Introduction: In Literature, Transcendentalism
was considered as philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New
England from about 1836 to 1860. It derived some of its basic idealistic
concepts from romantic German philosophy, notably which of Immanuel Kant and
from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The beliefs
that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition
is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism,
self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority.
American
Transcendentalism: During the early to middle years of
the nineteenth century, American transcendentalism was an important movement in
philosophy and literature. It has begun as a reform movement in the Unitarian
church, extending the views of William Ellery Canning on an indwelling God and
the significance of spontaneous thought. It originated among a small group of
intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the
rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith
centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. It was based on “a
monism holding to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in
the world. The soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world
and contains what the world contains for the transcendentalists.
Transcendentalism is an American
literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth
century, centered on 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 person 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,
Fruitland’s, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique
of American slavery.
1. Origins and Character
New England Congregationalists 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. 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.
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
An important source for the
transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge.
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. 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 theHarvardDivinitySchool.
German philosophy and literature were
also championed by Thomas Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip
toEuropein 1831. Along with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle
embraced a “natural supernaturalism,” the view that nature, including human
beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to an independent
deity.
An earlier transcendentalist scandal
surrounded the publication of Amos Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels (1836).
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.
2.
High Tide: The Dial, Fuller, Thoreau
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. After Emerson became editor in 1842 The Dial published a series of “Ethnical
Scriptures,” translations from Chinese and Indian philosophical works.
Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a
Massachusettscongressman 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”, Fuller became friends with many
of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. She organized a series of popular
“conversations” for women in Bostonin the winters of 1839–44, journeyed to the
Midwestin 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. 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.
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 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 now
becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer
evening or winter morning becomes Thoreau’s subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He
finds himself “suddenly neighbor to” rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and
he learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he
can properly sit. 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.
3. Social and Political Critiques
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”; slave
drivers of themselves, as Thoreau say inWalden. As the
nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists’
dissatisfaction with their society became focused on policies and actions of
theUnited States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the war
withMexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.
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 theMississippi.
Slavery had existed in theUnited
Statesfrom 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 inGeorgiaorMississippibut inMassachusettsandNew 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 The
distinction between morality and law is also the basis for Thoreau’s
“Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). 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.
Transcendentalism and
the American Past
Transcendentalism as a movement is rooted
in the American past: To Puritanism it owed its pervasive morality and the
“doctrine of divine light.” It is also similar to the Quaker “inner light.”
However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas intuition is an act of
an individual. In Unitarianism, deity was reduced to a kind of immanent
principle in every person – an individual was the true source of moral light.
To Romanticism it owed the concept of nature as a living mystery and not a
clockwork universe which is fixed and permanent.
Fundamental Beliefs of
American Transcendentalism
a. Essentially, Transcendentalism is a form of
idealism.
b. The transcendentalist “transcends” or rises above
the lower animalistic impulses of life (animal drives) and moves from the
rational to a spiritual realm.
c. More important than a concern about the
afterlife, should be a concern for this life – “the one thing in the world of
value is the active soul.” – Emerson
d. “Miracle is monster.” The miracles of the Bible are
not to be regarded as important as they were to the people of the past.
Miracles are all about us – the whole world is a miracle and the smallest
creature is one. “A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of
infidels.” – Whitman
e. Evil is a negative – merely an absence of good.
Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the
dark. In other words, there is no belief in the existence of Satan as an active
entity forcing humans to commit immorality. Humans are good and if they do
immoral acts they do so out of ignorance and by not thinking.
f. The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal
spirit (or “float” for Whitman) to which it and other souls return at death.
g. It is foolish to worry about consistency, because
what an intelligent person believes tomorrow, if he/she trusts oneself,
tomorrow may be completely different from what that person thinks and believes
today. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” – Emerson
h. Jesus also had part of God in himself – he was
divine as everyone is divine – except in that he lived an exemplary and
transcendental life and made the best use of that Power which is within each
one.
i. The transcendentalists see the necessity of
examples of great leaders, writers, philosophers, and others, to show what an
individual can become through thinking and action.
j. Therefore,
every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that
Oversoul (God).
k. This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found
everywhere – travel to holy places is, therefore, not necessary.
l. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or
predestination, which seem to work against humans, by exercising one’s own
spiritual and moral strength. It emphasizes on self-reliance.
m. Hence, the emphasis is placed on a human
thinking.
n. God can be found in both nature and human nature
(Nature, Emerson stated, has spiritual manifestations).
o. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or
predestination, which seem to work against humans, by exercising one’s own
spiritual and moral strength. It emphasizes on self-reliance.
p. Death is never to be feared, for at death the
soul merely passes to the Over soul.
q. Emphasis should be placed on the here and now.
