Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a series of new ideas that flourished among writers and philosophers in New England during the 19th century. The concept of transcendentalism was a state of being that was beyond the reach or comprehension of experience. These ideas centered on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, an innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic.

The original concepts of transcendentalism came from Europe, but were also influenced by old Indian texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, Chinese ideas of Confucius, the teachings of Buddha, and work by the Muslim Sufis. Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) paid much tribute to the ideas that came from Vedic thought.

These traditions were merged with Platonism and Neoplatonism by British writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), as well as the Swedish thinker and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and the German philosophical mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Some of the ideas came from Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who coined the phrase in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) when he wrote, “I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori.” Other ideas were synthesized from a number of German philosophers.

Although transcendentalism in Europe had been an abstract philosophical concept, in New England, especially in Concord, Massachusetts, it was a liberating philosophy which drew from the Romantic movement. It encouraged the adaptation of ideas from Europe and elsewhere to form what became from about 1830 until 1855 as a battle between the younger and older generations in the United States over the emergence of a [Page 1767]national cultural identity based around intrinsic American concepts.

The main people represented in the idea of transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–76), James Freeman Clarke (1810–88), Margaret Fuller (1810–50), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–94) and Henry David Thoreau. Others connected with the movement included Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), the younger W.E. Channing (1780–1842), W.H. Channing (1810–84), Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–92), Theodore Parker (1810–60) and George Ripley (1802–80). Julia Ward was on the fringes of the group as were others like Jones Very (1813–80).

Although the ideas of the transcendentalists were being formed in the early 1830s, it was the publication of the essay “Nature,” by Emerson that proved to be the catalyst for the movement. The Transcendentalist Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, opened on September 8, 1836, with Emerson, George Putnam, and Frederick Henry Hedge as members. The height of transcendentalism saw Emerson and Fuller establish The Dial in 1840. It was a “little magazine” that was published until 1844 and contained many of the best writings by minor transcendentalists.

In 1841, Brook Farm was established as a cooperative community near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, nine miles from Boston. There George Ripley and others from the Transcendentalist Club tried to apply their social, religious, and political theories to a farm of 200 acres called the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture. It came under the influence of Albert Brisbane, a prominent Fourierist, and was renamed the Brook Farm Phalanx. However, the idea finally collapsed in October 1847, and the group was dissolved.

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