What Is Transcendentalism?

Where Transcendentalism comes from

Transcendentalism grew out of Unitarianism at Harvard in the late 1820s and 1830s. Rather than rejecting their liberal church, many early Transcendentalists were Unitarian ministers who wanted a more intense spiritual experience than its cool rationalism offered. They drew on English and German Romanticism, on Kant’s transcendental philosophy and German idealism, on Platonism and on Indian religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, which Thoreau names in Walden. Much of the German thought reached them second-hand, through writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Emerson’s essay Nature, published anonymously in Boston in 1836, is usually treated as the movement’s founding statement. A review in January 1837 used the label ’Transcendentalist’ disparagingly, and the name stuck. A year later, in 1837, Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address ’The American Scholar’ urged American writers to stop imitating Europe; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called it the country’s ’intellectual Declaration of Independence’. His 1838 Divinity School Address, which questioned biblical miracles, caused a scandal and kept him out of Harvard for about thirty years.

Key ideas

• Inherent goodness — People and the natural world are fundamentally good, and nature is a source of spiritual insight.
• Intuition over evidence — Individual intuition is valued above objective, empirical proof as a route to truth.
• Self-reliance — Individuals should trust their own judgement rather than conform; Emerson set this out in ’Self-Reliance’ (1841).
• Suspicion of institutions — Organised religion and political parties are seen as forces that corrupt the individual.
• The Over-Soul — A shared divine spirit is thought to unite all people as one being.

The Transcendental Club and The Dial

In September 1836 four Unitarian ministers, Frederic Henry Hedge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley and George Putnam, began meeting in Cambridge and Boston. Members called it Hedge’s Club, because it met when Hedge visited from Maine; ’Transcendental Club’ was a disparaging name used by outsiders. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker and Henry David Thoreau took part, and formal meetings continued until 1840.

Because established journals turned down their work, the group launched its own periodical, The Dial, in July 1840, with Fuller as editor. Emerson took over around 1842 and used it to promote younger writers, including Thoreau. The magazine never paid its way and closed in April 1844, but in four years it gave the Transcendentalists a public voice. It printed Fuller’s essay ’The Great Lawsuit’ and work by Thoreau, and it became the main place where readers outside Concord and Boston could follow the group’s ideas.

Brook Farm and Fruitlands

Two short-lived communes tested the ideas in practice. George and Sophia Ripley founded Brook Farm in 1841 at West Roxbury, about nine miles from Boston. From 1844 it adopted the socialist ideas of Charles Fourier; when its uninsured central building, the Phalanstery, burned down in March 1846, the community was ruined, and it closed by 1847. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member and later satirised the experience in The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Fruitlands, founded by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane at Harvard, Massachusetts, in June 1843, was stricter still: residents ate no animal products and drank only water. It lasted about seven months, and Louisa May Alcott, Bronson’s daughter, later described it with gentle irony in her sketch ’Transcendental Wild Oats’. Both communes failed quickly, but they showed how seriously some members took the idea that a simpler, more spiritual way of living could be built from scratch.

Thoreau, Walden and civil disobedience

Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s protégé, put self-reliance into practice. From 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847 he lived in a cabin he built on Emerson’s woodland by Walden Pond, near Concord. Walden, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1854, turns that stay of two years, two months and two days into a meditation on simplicity, nature and independence. It also criticises the impact of the railways on the landscape, one reason it is now often read as an early work of environmental writing.

In July 1846 Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay the poll tax, in protest against slavery and the Mexican–American War. His essay ’Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849), reissued in 1866 as ’Civil Disobedience’, argues that individuals should not let governments override their conscience. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both later cited it as an influence on nonviolent resistance.

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was the movement’s leading woman and one of its sharpest minds. From 1839 she ran ’Conversations’, discussion classes for women who were largely shut out of higher education, and she edited The Dial from 1840 to 1842. Her essay ’The Great Lawsuit’, first printed in The Dial, became Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), often called the first major feminist work in the United States.

She went on to become a book reviewer and then the first female foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune, reporting on the Italian revolutions. Her book Summer on the Lakes (1844), based on travels around the Great Lakes, also criticised the loss of forests to industry. She died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850 with her husband and son, and her manuscript on the Roman Republic was lost. After her death Emerson felt the movement was fading.

Key works

• Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836. The essay usually seen as the founding statement of Transcendentalism.
• The American Scholar — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837. An address urging American writers to break free of Europe, later called America’s intellectual Declaration of Independence.
• Essays: First Series — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. Contains ’Self-Reliance’, the clearest statement of the movement’s individualism.
• Woman in the Nineteenth Century — Margaret Fuller, 1845. Often called the first major US feminist work, expanded from an essay in The Dial.
• Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) — Henry David Thoreau, 1849. The essay on conscience and the state that later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
• The Blithedale Romance — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852. A sceptical novel drawn from Hawthorne’s time at Brook Farm, useful as an outsider’s view.
• Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Thoreau’s account of two years by Walden Pond and the movement’s best-known book.
• Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855. Greeted by Emerson in a letter hailing the start of a great career; shows the movement’s influence on American poetry.

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