Transcendentalism is a movement that focuses on ideas, beliefs, and writing. It began in the late 1820s and 1830s in New England, a region of the United States. A key idea is that people and nature are naturally good, but society and its rules have made people less pure. Transcendentalists believe that people are best when they are self-reliant and independent. They saw spiritual experiences in everyday life and thought that physical and spiritual events are part of ongoing processes, not separate things.
Transcendentalism was one of the first major philosophical ideas in the United States. It is an important early part of American philosophy history. It focused more on personal feelings and thoughts than on facts and evidence. People who followed this movement believed that individuals could create new ideas without relying much on past thinkers. Its growth was a response to the intellectual and spiritual ideas that were common at the time. The beliefs of the Unitarian church, taught at Harvard Divinity School, were closely connected to Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism was influenced by ideas from English and German Romanticism, the study of the Bible by Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the doubts of David Hume, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. Scholars Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis say that Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme had a strong influence on Transcendentalism.
Origin
Transcendentalism is closely connected to Unitarianism in Boston during the early 1800s. It began to develop after Unitarianism became influential at Harvard University, especially after Henry Ware was chosen as the Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and John Thornton Kirkland became President in 1810. Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism. Instead, it grew naturally from Unitarian ideas about the importance of free conscience and the value of using reason. However, transcendentalists believed that Unitarianism was too calm and rational. They sought a more powerful spiritual experience. Therefore, transcendentalism was not a movement against Unitarianism, but a movement that followed similar ideas introduced by the Unitarians.
Transcendental Club
Transcendentalism became an organized group and an important movement when the Transcendental Club was formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 1836. The club was started by important thinkers from New England, including George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Henry Hedge. Other members of the club were Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd, Jones Very, and Charles Stearns Wheeler. Starting in 1840, the group published their ideas in a journal called The Dial and other places.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Cuba Journal was one of the first examples of transcendentalist writing shared among the Transcendental Club. The journal came two years before Emerson’s Nature and more than a decade before Thoreau’s Walden. Made up of 56 letters written during her time in Cuba in the early 1830s, the journal gives a detailed description of the island’s landscape, plants, and atmosphere, focusing on how things feel and personal growth. It did not talk about politics or money, but it praised nature’s beauty and its spiritual power, which deeply influenced early Transcendentalist thinkers. Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Peabody’s sister, shared the letters widely by hosting reading parties that lasted up to seven hours. Guests like Bronson and Abba Alcott, the Emersons, and the Channings took turns reading them late into the night. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne wrote: “It is pure, single Nature, alone in her power and loveliness, that calms and lifts the soul—we do not remember the godlike here, but we think of GOD here.”
Second wave of transcendentalists
By the late 1840s, Emerson felt the transcendentalist movement was ending, and this feeling grew stronger after Margaret Fuller died in 1850. Emerson wrote, "All that can be said is that she represents an important time and group in American culture." Later in the 19th century, a second group of transcendentalists emerged, including Moncure Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Samuel Longfellow, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The idea that the spirit can be shown through simple language helps readers feel a sense of purpose. This is the main theme in most transcendentalist essays and writings, which focus on topics that celebrate personal expression. Most members of the group were struggling artists, though Samuel Gray Ward was the wealthiest. After writing a few articles for The Dial, Ward focused on his career in banking.
Beliefs
Transcendentalists strongly believe in the power of individuals and focus on personal freedom. Their ideas are closely connected to those of the Romantics, but they differ by trying to accept or at least not oppose the scientific observations of science.
Transcendentalists base their religion and philosophy on ideas from German Romanticism, especially those of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Transcendentalism combined ideas from English and German Romanticism, the religious criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, the doubts of Hume, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and German idealism in general). Early Transcendentalists did not know much about German philosophy directly and relied mostly on writings by Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Staël, and other English and French writers to learn about it. The Transcendentalist movement was an American version of English Romanticism.
Transcendentalists believe that society and its groups, especially organized religion and political parties, harm the purity of individuals. They think people are best when they are self-reliant and independent. Only from such people can true community form.
Even with this need for individuality, Transcendentalists also believe that all people are connected to the "Over-Soul." Because the Over-Soul is one, it unites all people as one being. Emerson mentioned this idea in his speech "The American Scholar," saying, "There is One Man, present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man." This idea agrees with Transcendentalist beliefs about individuality, as each person can see within themselves a part of the divine Over-Soul.
