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ON TRANSCENDENTALISM
Self-Reliance is an essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published in 1841.
In this essay, Emerson conveys his transcendentalist philosophy and belief in selfreliance, an essential part of which is to trust in one's present thoughts and impressions rather
than those of other people or of one's past self. This philosophy is exemplified in the quote: "A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Emerson stresses the need to believe one's
own thoughts, while actively searching one's internal mind in order to capture the flash thought
that may or may not come across. However, Emerson articulates that although one has unlimited
potential in oneself, few actually possess the confidence to develop his mind fully. Emerson then
writes, "Trust yourself," for God will not have his work made manifest by "cowards".
Immediately afterwards, he asserts that everyone had the innate tendency to express
independent, genuine verdict when young. But, when young men become adults, Emerson
argues, they will become "clapped into jail by his consciousness." Additionally, the various
expectations of society will influence the minds of adults to a great extent, for society does not
love realities and creative minds, but loves customs and traditions. The essay states that "To be
great is to be misunderstood", by illustrating how enormously influential historical characters
(Jesus Christ, Columbus, Pythagoras, Copernicus) where fiercely opposed during their lifetimes,
while time later demonstrated the accuracy of their proposals.
Emerson also stresses originality, believing in one's own genius and living from within.
From this springs the quote: "Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide." He goes one step forward
from mere inconformity by suggesting everyone to "make your own Bible", instead of blindly
following traditionally held religious ideas. This revolutionised the American church.
Defining Transcendentalism:
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1842 lecture The Transcendentalist:
"The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in
miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he
believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the
admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the
spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own....
"It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired
the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who
replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the
intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a
very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but
through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he
denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that
man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent,
that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day
Transcendental...."
From a recent edition of Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
transcendentalism n. 1: A philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and
experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent
as the fundamental reality
2: a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and transcendental over the material and
empirical
3: the quality or state of being transcendental
From a 1913 Webster's Dictionary:
Tran`scen*den"tal*ism (?), n. [Cf. F. transcendantalisme , G. transcendentalismus .]
1. (Kantian Philos.) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the
fundamental principles of human knowledge. As Schelling and Hegel claim to have discovered
the absolute identity of the objective and subjective in human knowledge, or of things and
human conceptions of them, the Kantian distinction between transcendent and transcendental
ideas can have no place in their philosophy; and hence, with them, transcendentalism claims to
have a true knowledge of all things, material and immaterial, human and divine, so far as the
mind is capable of knowing them. And in this sense the word transcendentalism is now most
used. It is also sometimes used for that which is vague and illusive in philosophy.
2. Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.
THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE & TRANSCENDENTALISM
Thomas Hampson
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/transcend.html
"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our
own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself
inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
With this fiery challenge Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded his 1837 Harvard Phi Beta
Kappa Address, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. As his words were received with great
enthusiasm, Emerson argued not only for a new American culture, freed from European
bondage, but also for a rebirth of an intellectual and artistic life that was inextricably bound up
with the life of the spirit. Before long, Emerson and his circle of writers, reformers, and artists
would christen those ideals which governed the spirit "Transcendentalism."
The Transcendentalists stood at the heart of The American Renaissance-- the flowering
of our nation's thought in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music in the
period roughly designated from 1835-1880. Concentrated in Boston and Concord, MA, the
home of many of the literary members such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller,
the Alcotts, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, George Ripley, the Peabody Sisters, and the
Channings, Transcendentalism was far broader than a geographical phenomenon or a select club
membership--though Ripley and Emerson had founded the Transcendental Club in 1836. Rather
it was a faith shared by such diverse minds and such diverse places as those of Walt Whitman in
Brooklyn or Emily Dickinson in Amherst or the Hudson River School of painters in New York;
it was a visionary bent, a way of, as the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth had once
described his mission, "of seeing into the life of things" that permeated the best of American
thought and art throughout much of the 19th century. Even those artists of the American
Renaissance who would find difficulty with the optimism of the Transcendentalists--Hawthorne
and Melville among them--would be forced to focus on and respond to the existential issues the
movement raised.
American Transcendentalism
The term Transcendentalism was derived from the philosopher Kant, who called "all
knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing
objects." The roots of the American philosophy ran deep into German and English Romanticism.
From German philosophers such as Fichte and Herder, it received its mystic impulse; from
Goethe, Novalis, Jean-Paul, Heine, and the other great German Romantic poets it acquired its
imagistic language and themes. Acquaintance with German thought, by and large, filtered
through English translations--Coleridge and Carlyle's among the best--and acquaintance with
these and the work of other English Romantics such as Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and
Byron enriched the Americans' perspectives as well.
In his 1841 address delivered at Boston's Masonic Temple , which was later reprinted in
THE DIAL, Emerson attempted to define the philosophy in simple terms as "What is popularly
called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842." In reality it was
far more complex collection of beliefs: that the spark of divinity lies within man; that everything
in the world is a microcosm of existence; that the individual soul is identical to the world soul,
or Over-Soul, as Emerson called it. This belief in the Inner Light led to an emphasis on the
authority of the Self--to Walt Whitman's I , to the Emersonian doctrine of Self-Reliance, to
Thoreau's civil disobedience, and to the Utopian communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands. By
meditation, by communing with nature, through work and art, man could transcend his senses
and attain an understanding of beauty and goodness and truth.
Transcendentalism dominated the thinking of the American Renaissance, and its
resonances reverberated through American life well into the 20th century. In one way or another
our most creative minds were drawn into its thrall, attracted not only to its practicable messages
of confident self-identity, spiritual progress and social justice, but also by its aesthetics, which
celebrated, in landscape and mindscape, the immense grandeur of the American soul.
What is Transcendentalism?
by Jone Johnson Lewis
http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm
Readers have asked this question often. Here's my answer:
When I first learned about Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau in high school English class, I admit: I couldn't figure out what the term
"Transcendentalism" meant. I couldn't figure out what the central idea was that held all those
authors and poets and philosophers together so that they deserved this categorical name,
Transcendentalists. And so, if you're at this page because you're having difficulty: you're not
alone. Here's what I've learned since high school about this subject.
The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context -- by what they
were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were
trying to be different from.
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of well educated
people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it
both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around
Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already
decades since the Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people believed,
it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature,
essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything
from England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.
Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people
struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took
into account the new understandings their age made available.
The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had been looking at the Christian
and Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some
about the old assumptions of religion.
The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly
based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more
Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was
coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no
longer enough.
German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the religious and
philosophical thinking about reason and religion.
This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th
century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist
predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the revolutions had not gone far
enough, and had stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the
previous generation of rational religion.
The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity gave
rise, in the educated centers in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential,
passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the
gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?
Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in the West,
translated, and published so that they were more widely available. The Harvard-educated
Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own
religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have
led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed
with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.
And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will
walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A
nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine
Soul which also inspires all men."
Yes, men, but women too.
Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements,
especially anti-slavery and women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the more
radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism was a word that was invented deliberately in
France some decades later and was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the
Transcendentalists.) Why social reform, and why these issues in particular?
The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking that people
with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom than others (see some of
Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for this sentiment), also believed that at the level of the
human soul, all people had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and
knowledge and truth.
Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the ability to be
educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed. Women and African-descended
slaves were human beings who deserved more ability to become educated, to fulfill their human
potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human.