Transcendentalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Transcendentalism, the New England movement of the late 1820s and 1830s, had a spokesman who in 1842 told an audience that it did not exist as a party. In a lecture called "The Transcendentalist", Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that there was no pure transcendentalist at all. He said history had offered only prophets and heralds of such a philosophy, and no one who had lived it fully. That is a strange thing for a movement's leading voice to say. It was a movement that prized the individual so highly that it struggled to organize itself. Its members were bound by a conviction that people and nature are fundamentally good, and that institutions spoil what is pure in us. So where did such ideas come from, and why did a calm, rational church in Massachusetts give rise to something so restless? What did its followers actually believe about the self, the divine and the woods outside Concord? And why did some of America's sharpest writers spend years mocking them?

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• 2. Unitarian Roots

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  The story begins at Harvard, where Henry Ware was elected Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805. John Thornton Kirkland followed as President of the university in 1810. Between them, these two elections let Unitarianism take hold in Cambridge. Unitarianism prized free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. Transcendentalism grew out of those same emphases as an organic consequence, and not as a rebellion. It ran alongside the Unitarian ideas rather than against them.

  What the future transcendentalists lacked was fire. They found Unitarianism sober, mild and calmly rationalist. They wanted a more intense spiritual experience than a reasoned faith could offer. That hunger shaped everything they did next, and it soon needed a place to gather.

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• 3. The Transcendental Club

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  On the 12th of September 1836, a group of prominent New England intellectuals met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded the Transcendental Club. Among its founders were George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge. The membership grew to include Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker and Henry David Thoreau. Other names on the roll were Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke and Christopher Pearse Cranch. Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd, Jones Very and Charles Stearns Wheeler were members too. With the club, a loose circle of thinkers became a coherent movement. From 1840, the group frequently published in its journal, The Dial, as well as in other venues.

  Some of its earliest writing was shared in a very different spirit. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne wrote the Cuba Journal, made up of 56 letters from her stay on the island in the early 1830s. It describes the landscape, flora and atmosphere, and it focuses on sensory experience and personal awakening. It avoids political and economic commentary. It predates Emerson's Nature by two years and Thoreau's Walden by more than a decade.

  Her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, passed the letters around widely. She hosted reading parties, some lasting up to seven hours, where guests took turns reading aloud late into the night. The guests included Bronson and Abba Alcott, the Emersons and the Channings. In one letter, Sophia wrote: "It is pure, single Nature, alone in her power & loveliness, that touches subdues and exalts the soul. We do not remember the godlike here, but we think of GOD here."

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• 4. Borrowed Ideas

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  Few of the early transcendentalists had read German philosophy in the original. They relied instead on English and French commentators, among them Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin and Germaine de Staël. Through these intermediaries, the movement absorbed English and German Romanticism, and the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher. It also took in the skepticism of David Hume, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The transcendentalists read Kant's a priori categories as a priori knowledge. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis add Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences. The roots also reach back to Platonism and Neoplatonism.

  The borrowing did not stop at Europe. Thoreau tells in Walden how he bathed his intellect each morning in the Bhagavat Geeta. Then he went to his well, where, as he imagined it, his bucket grated against that of a Brahmin's servant drawing water from the Ganges. In his telling, the pure Walden water mingled with the sacred river.

  In 1844, the first English translation of the Lotus Sutra appeared in The Dial. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had translated it from French.

  Influence also ran the other way. Ram Mohan Roy, who lived from 1772 to 1833, founded the Brahmo Samaj. He rejected Hindu mythology, and also the Christian trinity, and he judged Unitarianism closest to true Christianity. In 1828, he asked American Unitarians to support missionary work from Calcutta. By 1829, he had abandoned the Unitarian Committee, yet his society kept close ties with the Unitarian Church after his death. Christian commentators called its theology neo-Vedanta, and it has shaped the modern popular understanding of Hinduism.

