American Transcendentalism
1. 1. Features of Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical,
religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered
around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other
important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia
Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer
Peabody, 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”. 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, Fruitlands, and Walden;
and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
(Transcendentalism)
The Transcendentalist movement was a
reaction against 18th-century rationalism and a manifestation of the general
humanitarian trend of 19th-century thought. The movement was based on a
fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The Transcendentalists
tried to find the truth through feeling and intuition rather than through logic.
For Orestes Brownson, “Transcendentalism is “the recognition in man of the
capacity of knowing truth intuitively…an order of knowledge transcending the
senses”. In this regard, nature was their bible. In addition, Chritopher Cranch
states:
All things in Nature are beautiful types to the soul
that will read them
…
Every object that speaks to the senses was meant for
the soul
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”; slavedrivers of
themselves, as Thoreau says in Walden. As
the nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists’
dissatisfaction with their society became focused on policies and actions of
the United States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the war
with Mexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.
As a group, the transcendentalists led
the celebration of the American experiment as one of individualism and
self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women's rights, abolition,
reform, and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws,
social institutions, and creeping industrialization. They created an American
"state of mind" in which imagination was better than reason,
creativity was better than theory, and action was better than contemplation.
And they had faith that all would be well because humans could transcend limits
and reach astonishing heights. Transcendentalists
advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no
intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing
on nature and opposing materialism. They emphasized the unity rather than the
“Trinity” of God. (Transcendentalism)