Read the brief introduction and basic assumptions completely. Jot down some notes for yourself to carry into your readings of the writers. You may also wish to skim the additional information on Transcendentalism and the American Past, the chronology and the basic tenets that Dr. Faulk has provided.

Once you have completed your reading, use the link at the bottom of the page to move to discussion. (Or, if you are doing your reading and responding at different times, simply click on the "Discussion" page.)

For the first discussion, read the poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (DiYanni 476; Abcarian & Klotz, 11) and "A noiseless patient spider" (DiYanni, 651). On the discussion page, respond to the prompt and to each other - applying what you have come to understand about transcendentalism to the poems of Whitman.

A Brief Introduction to American Transcendentalism

Ron Faulk, Ph.D.

             Arguably, the two most obvious features of the American Transcendentalists are their originality and their influence.  In originality, for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the first and remains one of the most original of all American short story writers.  Margaret Fuller was the first important feminist essayist in American.  No one has ever written a work quite like Thoreau’s Walden, a practical-spiritual meditation on man’s relationship to, and place in, the universe.  Ghandi might never have unified India, over-thrown British imperialism there and established peaceful civil disobedience as an important means of social change – later influencing Martin Luther King to galvanize the civil rights movement in America – if Thoreau had not written his essay on “Civil Disobedience.”  Emerson was a poet-prophet who did more than any other contemporary to raise the spiritual level of Americans.  He preached and wrote God-reliance, but he also emphasized the need for self-reliance.  He helped create a pragmatic-spiritual conception of the person and the citizen that has influenced Americans ever since. 

             Transcendentalism was short-lived as a movement, roughly covering the 1830’s and 40’s.  The major figures were Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller.  Lesser known figures were Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Augustus Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Charles Anderson Dana, John Sullivan Dwight, Sarah & Angelina Grimke, Sophia Peabody-Hawthorne, Frederick Henry Hedge, James Marsh, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George & Sophia Ripley, and Jones Very.

             Transcendentalism is a movement similar to, and to some extent derived from, the earlier Romantic movement in England and Europe, with, however, an American twist emphasizing self-reliance and pragmatism.  Americans, even when most idealistic, seem to have always judged ideas by their practical value; if a philosophy or even an art form does not have practical value, Americans tend to reject it. Transcendentalism, like Romanticism, comes from the arts, but widely influenced culture as a whole, including philosophy, painting (music to a lesser extent), civil rights, education, the women’s movement.  Both strive to use the language of the common man and common sense, both aim at equality and are democratically inclined, both have a strong spiritual emphasis, both are strongly individualistic, both are strongly reform oriented, both emphasize creativity and originality, both love nature, both love peace, both are unhappy with the way things are.

             Beyond these broad descriptors, Transcendentalism, like Romanticism, is difficult to define precisely.  Charles Dickens was told, on one of his visits to the U.S., that “whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental.”  This difficulty in definition arrives in part because Transcendentalism, like earlier Romanticism, represents a great shift in how we perceive ourselves and our place in the universe.  It is a way of seeing, a method of understanding, rather than a set of “isms” or “ought-tos.”  Transcendentalism sees each individual as transcending his or her time and space; we are more than animals, we are spiritual beings with a life beyond this one, and therefore, in a sense we are “strangers” to this world.  One can see, in these ideas, a strong Christian emphasis.

Transcendentalism is strongly idealistic and anti-skeptical, in the sense that it believes the human mind is much more than just the record of the sensations produced by its environment upon it, which had been the enlightenment view best promulgated by the English skeptical/empirical philosopher John Locke.  Transcendentalists believe that the mind shapes the environment, not vice versa, and, more importantly, that the mind can know absolute spiritual truths directly – can even know God.  So there is a kind of mystical quality to transcendentalism.

             As might be expected, Transcendentalism has had a wide influence on a disparate number of later American writers, including such odd bedfellows as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William James, John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway.

