American transcendentalism

Between 1835-1860 in New England, the northeastern region of the United States, writers such as Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau participated in a loosely-affiliated movement known as Transcendentalism. The writers and intellectuals associated with the Transcendentalist circle engaged in debates over religious and philosophical approaches to knowledge and were active in literary and publishing pursuits.  They participated in social living experiments, reform movements, and edited and contributed to the journal The Dial (1840-1844).

Transcendentalist thought emphasizes the importance of individual conscience and intuition when dealing with questions of morality or spiritual and artistic inspiration. Debate within the Unitarian church, to which Emerson and others belonged, prompted the beginnings of the movement; Emerson and others disagreed with traditional church doctrine and believed that spiritual inspiration could be experienced through individual perception rather than through miracles or supernatural aid (Myerson 25).

Roots of Transcendentalist thought can also be found in contemporary European philosophy and literature.  In particular, Transcendentalists took up the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  Kant’s work opposed the prevalent contemporary philosophical ideas of John Locke, who asserted that human thought and mental structures are formed by sensory experience.  According to Locke, the mind is akin to a slate to be filled and formed by knowledge gained through the senses.  Transcendentalists, with Kant, believed that the mind actively shapes experience, and that specific kinds of intuitive knowledge can transcends sensory and experiential perception.  The New England group extended these ideas to fields of morality and spirituality, believing that the mind can perceive truths without having to rely on sensory experience, logical reasoning, or traditional authorities.

Many associated with the New England Transcendentalist group were engaged in literary projects, and accordingly closely read international, and particularly European, literature.  English Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also influenced by Kant, became important to New England authors such as Emerson and Thoreau.  Romanticism in England, which flourished between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, emphasized individual expression and feeling.  Romanticism also engaged a spirit of revolution prompted by the rejection of ideals and rules governing Classicism and Neoclassicism, the cultural milieu preceding the Romantic project, and by ideas of political revolution that were encouraged by French and American political revolt.  Some twentieth-century critical work discusses how American literature in the early nineteenth century took up and extended ideas engaged by the English Romantics, generating a form of “American Romanticism.”  Literary critic Evan Carton discusses the idea of Romantic writing in nineteenth century America as resisting complete identification with either the imagination or the world, instead generating work that dialogues with both.

Characterization of literary periods tends to over-simplify the multiple and fluctuating modes of production occurring at a given moment, but can still be useful in sketching the broad strokes of cultural shifts.  Romanticism, and American Romanticism, can be thought of as large categories with many shared characteristics.  At least three such features, the emphasis on individual perception, the rejection of reliance on tradition, and the interest in social reform movements, are also shared by members of the Transcendental circle.

Geographical and political contexts of the nascent United States factored into the creation of nineteenth century writing that was particular to American experience, though writers drew from international sources and ideas.  Lee Rust Brown discusses how the particulars of the American geography and environment contributed to how relationships with nature were conceived.  Interactions with contained spaces of wilderness accessible by city dwellers in the east, and with ideas of the “West” as a frontier to be explored and settled, both figure into American writers’ versions of Romanticism.  Thoreau’s account in Walden of living in a small cabin on Walden Pond, actually located on a portion of Emerson’s land, is an example of an individual approach to experiencing nature through solitude, observation, and contemplation.  At the end of Walden, Thoreau writes the now oft-quoted lines:

If man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer. (326)

These lines typify the rejection of any unexamined acceptance of tradition and the appeal to individual modes of perception and action central to Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers.

Critical contemplation and reliance on individual thought also manifests in the rejection by Transcendentalists of established modes of religion, government, and social institutions.   Many participated in nineteenth century social reform movements aimed at influencing American legal and cultural practices.  Projects of post-federation social revolution included campaigns against slavery, and for temperance and women suffrage.  The Civil War (1861-1865) was a defining event of mid-nineteenth century American consciousness, and many involved with Transcendentalist writing and thinking actively participated in or wrote tracts supporting the abolitionist cause.  Thoreau, for example, spent one night in a Concord, Massachusetts jail for refusing to pay tax to a government that sanctioned the institution of slavery.  Emerson also spoke strongly against slavery, as in a speech against the Fugitive Slave Law in which he stated: “An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it.”  Critical engagement with dominant establishments and traditional codes was an important part of Transcendental practice.

Recent critics of the movement, however, have highlighted how its members were mainly upper class white males, a subject position with particular privilege in early American society, and have suggested that other figures might be read alongside these esteemed authors in order to demonstrate nineteenth century society and letters with more complexity.  Transcendental modes of thought and social practices, to the credit of those who debated and popularized the ideas, are available for others to engage with, and continue to be a present in American literary and philosophical discussions. (BH)

For further reading, see: American Transcendentalism Web

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/introduction.html

Works Cited:

Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Carton, Evan. The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985.

Myerson, Joel.  The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial. London: Associated UP, 1980.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Works Consulted:

Johnston, Kenneth R. et al. Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990.

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1.  Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath and Co., 1994.

Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkeley: U California P, 2001.