Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement in New

England in the early and middle part of the 19th century. The
philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern
United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned
for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely
material world of reason and rationality.

Definition:
From the word “transcend,” which means to go beyond – i.e., to go
beyond logic/reason or the five senses to find something deeper in the
human spirit/soul
 An extreme form of Romanticism, transcendentalism celebrates:
 Individualism
 The beauty of nature
 The virtue of humankind
A philosophy that implies that the basic truths of the universe lie
beyond the knowledge we obtain from our senses, reason, logic, or laws
of science–we learn these truths through our intuition, called the
“Divine Intellect”

 A belief in a higher reality or in a higher kind of knowledge

 Suggests that every individual is capable of discovering this
higher truth on his or her own, through intuition

Intuition: an innate understanding of what is right and good; a direct

line of communication between God and man. (“In the faces of men
and women I see God.” – Walt Whitman)
Beliefs

1. The human senses can know only physical reality.

2. Fundamental truths of being and the universe lie outside the reach of
the senses and can be grasped only through intuition.
3. The human spirit is reflected in nature.
4. Man and Nature are inherently good.
5. Individualism should be valued.
6. The natural world is symbolic of the spiritual world.
7. Society is a source of distracting, corruptive materialism. (Reject
Materialism!)
8. Simplicity is the path to spiritual greatness.

Once considered to have derived from European movements, it is now

generally seen as a development of native tendencies.

Centered on Boston and Concord, some of its most notable voices were
those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,
Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret
Fuller and Bronson Alcott.

The British writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle profoundly influenced these writers.

Transcendentalism was opposed to the idea that man needed an

intercessor through which to reach the divine, and was critical of
formalized religion.

Like the physical universe itself, all constructive practical activity, all
great literature, all forms of spiritual awareness were viewed as an
expression of the divine spirit.
The often expressed ambition was to achieve vivid perception of the
divine as it operates in common life, an awareness seen as leading at
once to personal cultivation and to a sense of history as an at least
potentially progressive movement.

Transcendentalism???
Transcendentalism also played a pivotal role in the 19th century
American literature. The pioneers of this movement not only enriched
American literature but also paved the way for the coming writers. In
addition to this, these pioneers broke out the old traditions and
established their own distinctive form of literature.
They valued:
 Simple Living,
 Frugality
 Harmony with nature
 The right of individual to self-government
 The sacredness of Life

Transcendentalism was a philosophical dissent from Unitarianism,

which represented the compromise of rational Deism with Calvinism,
relating to the rationalist's acceptance of liberal scientific thought
and rejecting extreme concepts concerning the original depravity and
the inherited guilt of man.

The rising young transcendentalists asserted that the Unitarian creed

had become conventional and complacent in its orthodox fidelity to
Christian dogmas of supernaturalism.

They rejected Locke's materialistic psychology in favour of the

idealism of the German thinker Immanuel Kant who declared that the
"transcendental" knowledge in the mind of man was innate.
Following the philosophy of Kant, they asserted the doctrine of
correspondence between the microcosm of the individual mind and
the macrocosm over-soul of the universe, and they derived an
enlarged conception of the sanctity of the individual and his freedom
to follow his intuitional knowledge.

The American Transcendentalists were influenced by British writers as

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle; Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling,
Goethe, Richter, Harder influenced the transcendentalists with their
philosophy; Greek philosophers like Plato, the Sufis, and the writers of
the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Buddhists and the
eclectic idealists profoundly influenced the transcendentalists.

These transcendentalists used to meet at Emerson's Concord house,

and through their magazine The Dial, they published their philosophy.
"Book Farm" (1841) and "Fruit Lands" (1842) were agrarian
experiments in communal living, supported briefly by the
transcendentalists concerned with the social order.

'Nature' was the first comprehensive expression of American

Transcendentalism. Emerson provided a fresh and lyrical intimation
of many of the leading ideas that developed in various essays and poems.

Thoreau's transcendentalism was empirical, not theological. He did

what he felt to be right and publicly opposed what he felt to be wrong.
If Emerson believed in Man, Thoreau believed in men. Both were the
party of Hope against the party of Memory, and were symbolic of a New
England turn from Calvinism through Unitarianism to a belief in man.
Both wrote and lived as if the 'American Adam' were more possibility
than myth. Walden is his famous book.
Whitman came to transcendentalism by way of his mother's Quakerism,
and Carlyle's and Hegel's writings, but Emerson was the immediate
influence. The Leaves of Grass was his monumental work. Through his
book, he taught the philosophy of democracy. He believed in the
transforming power of love in humanity and in life. Whitman was
theoretically the answer of Emerson's prayer, as he was also the voice
of the land of Promise, the first wholly unique one to emerge from
American continent.

Nathaniel Hawthorne satirized Book Farm in his novel The Blithedale

Romance. The Scarlet Letter was another novel in which he has
bitterly satirized Puritanism. Herman Melville satirized Puritanism in
his novel Moby Dick.

These transcendentalists – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville,

Whitman– seem to differ from one another more than they agree. First,
they are divergent in temperament; second, they are different in their
choice of subject matter and literary form; thirdly, they differ in their
interest and capacity for sustained philosophical thought.

Despite their differences, they have certain common things. These

writers have a profound sense of human predicament. They are
worried about the problem of man.

They all believe that individual virtue and happiness depends upon
self-realization and the self-realization depends upon the harmonious
reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies.
The five writers have a common assumption. They think that intuition
and imagination offer a surer road to truth than abstract logic or
scientific method. Finally, these five writers were able to deduce a
consequence of immense practical importance not only for their own
work but for the subsequent course of American literature as a whole.

In conclusion, American literature of 19th century was developed, and

enriched by these writers. They are unforgettable for their philosophy.
They prepared the way for the coming writers.