Transcendentalism

From Self-Culture to Nonconformity

Liberal Unitarians in New England in the first decades of the nineteenth century had challenged lingering Calvinist doctrines of original sin and human depravity. The Reverend William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) in 1828 had preached the liberating concept of man's “likeness to God” and encouraged lifelong dedication to “self-culture.” Transcendentalism emerged in the mid-1830s as a further expression of disaffection with the constraining cultural and spiritual legacy of the previous generation. The little book Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) became the most influential of several books published in 1836 that called for philosophical, religious, and educational reform. We are smothered by the past, Emerson declared, because of our timid, misplaced reverence for institutions and tradition. “Why,” he asked, “should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (Myerson 2000, p. 125). In his address to graduates of the Divinity School at Harvard in 1838, Emerson challenged the prospective ministers to avoid rote preaching and to realize the power of their calling by “convert[ing] life into truth” (Myerson 2000, p. 239); his appeal was seen by the scandalized Harvard establishment and other social conservatives as an act of “infidelity.” “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson's most famous essay, cemented his reputation as the champion of individualism: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string”; “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Myerson 2000, pp. 320, 321).

Henry D. Thoreau (1817–1862), an admirer of Emerson, brought nonconformity squarely into the political arena in “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience,” 1849). Thoreau had been arrested and confined for one night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that, he argued, promoted the war against Mexico as a means to expand slave territory. The age had seen the rise of the Jacksonian common man, but Thoreau warned that democracy fostered conformity and tended to crush minority voices. The individual, he insisted, must never concede matters of conscience or moral principle to the majority or to the state, which at best can be trusted to act according to simple expediency. His classic essay—which has inspired such reformers as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—shows that transcendental individualism is not an anarchic stance but a morally demanding position with strong social implications.

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