Transcendentalism was a literary, philosophical, and cultural movement in mid-19th century New England, influenced by Immanuel Kant and Romantic poets. It rejected traditional Christian theory and Unitarianism, valuing innate spiritual knowledge over reason and science. Nature was seen as a source of the divine, and the movement advocated for women’s rights and equality for all races. Key figures include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
Transcendentalism is a literary, philosophical and cultural movement that arose in New England in the mid-19th century. His theories have been espoused and encouraged by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Ministers Frederick Henry Hedge and Theodore Parker were prominent Transcendentalists, as was Sophia Peabody, the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The concept builds on theories that precede it. Most influential were the writings of the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who theorized that the only true knowledge was that which could be known instinctively rather than empirically demonstrated. A further very important influence was the work of the Romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some people refer to Transcendentalism as American Romanticism.
Instead of embracing traditional Christian theory, Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that people have an innate sense of the spiritual, a spiritual knowledge that transcended what could be known empirically or what could be corrupted by the senses. Transcendentalists were also reacting against the spiritual tradition of the Unitarian church, a nontrinitarian form of Christianity. At times, they were even specifically against the theories espoused during the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.
Unitarians of that time embraced the idea that reason, science, and philosophy helped people discover the purpose of life and the spirit world. Those who adopted Transcendentalism felt that learning directly interfered with innate knowledge and dulled the senses rather than freeing them for personal perception of the divine. The divine was there to be felt rather than something to be convinced of. Some have jumped the fence on this issue; Emerson was both naturalist and transcendentalist. Many Unitarian ministers became transcendentalists at this time.
The poets and writers associated with this movement especially expressed the sense of awareness that one could have from being ‘in nature’. This was certainly a direct reflection of the English Romantic movement in poetry. Wordsworth and others specifically celebrated nature as the source of the divine, not just the outdoors and natural manifestations of the earth, but also the essence or nature of the human.
From the work of Emerson Nature the concepts of transcendentalism are well expressed:
“Standing on the bare earth, – my head bathed in the merry air, and raised in infinite space, – all petty selfishness vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see everything; the currents of the Universal Being circulate in me; I am part or particle of God.”
The gist in Emerson and writers like him is that the natural world allows people to shed the rational perceptual part of themselves, to instead actively engage with the divine.
Another extremely important work related to this movement is Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Walt Whitman’s poetry, especially Leaves of Grass, is a vital explanation of the movement. William Cullen Bryant and his masterpiece “Thanatopsis” are also important.
Another key feature of the movement was its growing respect and value for the position of women. It was out of Transcendentalism that women in the United States would start campaigning for the vote. This movement also embraced a transcendent love of all races and took up the cause of unfair treatment of Native Americans and slaves. Not all Transcendentalists were concerned about these reforms, but many of them used their instincts to listen to the human nature of essential equality, for human beings are all, as Emerson put it, “part or particle of God.”
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