In recent years, a difference has been made between individuality and individualism. Both support the unique ability of individuals. However, individualism is strongly against government, while individuality sees all parts of society as necessary or at least acceptable for developing a truly independent person. Whether Transcendentalists supported individualism or individuality is still unclear.
While deeply influenced by Western philosophies like Platonism, Neoplatonism, and German idealism, Transcendentalism was also directly affected by Indian religions. Thoreau wrote in Walden about the influence of Indian religions on Transcendentalists:
In 1844, the first English translation of the Lotus Sutra was published in The Dial, a journal by New England Transcendentalists, translated from French by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.
Transcendentalists have different views on the practical goals of will. Some believe it leads to utopian social change, like Brownson, who connected it to early socialism. Others see it as only about individualism and idealism. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist," he said that a purely transcendental way of life was hard to achieve in practice.
Transcendentalists deeply respect nature, not only for beauty but also as a way to study and understand the natural world. Emerson wrote about this in his work Nature, saying that the natural world has a powerful, whole effect on people.
Inspired by Emerson and the importance of nature, Charles Stearns Wheeler built a small cabin at Flint's Pond in 1836. This was the first Transcendentalist experiment in living outdoors. Wheeler used his cabin during summers away from Harvard from 1836 to 1842. Thoreau stayed at Wheeler's cabin for six weeks in 1837 and later built his own cabin at Walden in 1845. The exact location of Wheeler's cabin was found by Jeff Craig in 2018 after a five-year search.
Protecting natural areas untouched by humans is very important to Transcendentalists. The idealism central to Transcendentalism makes them skeptical of capitalism, westward expansion, and industrialization. As early as 1843, Margaret Fuller wrote in Summer on the Lakes that "the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron." In 1854, Thoreau described trains in Walden as "winged horse or fiery dragon" that "sprinkle[d] all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed."
Influence on other movements
Transcendentalism is considered the first important American intellectual movement. It has influenced many later American thinkers and helped shape certain literary movements.
Transcendentalism also affected the "Mental Sciences" movement of the mid-1800s, which later became known as the New Thought movement. New Thought considers Ralph Waldo Emerson its main intellectual leader. Many important figures, such as Emma Curtis Hopkins (called "the teacher of teachers"), Ernest Holmes (founder of Religious Science), Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (founders of Unity), and Malinda Cramer and Nona L. Brooks (founders of Divine Science), were strongly influenced by Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism was also shaped by ideas from Hinduism. Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), who started the Brahmo Samaj, rejected parts of Hindu mythology and the Christian belief in a trinity. He believed Unitarianism, a religious movement, came closest to true Christianity. He had strong support for Unitarians, who were closely linked to Transcendentalists. In 1828, Roy asked American Unitarians for help with missionary work in India. By 1829, Roy left the Unitarian Committee, but after his death, the Brahmo Samaj continued to connect with the Unitarian Church. The Unitarians focused on rational beliefs, social change, and combining these ideas into a new religion. This belief system was called "neo-Vedanta" by Christian writers and has greatly influenced modern views of Hinduism and Western spiritual ideas, which later adopted Unitarian ideas under the name neo-Vedanta.
Major figures
Important people in the transcendentalist movement included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott. Other well-known transcendentalists were Louisa May Alcott, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Chris McCandless, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, Thomas Treadwell Stone, Jones Very, and Walt Whitman.
Criticism
Early in the movement's history, critics used the term "transcendentalists" as a negative label, suggesting their ideas were beyond reason. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel called The Blithedale Romance (1852), which mocked the movement. The story was based on his time at Brook Farm, an ideal community that failed and was built on transcendental ideas.
In Edgar Allan Poe's satires How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) and Never Bet the Devil Your Head (1841), Poe made fun of transcendentalism. He also called its followers "Frogpondians," a name from a pond in Boston Common. The second story mentioned the movement and its main journal, The Dial, even though Poe said he wasn't targeting anyone in particular. Poe criticized their writing, calling it "metaphor-run mad" and saying they used too much obscurity or mysticism without purpose.
In his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Poe criticized the "too much meaning" in transcendentalist poetry, saying it turned into plain, boring prose.