Transcendentalism
Term used to refer to the social thought of a loose circle of liberal theologians, romantic writers, and social reformers based in and around Boston from the 1830s through the 1850s.
This diverse group of intellectuals who sought to balance individual protest with social commitment included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, and Bronson Al- cott, among others. The term comes from Immanuel Kant, who argued that our knowledge of the world does not come from sensory experience, as John Locke had claimed, but from “transcendental” intuitions in the mind itself. Like Parker, who poked fun at the label, arguing that it was a term of derision used by critics who worried that the antinomian impulse in transcendentalism was “a very naughty” import from Europe, Emerson did not much care for the term. However, despite Emerson’s insistence that “there is no such thing as a Transcendental party” (Emerson 1842, 197) he did find the term handy insofar as it referred to an idealist alternative to materialism. Drawing inspiration from Plato, German idealism, English Romanticism, and Asian spirituality, Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists argued for the sanctity of the individual by insisting that truth is found in individual consciousness and not in the external world. Though popular perception of the time viewed transcendentalism as radical and antiestablishment, Emerson insisted that their ideas were “not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times” (Emerson 1842, 193). According to Emerson, transcendentalism was “Idealism as it appears in 1842” (Emerson 1842, 193).Despite the limitations of the label, the intellectuals and ideas associated with the movement articulated a number of shared concerns growing out of their backgrounds
Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists argued for the sanctity of the individual by insisting that truth is found in individual consciousness and not in the external world.
(Library of Congress)in Unitarianism, a strand of liberal Protestantism that had become dominant in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century. Though they shared the Unitarian emphasis on the human capacity for good and likewise its interest in biblical criticism and secular literature and sciences, the transcendentalists were critical of Unitari- anism’s “corpse-cold” rationalism, which they believed placed too great an emphasis on form over spirit and too easily accommodated itself to the pecuniary interests of the commercial class. Trained as Unitarian ministers, Emerson, Parker, and Ripley ultimately broke with Unitarianism during the “miracles controversy” of the 1830s, which signaled the increasingly generational divide between the young ministers and mainline Unitarianism. The transcen- dentalist ministers rejected the mainline Unitarian belief that the miracles in the New Testament were proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Instead they held that Christian doctrine was true not because it was proven by a few divine parlor tricks eighteen hundred years before, but because it was true self-evidently, universally, and timelessly. The gospels, in their estimation, required no supernatural intervention in order to be justified. Likewise, the tran- scendentalist ministers downplayed the unique divinity of Christ, arguing that all people were equally divine. Overall, the young ministers collectively criticized the ministerial profession for its undue emphasis on formalism and historical Christianity, rather than promoting its living spirit. This insistence on spirit over form, on divinity as a living intuition animating all individuals, and on individual responsibility would form the basis of the transcenden- talist impulse.
Though the central ideas of transcendentalism come out of Unitarianism, much of its inspiration comes from trends in European thought. Indeed New England transcendentalism is often viewed as the American corollary to European Romanticism.
While Enlightenment ideals had provided Americans a revolutionary force to break with England in the eighteenth century, they failed to animate the moral imagination of this younger generation of intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century. Eager for new intellectual sources to guide the American democratic experiment and to inspire a new liberal personality, the transcendentalists turned to a variety of early nineteenth-century European thinkers for ideas that were congenial to their project. The more literary of the writers gravitated to the beauty and emotional range found in the poetry of the British Romantics including Carlyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Transcendental social reformers turned to the post-Kantian empiricism of Victor Cousin and to the communitarian ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier for his science of social perfection. Though critical of the pantheism and subjectivism they detected in German philosophy, a number of tran- scendentalists nevertheless discovered a wide range of confirming ideas in German thought. They discovered in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher insights on the intuitiveness of religion; in Jakob Bohme mystical theosophy; in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling a philosophy of nature as the artwork of God; and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a model of linguistic artistry and moral self-reliance.
Though the transcendentalists read widely in European texts, their interest in European ideas was cultivated by their deep connections to their New England heritage. They creatively appropriated only those ideas from European authors that confirmed and strengthened their commitment to finding a middle course in American life between individual independence and social responsibility at a time when American democratic culture was still beginning to take root. Indeed, the legacy of transcendentalism is as an indigenous movement aimed at finding a new literary voice and social vision for the young nation.
Originating in discontent with the social atomism engendered by the market revolution, coupled with the social conformity caused by outworn religious beliefs, transcendentalism’s lasting significance is its vision of a harmonious relation between God and man, independence and obligation, and innovation and history.Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
See also Bancroft, George; Fuller, Margaret References and Further Reading Cromphout, Gustaaf van. Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1990.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Transcendentalist.” In Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1842, 1983.
Pochmann, Henry A. German Culture in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1957.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists.” In Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. Eds. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999.
Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1981.
Wellek, Rene. Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1965.