             Today, no one calls him or herself a “transcendentalist,” because so many Americans are imbued with what we might call the spirit of transcendentalism, reflected in the belief that wo/man is put on the earth for a reason, and that reason includes a stewardship of nature and of all our fellows under a covenant with a creator who is interested in what we do, that individual creativity and self reliance is important, that our future transcends this life, and what we do here, is somehow very important.

 The following information is from: Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 4: Early Nineteenth Century - American Transcendentalism: A Brief Introduction." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap4/4intro.html 

Basic Assumptions of Transcendentalism:

The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sensical, became the means for a conscious union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit as Atman) with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, life-force, prime mover and God (known in Sanskrit as Brahma).

Basic Premises:

1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.

2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."

3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.

4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:

a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.

b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.

Correspondence

It is a concept which suggests that the external is united with the internal. Physical or material nature is neutral or indifferent or objective; it is neither helpful nor hurtful; it is neither beautiful nor ugly. What makes one give such attributes to nature is that individual's imposition of her/his temperament or mood or psyche. If I'm feeling lousy, I may dismiss a gorgeous day; if I'm feeling bright and cheerful then the most dreary of days becomes tolerable. And so, the Transcendentalists believed that "knowing yourself" and "studying nature" is the same activity. Nature mirrors our psyche. If I cannot understand myself, may be understanding nature will help. Here is Darrel Abel's "take" on this concept:

"Since one divine character was immanent everywhere in nature and in man, man's reason could discern the spiritual ideas in nature and his senses could register impressions of the material forms of nature. To man the subject, nature the object, which shared the same divine constitution as himself, presented external images to the innate ideas in his soul. " (American Literature, Vol. 2, 1963, 4-5.)

Transcendentalism and the American Past

Transcendentalism as a movement is rooted in the American past: To Puritanism it owed its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light." It is also similar to the Quaker "inner light." However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas intuition is an act of an individual. In Unitarianism, deity was reduced to a kind of immanent principle in every person - an individual was the true source of moral light. To Romanticism it owed the concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe (deism) which is fixed and permanent.

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

Transcendentalism was a 1. spiritual, 2. philosophical and 3. literary movement and is located in the history of American Thought as

(a). Post-Unitarian and free thinking in religious spirituality
(b). Kantian and idealistic in philosophy and
(c). Romantic and individualistic in literature.

A Brief Chronology of Events

Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism:

Note : This list must not be considered to be a creed common to all transcendentalists. It is merely a grouping of certain important concepts shared by many of them.

Reasons for the Rise of American Transcendentalism

There was no one precise "cause" for the beginning of Transcendentalism. According to Paul Boller, chance, coincidence and several independent events, thoughts and tendencies seemed to have converged in the 1830s in New England. Some of these were:

Important ideas from: Warren, Robert Penn, Cleanth Brooks, and R. W. B. Lewis. "A National Literature and Romantic Individualism." in Romanticism. eds. James Barbour and Thomas Quirk. NY: Garland, 1986, 3-24.

For comments on Romanticism, go to Chap. 3

1. Transcendentalism was a philosophical, literary, social, and theological movement.

2. Its origin is traced to the relaxing of Puritan Calvinism into Unitarianism - a belief very much like Deism. From its early liberalism, Unitarianism developed, for some of the young intellectuals, into "a new orthodoxy of smug social conformity that denied the spiritual and emotional depths of experience - 'corpse-cold Unitarianism,' as Emerson was to call it." (11)

3. German and English Romanticism provided some inspiration towards the search for some deeper 'truth.'

4. "Transcendentalism represented a complex response to the democratization of American life, to the rise of science and the new technology, and to the new industrialism - to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of the relation of man to nature and to other men that was being demanded by the course of history." (11-12)

5. Influences:

a. From Plato came the idealism according to which reality subsists beyond the appearances of the world. Plato also suggests that the world is an expression of spirit, or mind, which is sheer intelligibility and therefore good.

b. From Immanuel Kant came the notion of the 'native spontaneity of the human mind' against the passive conception of the 18th c. sensational theory (also known as the philosophy of empiricism of John Locke and David Hume; the concept that the mind begins as a tabula rasa and that all knowledge develops from sensation).

c. From Coleridge came the importance of wonder, of antirationalism, and the importance of individual consciousness.

d. From Puritanism came the ethical seriousness and the aspect of Jonathan Edwards that suggested that an individual can receive divine light immediately and directly.