“Give me one world at a time.” – Thoreau
r. Reform must not be emphasized – true reform
comes from within.
s. One must have faith in intuition, for no church
or creed can communicate truth.
t. The unity of life and universe must be realized.
There is a relationship between all things.
Intensely Ideas on American Transcendentalism:
a. THE
EMERGENCE OF the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place
during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy
extended much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism
and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from
American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
b. Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood
outside the context of Unitarianism, the dominant religion inBoston during the
early nineteenth century. Unitarianism had developed during the late eighteenth
century as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated
from Orthodox Christianity during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. That
Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around the questions of divine
election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism. The Liberals
tended to reject both the persistent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity and
the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the other
stood pernicious “enthusiasm.” The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation of
Enlightenment principles with American Christianity, began to stress the value
of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians descended
as theBoston contingent of this tradition, while making their own unique
theological contribution in rejecting the doctrine of divine trinity.
c. Unitarians placed a premium on
stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive morality, classical learning,
and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity. Instead of the dogma of
Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians offered a philosophy
stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct and the ability of the
intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct. Theirs was a “natural
theology” in which the individual could, through empirical investigation or the
exercise of reason, discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe
and of God’s laws. Divine “revelation,” which took its highest form in the
Bible, was an external event or process that would confirm the findings of
reason. William Ellery Chaining, in his landmark sermon “Unitarian
Christianity” (1819) sounded the characteristic theme of optimistic
rationality:
Our leading principle in interpreting
Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of
men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other
books…. With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise
our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter
to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer,
his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining
what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.
d. The intellectual marrow of
Unitarianism had its counterbalance in a strain of sentimentalism: while the
rational mind could light the way, the emotions provided the drive to translate
ethical knowledge into ethical conduct. Still, the Unitarians deplored the kind
of excessive emotionalism that took place at revivals, regarding it as a
temporary burst of religious feeling that would soon dissipate. Since they
conceived of revelation as an external favor granted by God to assure the mind
of its spiritual progress, they doubted that inner “revelation” without prior
conscious effort really represented a spiritual transformation.
e. Nonetheless, even inNew England
Evangelical Protestants were making many converts through their revivalist
activities, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. The accelerating diversification
ofBoston increased the number of denominations that could compete for the
loyalties of the population, even as urbanization and industrialization pushed
many Bostonians in a secular direction. In an effort to become more relevant,
and to instill their values of sobriety and order in a modernizing city, the
Unitarians themselves adopted certain evangelical techniques. Through founding
and participating in missionary and benevolent societies, they sought both to
spread the Unitarian message and to bind people together in an increasingly
fragmented social climate. Ezra Stiles Gannett, for example, a minister at
theFederalStreetChurch, supplemented his regular pastoral duties with
membership in the Colonization, Peace and Temperance societies, while Henry
Ware Jr. helped found the Boston Philanthropic Society. The liberalism
Unitarians displayed in their embrace of Enlightenment philosophy was
stabilized by a solid conservatism they retained in matters of social conduct
and status.
f. During the first decade of
the nineteenth century, Unitarians effectively captured Harvard with the
election of Rev. Henry Ware Sr. as Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of
Rev. John Thornton Kirkland as President in 1810. It was at Harvard that most
of the younger generation of Transcendentalists received their education, and
it was here that their rebellion against Unitarianism began. It would be
misleading, however, to say that Transcendentalism entailed a rejection of
Unitarianism; rather, it evolved almost as an organic consequence of its parent
religion. By opening the door wide to the exercise of the intellect and free
conscience, and encouraging the individual in his quest for divine meaning,
Unitarians had unwittingly sowed the seeds of the Transcendentalist “revolt.”
g. The Transcendentalists felt that
something was lacking in Unitarianism. Sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism
failed to satisfy that side of the Transcendentalists which yearned for a more
intense spiritual experience. The source of the discontent that prompted
Emerson to renounce the “corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street andHarvardCollege”
is suggested by the bland job description that Harvard issued for the new
Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity.
h. Perry Miller has argued
persuasively that the Transcendentalists still retained in their characters
certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction against
the “pale negations” of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic
side of Calvinism in whichNew England culture had been steeped. The Calvinists,
after all, conceived of their religion in part as man’s quest to discover his
place in the divine scheme and the possibility of spiritual regeneration, and
though their view of humanity was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism
could give rise to such early, heretical expressions of inner spirituality as
those of the Quakers and Anne Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians acted
as crucial intermediaries between the Calvinists and the Transcendentalists by
abandoning the notion of original sin and human imperfectability:
The ecstasy and the vision which
Calvinists knew only in the moment of vocation, the passing of which left them
agonizingly aware of depravity and sin, could become the permanent joy of those
who had put aside the conception of depravity, and the moments between could be
filled no longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.
