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American Transcendentalism
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American Transcendentalism
For much more information than can be contained
on this brief page, see Lawrence Buell's Literary Transcendentalism
and other works from the selected bibliographies on Henry
David Thoreau, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
Text-only version
Overview
 American
transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature
that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century
(about 1836-1860). It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian
church, extending the views of William Ellery Channing on an indwelling
God and the significance of intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism
holding to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in
the world" (Oxford Companion to American Literature 770). For the
transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul
of the world and contains what the world contains.
Transcendentalists rejected Lockean
empiricism, unlike the Unitarians:
they wanted to rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England Calvinism
(although none of its dogma) and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine
and supernatural light," imparted immediately to the soul by the spirit
of God.
For an excellent overview of American transcendentalism,
go to Chapter
Four of Paul Reuben's PAL site at California State University-Stanislaus
and Ann Woodlief's English
624 students' Transcendentalism
Web at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Related links: Tom Foran Clark's online
biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.
Key statements of its doctrine include Emerson's
essays, especially
Nature
(1836), "The American
Scholar" (1837), "The
Divinity School Address" (1838), "The
Transcendentalist" (1842), and "Self-Reliance,"
and Thoreau's Walden (1854). Others involved in the Transcendental
Club and its magazine The Dial included Margaret Fuller, editor
of
The Dial (1840-42), Amos Bronson Alcott, and William Ellery Channing.
In addition to his famous "transparent eyeball"
caricature of Emerson, see also Christopher Pearse Cranch's poem "Correspondences"
for
a succinct statement of Transcendentalist doctrines.
American
Romanticism
Definitions
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture
(1986)
"Transcendentalism, in fact, really began
as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a Romanticized version
of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of
the holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion
are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference
from historical and natural evidence" (46).
William Henry Channing(1810-1844)
"Transcendentalism, as viewed by its
disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals
to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence
of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through
intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots,
and skeptics, the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration,
the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought
to hold communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit,
and gave himself up to the embrace of nature's perfect joy, as a babe seeks
the breast of a mother."
Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism
(1842)
"That belief we term Transcendentalism
which maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses
or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation
from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual
world. . . ."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)
 "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 eye-ball.
I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or parcel of God" (996). See also Emerson's essay
"The Transcendentalist."(1842)
Sources
Reaction against New England Calvinism
Reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism
God as Deistic
First Cause who creates the world and universal laws but does not intervene
in human affairs
skepticism
Reaction against Lockean
empiricism
Emerging ideal of American democracy
German philosophy
idealism (principle of organicism--Leibniz)
Kant and Neoplatonists (mind imposes form). Transcendentalism
affirmed Kant's principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses.
According to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, "Kant
had confined the expression 'transcendental knowledge' to the cognizance
of those forms and categories--such as space, time, quantity, causality-which,
in his view, are imposed on perception by the constitution of all human
minds; he regarded these aspects as the universal conditions of sense-experience.
Emerson and others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge,
in a way whose validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive
cognizance of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of human
sense-experience" (216).
Schelling (emphasis on feeling; divinity and creative
impulse in nature)
The Romantic
movement, especially Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the English romantics
(Emerson)
Unitarianism
Eastern philosophy
Emanuel Swedenborg
Ideas
(from
Emerson)
Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding,"
or the normal means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason,"
a higher, more intuitive form of perception. In Biographia Literaria,
Coleridge cites Milton's Paradise Lost on the difference between
reason and understanding (Book V, ll. 479-490). In this passage from Paradise
Lost, Raphael instructs Adam and Eve on the distinction between heavenly
and earthly perception:
So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence
the leaves
More aery, last the bright consummate flow'r
Spirits odorous breathes: flowr's and thir fruit
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense
Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
According to Emerson, reason is "the highest faculty
of the soul--what we mean by the soul itself; it never reasons,
never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By contrast, "The Understanding
toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but
strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary" (L1:412-413).
Microcosm and macrocosm: each part of nature contains
all within it. "Nature is a sea of forms radically alike. . . ." ; "Every
particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related
to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle
is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."
Principle of analogy, of perceiving correspondences:
"[M]an is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects."
Emblematic Nature: "Every natural fact is a symbol
of some spiritual fact."
Universal soul ("Oversoul"): "Meantime within man
is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which
every part and particle is equally related."
The principle of organicism; the concept of the circle.
Transcendentalism, like other romantic movements,
proposes that the essential nature of human beings is good and that, left
in a state of nature, human beings would seek the good. Society is to blame
for the corruption that mankind endures. Hawthorne's juxtaposition of the
red rose, the flower of nature, and the rusty, blackened prison, the "black
flower" of society, exemplifies this perspective. This view opposes the
neoclassical vision that society alone is responsible for keeping human
beings from giving in to their own brutish natures. Transcendentalism also
takes the Romantic view of man's steady degeneration from childhood to
adulthood as he is corrupted by culture: "A man is a god in ruins."
Perfectionism and optimism.
See also the Romantic concept of the sublime,
especially
the ideas of
Edmund Burke.
Context
and
Controversy
Orestes Brownson, a philosopher and contemporary
of Emerson's, raised objections to Emerson's thought that are remarkable
because he neither defends Lockean epistemology nor seems worried (as were
conservative thinkers) about the "murderous instincts" of the lower classes.
Although he retracted much of this later because he felt sympathy for Emerson
(who was under attack for these ideas), here are some of his initial impressions:
"But we give it up. We cannot analyze one of
Mr. Emerson's discourses. He hardly ever has a leading thought, to which
all the parts of his discourse are subordinate, which is clearly stated,
systematically drawn out, and logically enforced. He is a poet rather than
a philosopher--and not always true even to the laws of poetry."
Reviewing the "Divinity School Address," Brownson
said that we are told "to obey our instincts" and to scorn to imitate even
Jesus. But "How shall we determine which are our higher instincts and which
our lower instincts? We do not perceive that he gives us any instructions
on this point. . . . We are to act out ourselves. Now, why is not the sensualist
as moral as the spiritualist, providing he acts out himself?"
Brownson accuses Emerson of "transcendental selfishness":
"Are all things in the universe to be held subordinate to the individual
soul? Shall a man take himself as the center of the universe, and say all
things are for his use, and count them of value only as they contribute
something to his growth or well-being?" According to this system, "I am
everything; all else is nothing, at least nothing except what it derives
from the fact that it is something to me."
In an April 1841 notice for The Boston Quarterly
Review, however, Brownson praised Emerson's Essays: "He who
reads it will find, that he is no longer what he was. A new and higher
life has quickened in him, and he can never again feel, that he is merely
a child of time and space, but that he is transcendent and immortal" (qtd.
in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vo. 2, p. 469).
Comments to D. Campbell
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