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• 5. Self-Reliance and the Over-Soul

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  Organized religion and political parties topped the transcendentalist list of corrupting forces. Society and its institutions, they argued, damage the purity of the individual. People are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Only from such real individuals, in their view, can true community form.

  Yet this individualism sat beside a belief in the "Over-Soul". Because the Over-Soul is one, it unites all people as a single being. Emerson hints at the idea in his American Scholar address, where he says that "you must take the whole society to find the whole man". Each person holds a piece of the divine, which is why individuality and unity never contradicted each other for them.

  In recent years, scholars have separated individuality from individualism. Individualism is decidedly anti-government, while individuality treats all parts of society as necessary, or at least acceptable, for developing the true individual. Which of the two the transcendentalists really held is still undecided.

  Their practical aims divided them too. Orestes Brownson tied the philosophy to early socialism, and other adherents hoped it would bring utopian social change. Others considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project, and Emerson shared that view.

  The movement's beliefs resembled those of the Romantics in many ways. One difference was that transcendentalists tried to embrace, or at least not oppose, the empiricism of science. That openness turned their attention outward, toward the natural world.

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• 6. Into the Woods

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  In Nature, Emerson wrote that in the woods he became "a transparent eye-ball". He added: "I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." For transcendentalists, nature was more than scenery. It was also a tool for observing and understanding the structured inner workings of the world.

  The idea soon moved from the page to the ground. In 1836, Charles Stearns Wheeler built a shanty at Flint's Pond, inspired by Emerson. It is considered the first transcendentalist outdoor living experiment. Wheeler used it during his summer vacations from Harvard, from 1836 to 1842. In the summer of 1837, Thoreau stayed there for six weeks. He came away wanting a cabin of his own, which he built at Walden in 1845. The exact site of Wheeler's shanty stayed lost until 2018, when Jeff Craig found it after a five-year search.

  Protecting an undisturbed landscape mattered deeply to these writers. Their idealism bred skepticism toward capitalism, westward expansion and industrialization. In Summer on the Lakes, published as early as 1843, Margaret Fuller noted that "the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron".

  Thoreau, writing in Walden in 1854, saw the new railroads across America as a "winged horse or fiery dragon". In his image, that creature sprinkled the country with restless men and floating merchandise as if they were seed.

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• 7. Ridicule

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  In the movement's early years, critics used the word "transcendentalists" as an insult. They meant that its followers had wandered beyond sanity and reason. Nathaniel Hawthorne turned that suspicion into a novel, The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852. It satirized the movement and drew on his experiences at Brook Farm, a short-lived utopian community founded on transcendental principles.

  Edgar Allan Poe was harsher. His satires "How to Write a Blackwood Article", from 1838, and "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", from 1841, ridiculed the movement. Elsewhere he called its followers "Frogpondians", after the pond on Boston Common. The second story names both the movement and its flagship journal, The Dial. Poe still denied that he had any specific targets.

  He described transcendentalist writing as "metaphor-run mad". He accused it of "obscurity for obscurity's sake" and "mysticism for mysticism's sake". In his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition", he denounced the "so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists" as prose of the flattest kind.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  By the late 1840s, Emerson believed the movement was dying. The death of Margaret Fuller in 1850 convinced him even more. He wrote of her: "All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation." Later lists of prominent figures add names such as Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman, alongside the core four of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott.

  Emerson's gloom was premature. A second wave of transcendentalists arrived later in the 19th century, including Moncure Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The group was mostly made up of struggling aesthetes. The wealthiest was Samuel Gray Ward, who made a few contributions to The Dial and then turned to his banking career.

  The movement's deepest legacy lay in the so-called Mental Sciences of the mid-19th century, later known as the New Thought movement. New Thought considers Emerson its intellectual father. Ernest Holmes founded Religious Science, and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity. Malinda Cramer and Nona L. Brooks founded Divine Science. All were greatly influenced by transcendentalism. Emma Curtis Hopkins, known as "the teacher of teachers", sits among the movement's most influential heirs.

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