i. For the Transcendentalists, then,
the critical realization, or conviction, was that finding God depended on
neither orthodox creedless nor the Unitarians’ sensible exercise of virtue, but
on one’s inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. From
this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of their religious
philosophy.
j. Transcendentalism was not a purely
native movement, however. The Transcendentalists received inspiration from
overseas in the form of English and German romanticism, particularly the
literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the post-Kantian
idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the influence of these
writers, the Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human “Reason,” or
what we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the
Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as
empirical investigation, which underlay both deism and the natural theology of
the Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically of the ability of scientific
methods to discover the true nature of the universe; now the rebels
atHarvardCollege would turn the ammunition against their elders. In an 1833
article in The Christian Examiner entitled simply “Coleridge,” Frederic Henry
Hedge, once professor of logic at Harvard and now minister inWest Cambridge,
explained and defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence
between internal human reality and external spiritual reality.
The method [of Kantian philosophy] is
synthetically, proceeding from a given point, the lowest that can be found in
our consciousness, and deducing from that point ‘the whole world of
intelligences, with the whole system of their representations’ …. The last step
in the process, the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space,
and variety, or, in other words, the establishing of a coincidence between the
facts of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered within
ourselves.
k. Although written in a highly
intellectual style, as many of the Transcendentalist tracts were, Hedge’s
argument was typical of the movement’s philosophical emphasis on non-rational,
intuitive feeling. The role of the Continental Romantics in this regard was to
provide the sort of intellectual validation we may suppose a fledgling movement
of comparative youngsters would want in their rebellion against the Harvard
establishment.
l. For Transcendentalism was entering
theological realms which struck the elder generation of Unitarians as heretical
apostasy or, at the very least, as ingratitude. The immediate controversy
surrounded the question of miracles, or whether God communicated his existence
to humanity through miracles as performed by Jesus Christ. The
Transcendentalists thought, and declared, that this position alienated humanity
from divinity. Emerson leveled the charge forcefully in his scandalous
Divinity School Address (1838), asserting that “the word Miracle, as pronounced
by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one
with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”(6) The same year, in a bold
critique of Harvard professor Andrews Norton’s magnum opus The Evidence of the Genuineness of the Four Gospels,
Orestes Brownson identified what he regarded as the odious implications of the
Unitarian position: “there is no revelation made from God to the human soul; we
can know nothing of religion but what is taught us from abroad, by an
individual raised up and specially endowed with wisdom from on high to be our
instructor.” For Brownson and the other Transcendentalists, God displayed his
presence in every aspect of the natural world, not just at isolated times. In a
sharp rhetorical move, Brownson proceeded to identify the spirituality of the
Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy:
m. To Norton, such a rejection of the
existence of divine miracles, and the assertion of an intuitive communion with
God, amounted to a rejection of Christianity itself. In his reply to the
Transcendentalists, “A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity,” Norton
wrote that their position “strikes at root of faith in Christianity,” and he
reiterated the “orthodox” Unitarian belief that inner revelation was inherently
unreliable and a potential lure away from the truths of religion.
The religion, of which they speak,
therefore, exists merely, if it exists at all, in undefined and unintelligible
feelings, having reference perhaps to certain imaginations, the result of
impressions communicated in childhood, or produced by the visible signs of
religious belief existing around us, or awakened by the beautiful and
magnificent spectacles which nature presents.
Despite its dismissive intent and tone,
Norton’s blast against Transcendentalism is an excellent recapitulation of
their religious philosophy. The crucial difference consisted in the respect
accorded to “undefined and unintelligible feelings.”
n. The miracles controversy revealed
how far removed the Harvard rebels had grown from their theological upbringing.
It opened a window onto the fundamental dispute between the Transcendentalists
and the Unitarians, which centered on the relationship between God, nature and humanity.
The heresy of the Transcendentalists was to countenance mysticism and
pantheism, or the beliefs in the potential of the human mind to commune with
God and in a God who is present in all of nature, rather than unequivocally
distinct from it. Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists continued to think of
themselves as Christians and to articulate their philosophy within a Christian
theological framework, although some eventually moved past Christianity or
abandoned organized religion altogether.
