Transcendentalism

Definition

• From Latin, meaning “passing over” or a “climbing beyond”

• Literary movement in New England beginning with publication of Emerson’s Nature in 1836 and lasting until beginning of Civil War in 1860

• Sometimes called the “American Romantics”—what did they want to pass over or climb beyond?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sources of Transcendentalism

• German philosopher Immanuel Kant idealism—world of thought and ideas as opposed to the material world

Sources of Transcendentalism

• British Romantic Poets

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Wordsworth(1770-1850)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834)

John Keats(1795-1821)

Lord Byron(1788-1824) Percy Shelley

(1792-1822)

Sources of Transcendentalism

• Eastern mysticism

• Thoreau, in particular, read Hindu sacred writings, recently translated into English

Sources of TranscendentalismUnitarianism• Form of Christianity that

stresses the unity of God• Denies the doctrine of the

Trinity• Emphasizes primacy of

reason and individual conscience in matters of faith and morality

• Some Unitarians even went so far as to argue that Jesus was a great man rather than the son of God

Transcendental Club• Small group of friends from

Boston and Concord

• Began meeting same year that Nature was published

• Included Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, etc.

• Published The Dial (intellectual and literary magazine) between 1840 and 1844

What did they believe?

• Divinity of human beings (everyone partook of the spark of the eternal divine)

• Unity of God (God seen everywhere immanent in the Creation, as the “Over-Soul”—Emerson’s term—that animated all of us)

• Humans commune directly with Divinity, can receive inspiration from God without the mediation of priests or printed texts of religion

• Signs of eternal truth everywhere present in nature. Reading these signs a way to receive divine inspiration

• Since so much left up to the individual, the individual is valued highly—much division of opinion, growth, and change in the philosophy. Consistency not important

In the words of Emersonfrom 1842 lecture, The Transcendentalist

The transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. . . .

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas . . . which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental…