Transcendentalism was a religious, literary, and philosophical movement that flourished especially between 1836, when Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature was published, and 1844, when the semiofficial journal of the movement, the Dial, ceased publication. Influenced by Unitarianism, Transcendentalists denied the existence of miracles, preferring a Christianity that rested on the teachings of Christ rather than on his supposed deeds. Many Transcendentalists, in fact, were Harvard - educated Unitarian ministers who were dissatisfied with their conservative Unitarian leaders as well as with the general conservative tenor of the time.
With a membership that included Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau, Transcendentalists experimented with communitarian living and supported educational innovation, the abolitionist and feminist movements, and a reform of church and society generally. They were committed to intuition as a way of knowing, to individualism, and to belief in the divinity of both man and nature.
Although philosophically based on Kant, the Boston - centered movement was more influenced by the romantic literary movement than by the systematic methodologies of philosophical Idealism. That is, Transcendentalism owed more to Goethe, Coleridge, and Carlyle than to Hegel and Schelling. The mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg also fed into the ideology of the movement.
An idealistic philosophy that in general emphasizes the spiritual over the material. By its very nature, the movement is hard to describe and its body of beliefs hard to define. Its most important practitioner and spokesman in the New England manifestation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called it "the Saturnalia or excess of Faith." That which is "popularly called Transcendentalism among us," he wrote, "is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842." That description mentions two of the very elements, an emphasis upon heightened spiritual awareness and an interest in various types of philosophical idealism, that make transcendentalism so difficult to describe.
In actuality, we cannot speak of a well organized and clearly delineated transcendentalist movement as such. Instead, we find a loosely knit group of authors, preachers, and lecturers bound together by a mutual loathing of Unitarian orthodoxy, a mutual desire to see American cultural and spiritual life freed from bondage to the past, and a mutual faith in the unbounded potential of American democratic life. Located in the Concord, Massachusetts, area in the years between 1835 and 1860, the transcendentalists formed not a tight group but, rather, a loose federation.
Though a movement such as transcendentalism cannot be said to have had one distinct leader, Emerson (1803 - 1882) was clearly its central figure. The publication of his Nature in 1836 is generally considered to mark the beginning of an identifiable movement. The next two decades were to see numerous new works from Emerson and poems, essays, and books from other transcendentalist figures, such as Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Orestes Brownson (1803 - 1876), Amos Bronson Alcott (1799 - 1888), Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850), George Ripley (1802 - 1880), and Theodore Parker (1810 - 1860). Never forming an official affiliation, these figures and others associated with them banded together for the formation of an informal discussion group called the Transcendental Club; the publication of the transcendentalist literary and philosophical journal, The Dial; and the establishment of an experiment in utopian communal living, Brook Farm.
One thing almost all those associated with the movement did share, however, was a common heritage of Unitarianism. Perhaps more than anything else, this fact helps to explain the development of transcendentalism and its later and larger significance for American culture. The transcendentalists broke with Unitarianism for two reasons. First, they objected to the Unitarian desire to cling to certain particulars of Christian history and dogma. Emerson called this clinging a "noxious" exaggeration of "the personal, the positive, the ritual," and he asked instead for a direct access to God, unmediated by any elements of Scripture and tradition. And second, the transcendentalists lamented the sterility of belief and practice they found in the Unitarian faith.
According to Thoreau, it is not man's sin but his boredom and weariness that are "as old as Adam." The American Adam needs to exchange his bondage to tradition for a freedom to experiment: "old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."
In some ways transcendentalism attempted to recapture for the American spirit the fervor of the original Puritan enterprise. That zeal, with its attendant bliss and agony, had been suppressed or exiled to the wilderness of the American religious experience by the end of the eighteenth century. Transcendentalism was one of the first and most dramatic protests against civil religion in America. Though it did not live up to the expectations of its adherents, many of them expected nothing less than a total regeneration of social and spiritual life through the application of the principles of idealism in America, transcendentalism has had a lasting impact. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, several of the transcendentalists were important participants in the abolitionist movement, and in the decades to follow, widely divergent individuals and movements would find inspiration in the transcendental protest against society.
For example, Henry Ford, who once said "history is bunk" and declared Emerson's essays to be his favorite reading, dwelt upon the transcendentalists' disdain for convention and their exaltation of self reliant power, while both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King drew deeply upon the resources of Thoreau's famous essay, "Civil Disobedience."
Perhaps even more significantly, transcendentalism marked the first substantial attempt in American history to retain the spiritual experience and potential of the Christian faith without any of the substance of its belief. By claiming an essential innocence for man, by substituting a direct intuition of God or truth for any form of revelation, and by foreseeing a future of ill defined but certain glory for humankind, transcendentalism paved the way for the many romantic notions about human nature and destiny that have become such a central part of the American experience in the last hundred years.