o. Transcendentalists believed in a
monistic universe, or one in which God is immanent in nature. The creation is
an emanation of the creator; although a distinct entity, God is permanently and
directly present in all things. Spirit and matter are perfectly fused, or
“interpenetrate,” and differ not in essence but in degree. In such a
pantheistic world, the objects of nature, including people, are all equally
divine (hence Transcendentalism’s preoccupation with the details of nature,
which seemed to encapsulate divine glory in microcosmic form). In a pantheistic
and mystical world, one can experience direct contact with the divinity, then,
during a walk in the woods, for instance, or through introspective
contemplation. Similarly, one does not need to attribute the events of the
natural world to “removed” spiritual causes because there is no such
separation; all events are both material and spiritual; a miracle is indeed
“one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”
p. The Transcendentalists can be
exasperatingly vague in their prescriptions for spiritual transformation, a
vagueness which derives principally from their distrust of all forms of ritual
and inherited religious forms. The transcendent individual is often a solitary
figure, contemplating his soul (and by analogy, the soul of all humanity), and
contemplating other souls through the reading of serious literature. But the
central recurring theme that emerges is a return to nature, where the artifice
and depravity of society cannot reach.
q. Emerson, in “Nature,” tries to
capture the feeling of conversion as experienced during his (or his narrator’s)
sojourn in the woods. In a famous passage that has become a classic yet
frequently parodied description of the “transcendent moment,” he writes:
In the woods, we return to reason and
faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no
calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all
mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel
of God.
r. For the reading or listening
audience of the Transcendentalists, however, the question remained whether this
kind of spiritual experience was the inevitable result of a walk in the woods.
It is a question that the Transcendentalists would have answered indirectly,
implicitly, through the demonstration of spiritual transformation rather than
instruction in its causative methods. That is, they were less interested in
mapping out the precise route to conversion than in describing the general
feeling of spiritual awakening. Experiencing nature was of critical importance
because the natural world was the face and essence of God; becoming physically
closer to nature, contemplating it, understanding it—these were the actions
that brought man closer to his maker.
s. Transcendentalists, who never
claimed enough members to become a significant religious movement, bequeathed
an invaluable legacy to American literature and philosophy. As a distinct
movement, Transcendentalism had disintegrated by the dawn of civil war; twenty
years later its shining lights had all faded: George Ripley and Jones Very died
in 1880, Emerson in 1882, Orestes Brownson in 1876, Bronson Alcott in 1888. The
torch passed to those writers and thinkers who wrestled with the philosophy of
their Transcendentalist forebears, keeping it alive in the mind more than in
the church. At his one-hundredth lecture before the Concord Lyceum in 1880,
Emerson looked back at the heyday of Transcendentalism and described it thus:
It seemed a war between intellect and
affection; a crack in Nature, which split every church in Christendom into
Papal and Protestant; Calvinism into Old and New schools; Quakerism into Old
and New; brought new divisions in politics; as the new conscience touching
temperance and slavery. The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had
become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new
consciousness…. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the
individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly
written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher
had far more precision; the individual is the world.
t. The
Transcendentalists had stood at the vanguard of the “new consciousness” Emerson
recalled so fondly, and it is for their intellectual and moral fervor that we
remember them now as much as for their religious philosophy; the light of
Transcendentalism today burns strongest on the page and in the classroom,
rather than from the pulpit.
Reasons for the Mount
of American Transcendentalism: There
was noone precise “cause” for the beginning of
Transcendentalism. According to Paul Bowler, chance, coincidence and several
independent events, thoughts and tendencies seemed to have converged in the
1830s inNew England. Some of those were:
a. The imperatives of logic itself for
those who take ideas seriously – the impossibility, for instance, of accepting
modern science without revising traditional religious views.
b. The steady erosion of Calvinism.
c. The intrusion of the machine into
theNew Englandgarden and the disruption of the old order by the burgeoning
industrialism.
d. The appearance of talented and
energetic young people like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau on the scene.
e. The progressive secularization of
modern thought under the impact of science and technology.
f. The emergence of a Unitarian
intelligentsia with the means, leisure, and training to pursue literature and
scholarship.
g. The increasing insipidity and
irrelevance of liberal religion to questing young minds – lack of involvement
in women’s rights and abolitionism.
h. The impact of European ideas on
Americans traveling abroad.
Traditional sense: In the traditional sense of the word, American
Transcendentalism of Nineteenth Century is not a religion; it is a realistic
philosophy, a state of mind, and a form of spirituality. It is not a religion
because it does not adhere to the three concepts common in major religions:
a. belief in a God;
b. belief in an afterlife (dualism); and
c. a belief that this life has consequences on the next
(if you’re good in this life, you will go to heaven in the next, etc.).
Transcendentalism is monist; it does not
reject an afterlife, but its emphasis is on this life.
The Self-Identified
Transcendentalists
The Big Three: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
Others: Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Augustus Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Charles Anderson Dana, John Sullivan Dwight, Sarah & Angelina Grimke, Sophia Peabody-Hawthorne, Frederick Henry Hedge, James Marsh, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George & Sophia Ripley, Jones Very, and others.
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