6. "Transcendentalism was, at its core, a philosophy of naked individualism, aimed at the creation of the new American, the self-reliant man, complete and independent." (22)

7. "The achievement of the transcendentalists has a grandeur. They did confront, and helped define, the great issues of their time, and if they did not resolve those issues, we of the late twentieth century, who have not yet resolved them, are in no position to look down our noses at their effort." (23)

Towards a Definition of Transcendentalism: A Few Comments:

(from Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of N. E. Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent, 1917)

1. "The spirit of the time is in every form a protest against usage and a search for principles." - Emerson in the opening number of The Dial.

2. "I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental." - Charles Dickens in American Notes

3. "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations." - Thoreau, Journal, V:4

4. "The word Transcendentalism, as used at the present day, has two applications. One of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical and precise. In the former sense it describes man, rather than opinions, since it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each other, but directly opposed." - Noah Porter, 1842

5. Transcendentalism is the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience." - J. A. Saxton, Dial II: 90

6. "Literally a passing beyond all media in the approach to the Deity, Transcendentalism contained an effort to establish, mainly by the discipline of the intuitive faculty, direct intercourse between the soul and God." - Charles J. Woodbury in Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson

7. "Transcendentalism was not ... speculative, but essentially practical and reformatory." - John Orr in "The Transcendentalism of New England," International Review, XIII: 390

8. "Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system. Practically it was an assertion of the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind. ... Transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a philosophy. It is more justly regarded as a gospel. As a philosophy it is ... so far from uniform, that it may rather be considered several systems than one. ... Transcendentalism was ... an enthusiasm, a wave of sentiment, a breath of mind." - O. B. Frothingham in Transcendentalism in New England, 1876

9. "The problem of transcendental philosophy is no less than this, to revise the experience of mankind and try its teachings by the nature of mankind, to test ethics by conscience, science by reason; to try the creeds of the churches, the constitution of the states, by the constitution of the universe." - Theodore Parker in Works VI: 37

10. "We feel it to be a solemn duty to warn our readers, and in our measure, the public, against this German atheism, which the spirit of darkness is employing ministers of the gospel to smuggle in among us under false pretenses." Princeton Review XII: 71

11. "Protestantism ends in Transcendentalism." - Orestes Brownson in Works, 209

12. "The fundamentals of Transcendentalism are to be felt as sentiments, or grasped by the imagination as poetical wholes, rather than set down in propositions." - Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1887, I: 248

13. "First and foremost, it can only be rightly conceived as an intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual ferment, not a strictly reasoned doctrine. It was a renaissance of conscious, living faith in the power of reason, in the reality of spiritual insight, in the privilege, beauty, and glory of life." - Frances Tiffany, "Transcendentalism: The New England Renaissance," Unitarian Review, XXXI: 111.

14. "The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. ... If there is anything grand or daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist ... is a Transcendentalist. ... Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson's lecture on "The Transcendentalist," Works I: 317-320

15. "(Transcendentalism was) a blending of Platonic metaphysics and the Puritan spirit, of a philosophy and a character ... taking place at a definite time, in a specially fertilized soil, under particular conditions." - H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism, 1908.

16. "If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist." - Charles Dickens in American Notes

Recommended resource: Boller, Paul F. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry. NY: Putnam, 1974. [B905 B64].

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

A noiseless patient spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch's forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.