Transcendentalism

• A reliance on the intuition and the conscience;
   
• A form of idealism;
   
• A philosophical romanticism reaching America a generation or two after it developed in Europe.

Transcendentalism, though based on doctrines of ancient and modern European philosophers (particularly Kant) and sponsored in America chiefly by Emerson after he had absorbed it from Carlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, and others, took on special significance in the United States, where it so largely dominated the New England authors as to become a literary movement as well as a philosophic conception.

The movement gained its impetus in America in part from meetings of a small group that came together to discuss the “new thought” of the time (the Transcendental Club).  While holding different opinions about many things, the group seemed in general harmony in their conviction that within the nature of human beings there was something that transcended human experience—an intuitive and personal revelation.  As the movement developed, it informally sponsored two important activities: the publication of The Dial (1840-1844) and Brook Farm (a utopian experiment in communal living).

Some of the various doctrines that have somehow been accepted as “transcendental” may be restated here:

• Transcendentalist believed in living close to nature (Thoreau) and taught the dignity of manual labor (Thoreau).
   
• They strongly felt the need of intellectual companionships and interests (Brook Farm) and
   
• [They] placed great emphasis on the importance of spiritual living.  Every person’s relation to God was a personal matter to be established directly by the individual (Unitarianism) rather than through the intermediation of the ritualistic church.  They held firmly that human beings were divine in their own right, an opinion opposed to the doctrines held by the Puritan Calvinists in New England, and they urged strongly the essential divinity of human beings and one great brotherhood.  Self-trust and self-reliance were to be practiced at all times, since to trust self was really to trust the voice of God speaking intuitively within us (Emerson).
   
• The transcendentalists felt called on to resist the “vulgar prosperity of the barbarian,” believed firmly in democracy, and insisted on an intense individualism.  Some extremists went so far as to evolve a system of dietetics and to rule out coffee, wine, and tobacco—all on the basis that the body was the temple of the soul and that for the tenant’s sake it was well to keep the dwelling undefiled.
   
• Most of the transcendentalists were by nature reformers, though Emerson—the most vocal interpreter of the group—refused to go so far in this direction as, for instance, Bronson Alcott.  Emerson’s position is that it is each person’s responsibility to be “a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight path to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him to go in honor and with benefit.”  In this way most of the reforms were attempts to awaken and regenerate the human spirit rather than to prescribe particular and concrete movements.  The transcendentalists were, for instance, the early advocates of the enfranchisement of women.

Ultimately, despite these practical manifestations, transcendentalism was an epistemology—a way of knowing—and the ultimate characteristic that tied together the frequently contradictory attitudes of the loosely formed group was the belief that human beings can intuitively transcend the limits of the senses and of logic and directly receive higher truths and greater knowledge denied to more mundane methods of knowing.

The documents that most definitely give literary expression to general transcendentalist views are Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854).

[taken from Holman and Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature, 5^th edition, 1986]