward individualism, a belief in the importance of literature, and an interest in moral reform. They looked to certain Unitarians as mentors, especially the great Boston preacher William Ellery Channing. Yet transcendentalists came to reject key aspects of the Unitarian worldview, starting with their rational, historical Christian apologetic.

The Unitarian apologetic took as its starting point the thesis of the British philosopher John Locke that all knowledge, including religious knowledge, was based on sense data. The Unitarians were not strict Lockeans; under the influence of the Scottish "Common Sense" philosophers, notably Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, they held that some fundamental knowledge could be known intuitively—for example, that certain things were morally right and wrong, and that the world that human senses perceive in fact exists. Nonetheless, Unitarians held that only "objective" evidence could prove Jesus had delivered an authoritative revelation from God. They believed they had found such evidence in the testimony, provided in the Gospels, of Jesus' miracles. The Unitarians valued the historical study of Gospel accounts, in order to prove them "genuine" and therefore credible.

Transcendentalists rejected as "sensual" and "materialistic" Unitarianism's Lockean assumptions about the mind, and were inspired instead by German philosophical idealism. Its seminal figure, Immanuel Kant, argued that sense data were structured by the mind according to certain "transcendental" categories (such as space, time, and cause and effect), which did not inhere in the data, but in the mind itself. The transcendentalists liked the Kantian approach, which gave the mind, not matter, ultimate control over the shape of human experience. The name of their movement was derived from Kant's philosophical term. Yet the transcendentalists, unlike Kant but like other Romantics (and, to an extent, the Common Sense philosophers), held that religious knowledge itself could be intuitively known. According to this view, people could tell "subjectively" that Jesus had given a revelation from God, because his doctrine was self-evidently true and his life self-evidently good.

The transcendentalist apologetic turned out to have radical implications. Because transcendentalists believed religious truth could be known naturally, like any other truth, they tended to reject the idea of miraculous inspiration as unnecessary and to dismiss as false the claim made for the Bible that it had unique miraculous authority. Transcendentalists still respected Jesus, but the more radical of them, like Emerson in his Divinity School Address (1838), and Parker in Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841), attacked the miracle stories in the Gospels as pious myths. Such attacks were highly controversial; theologically conservative Unitarians accused the transcendentalists of being infidels and atheists. Meanwhile, the transcendentalists began to see religious value in sacred writings beyond the Bible, including those of Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. The transcendentalists became pioneers in the American study of comparative religion.

Another implication of intuitionism had to do with the role of the artist. The transcendentalists believed all human inspiration, whether biblical or not, drew from the same divine source. They did not hold religious inspiration to be mundane, like artistic and intellectual inspiration; rather, they held that artistic and intellectual inspiration, like religious inspiration, were divine. The artist, in particular the poet, gained new importance to the transcendentalists as a potential prophet figure, and poetry as a potential source of divine revelation. Emerson was being characteristically transcendentalist when in his first book, Nature (1836), he sought to achieve wholly honest, beautiful, and original forms of expression. In his address "American Scholar" (1837), meanwhile, he called on American writers to stop imitating foreign models; actually, the transcendentalists promoted American interest in foreign Romantic writers, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).

Intuitionism also affected the transcendentalist approach to social and political problems. Transcendentalists

believed laws should be disobeyed if moral intuition held them to be unjust. Thoreau famously argued this point in his essay "Civil Disobedience" (1848; also called "Resistance to Civil Government"). He here advised individuals to disobey unjust laws so as to prevent their personal involvement in evil.

More broadly, the transcendentalists held that inspiration was blunted by social conformity, which therefore must be resisted. This is a theme of Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" (1841) and Thoreau's book Walden (1854). When approaching the education of children, the transcendentalists advocated innovative methods that supposedly developed a child's innate knowledge; Alcott tried out transcendentalist methods at his famous experimental Boston school in the mid-1830s. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), who later played a major role in bringing the European kindergarten to America, described Alcott's approach in her Record of a School (1835), as did Alcott himself in his Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836).

Transcendentalists also came to criticize existing social arrangements, which they thought prevented individual spiritual development. There were calls and attempts to change what were seen as oppressive economic structures. Orestes Brownson, in his Boston Quarterly Review articles on the "Laboring Classes" (1840), advocated abolition of inherited private property. George and Sophia Ripley, with others, tried to make Brook Farm a place with no gap between thinkers and workers. Eventually, the Farmers adopted a system inspired by the French socialist Charles Fourier, who believed that in a properly organized society (one he planned in minute detail), people could accomplish all necessary social work by doing only what they were naturally inclined to do. Margaret Fuller, meanwhile, criticized the lack of educational, political, and economic opportunities for women of the era. In the famous series of "conversations" she led for women (1839–1844), Fuller set out to encourage their intellectual development, and in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1846), issued a famous manifesto in favor of women's rights. She came to embody many of the principles she advocated, and became a significant literary critic and journalist, as well as a participant in the Roman Revolution of 1848.

The transcendentalists saw slavery as inherently wrong because it crushed the spiritual development of slaves. They protested against slavery in various ways and a few of them, most notably Parker, became leaders of the abolitionist movement. Finally, the transcendentalists laid great value on the spiritual value of nature; Thoreau, particularly, is regarded as a principal forerunner of the modern environmental movement.

Transcendentalism has always had its critics. It has been accused of subverting Christianity; of assessing human nature too optimistically and underestimating human weakness and potential for evil; of placing too much emphasis on the self-reliant individual at the expense of society and social reform. Yet even those hostile to transcendentalism must concede that American literature, religion, philosophy, and politics have been shaped by the movement in profound ways.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

Packer, Barbara, "The Transcendentalists." In The Cambridge History of American Literature. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. Vol. 2: Prose Writing 1820–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

DeanGrodzins

See alsoIndividualism ; Philosophy ; Romanticism ; Utopian Communities ; Walden .

Transcendentalism, a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particularly at Concord (c. 1836–60), as a reaction against 18th‐century rationalism, the skeptical philosophy of Locke, and the confining religious orthodoxy of New England Calvinism. This romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualistic belief was more a cast of thought than a systematic philosophy. It was eclectic in nature and had many sources. Its qualities may be discerned in Jonathan Edwards's belief in “a Divine and Supernatural Light, immediately imparted to the soul by the spirit of God,” and the idealism of Channing, whose Unitarianism was a religious predecessor of this belief in an indwelling God and intuitive thought. It was also a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th‐century thought. The name, as well as many of the ideas, was derived from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he declares: “I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori.” From other German philosophers, such as Jacobi, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Herder, it received impulses toward mysticism and toward practical action as an expression of the will. Through Goethe, Richter, Novalis, and other literary figures, the philosophy was more easily communicated to American authors, and, at second remove, the doctrines of German transcendentalism were reflected in the poetry and criticism of such English authors as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. In addition, the New England Transcendentalist belief was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, and such English neo‐Platonists as Cudworth and More, as well as by certain aspects of the teachings of Confucius, the Mohammedan Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad‐Gita, the Buddhists, the eclectic idealist Victor Cousin, the Hebrew and Greek scriptural authors, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Swedenborg.

Although the very spirit of Transcendentalism permitted contradiction, and its eclectic sources made for diverse concepts, in its larger outlines the belief had as its fundamental base a monism holding to the unity of the world and God and the immanence of God in the world. Because of this indwelling of divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within itself all the laws and meaning of existence. Likewise, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rapt mystical state, in which the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and originating in the Over‐Soul. Thus occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul's intuitions and impulses, based on this identification of the individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self‐reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority, tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of the movement.

These primary beliefs varied greatly as they were interpreted in the writings of different authors, although the most important literary expression of transcendental thought is considered to lie in Thoreau's Walden and in such works of Emerson as Nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, “The Over‐Soul,” “Self‐Reliance,” and “Compensation.” Other members of the informal Transcendental Club whose prose and poetry express similar ideas, in‐cluded Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the younger W.E. Channing, Ripley, Jones Very, C.P. Cranch, J.F. Clarke, Theodore Parker, Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody, and W.H. Channing. Since there was no formal association, many writers of the time, such as Hawthorne and Julia Ward Howe, were on the fringe of the steadfast believers, and in one way or another the beliefs affected many not usually associated with the movement, including Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Melville, and Whitman. So far as the movement had a central voice, The Dial (1840–44) may be considered its organ, and, although it necessarily remained on an idealistic plane, it was instrumental in the formation of such social experiments as Brook Farm and Fruitlands.

tran·scen·den·tal·ism / ˌtranˌsenˈdentlˌizəm/ • n. 1. (Transcendentalism) an idealistic philosophical and social movement that developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures. 2. a system developed by Immanuel Kant, based on the idea that, in order to understand the nature of reality, one must first examine and analyze the reasoning process that governs the nature of experience. DERIVATIVES: tran·scen·den·tal·ist (also Tran·scen·den·tal·ist) n. & adj.

transcendentalism in philosophy, term descriptive of systems that hold that there are modes of being and principles of existence beyond the reach of mundane experience and manipulation. The term is now closely associated with Kantian theory, although some conception of transcendent being has been common to most forms of philosophical idealism. Kant argues that perception of sense data depends on a priori intuitions, which include conception of space and time and categories of judgment. For Kant, "transcendental" refers to conditions necessary for the possibility of experience, while "transcendent" refers to a noumenon , something unknowable and beyond the realm of possible experience.

transcendentalism School of philosophy that traced its origin to the idealism of Immanuel Kant. It concerned itself not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects. It spread from Germany to England, where Samuel Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle came under its influence. In the mid-19th century, it spread to the USA, where its proponents included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In general, it emphasized individual (as opposed to collective) moral and spiritual responsibilities and rejected materialism, returning to nature for spiritual guidance.

transcendentalism This is the belief that God stands outside and independent of the universe of which He is the Creator. It is normally contrasted with the idea of immanence—the belief that God dwells in the world. The doctrine of immanence is common in pantheism, in which human beings and Nature are thought to be aspects of an all-inclusive divinity. Monotheism is normally transcendentalist. See also RELIGION; THEISM.