Transcendentalism was a nineteenth-century movement that had at its foundation the idealist philosophies of Greek philosopher Plato and German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Emerging out of a liberal New England Christianity, American Transcendentalism was influenced by these two thinkers and a number of writers, such as Englishmen Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. The foundation for Transcendental thought was the relation of the Deity to the individual.
Transcendentalists, as they began calling themselves in the 1830s, sought the real Deity in a Platonic ideal and made use of Kant’s idea of human intuition so that reason, in itself, could be seen as a link to the divine. Primarily known for three of its most famous contributors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, quite often portrayed as the chief Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller—Transcendentalism, as it was articulated throughout the 1830s and 1840s, deplored materialism. It was idealistic in nature and focused on innovative thought and ongoing revelation in the conscious mind as it related to the divine. In this case, nature served as a mirror to the divine. Transcendentalists lauded the intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sensual, which became the means for a conscious union of the individual psyche with the Deity.
Henry David Thoreau and American Transcendentalism
American Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that developed in New England in the mid-nineteenth century, and which continues to have an abiding influence on American thought and lifestyle to this day. The Transcendentalists believed that the universe and all life are interconnected, that humanity is essentially good, and that personal contemplation can give rise to true insight. Two major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Thoreau’s lines of thought, in particular, have had a lasting impact. Articulated in a number of works, but perhaps most notably in Walden and Civil Disobedience, these ideas have continued to permeate American popular notions of self, one’s relationship to nature, and one’s social responsibility to the present day, and helped to shape the thinking and action of many iconic American social currents, including that for civil rights, the development of the youth counterculture of the 1960s, the protests against the Vietnam War, and the Green movement.
C. Fee
Whereas Christianity sees the Deity acting on the world, Transcendentalism envisions the world in the Deity. Christianity accepts the world as the Deity made it; Transcendentalists see the whole circle of progression, and move their spirits to that. The Christian Deity requires passive acceptance; the Transcendental Deity desires active thought. According to the Transcendentalists, the Deity, or God, of Christian religion relied too much upon dogma. Like other Transcendentalists, Emerson explored other religions, coming up with a model for his own beliefs based largely on Indian gods. From reading Hindu literature, Emerson transferred an idea of God onto Brahma, one of the three Hindu gods (along with Vishnu and Shiva), arguing that Brahma is everywhere, subsisting, ultimately, in the natural world. This became the Transcendental Spirit, or Deity.
The Transcendental Deity, the foundational idea for all of Transcendentalism, was shaped largely by Emerson’s reading of both Kant and Plato. Emerson took from Plato the notion of ideal “Forms,” whereby the real world exists in reality on a higher plane, where original Forms exist as archetypes. Plato’s claim was that the sensible world is a mere copy of this real world: it is an expression, or extension, of these highest Forms. This, coupled with an understanding of Kant, brought about Emerson’s revolutionary notion of the Deity in Transcendentalism. Kant believed that the mind, with reason being the highest faculty, could reach this idealistic world. For Emerson, reason served as people’s ability to know the Deity.
Emerson’s writings built upon Transcendentalist thought, and its core tenets can be seen to some degree in most of his works. His sermon CLXII (“Lord’s Supper”) gives the background of Emerson’s religious thought, from which his ideas on the Deity were shaped. Another essay, “Water,” provides insight into Emerson’s ties with nature, as well as the importance and newly developed fascination with water for early Americans. Events and substances in nature are symbols, or mirrors, of spiritual facts. In fact, humans exist at the spiritual center of the universe, and, ultimately, the keys to this universe already exist within us. All is seen in nature. Since everything is circular, this is a copy of the universe’s relation to the Deity. The structure of nature, the universe, and everything existing within, structures itself on humans, and vice versa.
Ralph Waldo Emerson authored a number of influential essays and poems in the 1830s and 1840s, which established him as one of the most important intellectuals in the United States. In his essay “Nature” from 1836 he outlined the key elements of transcendentalism, a system of belief that depicts God as suffused throughout the natural world. (Corbis)
In understanding Transcendentalism, one must first perceive that everything begins and ends with nature, although nature is a mirror of reality. In the essay “Nature” (1836), which serves as the bedrock for understanding Transcendentalism in Emerson’s essays, the reader becomes immersed in Emerson’s theory of Transcendentalism and his notions of the Transcendentalist Deity. Here, he articulates the position of humans to Nature. For Emerson, the Deity, or “Spirit,” is a self-moving embodiment of vastness; creation begins in the self, and everything that follows is an analogy. There exists a mirror effect, where “Father” is a natural term, and everything in nature serves as a metaphor for existent things. Nature, in fact, is a mirror of the Deity: nature is a divine, moral order, a place of natural relations wherein noble acts are reflected. Every pattern in the natural world reflects a similar pattern in the spiritual world. Beauty is whole; darkness is partiality. Thus, the purpose of natural beauty is both spiritual and moral: it raises humanity to the true organization of the universe. The individual becomes a “transparent eyeball,” where the ego is dissolved into Nature upon spiritually merging with it.
Importantly, then, the unity of everything becomes intuitive, not sensory. In terms of the spiritual realized in the Over-soul (“Over-soul” [1841]), the central symbol of Transcendentalism, the Over-soul was the overarching divine concept of a link to the Deity. It served as a connection between the individual and the universal, a higher reality experienced by moments of spiritual clarity, which, for Emerson, exists in faith. The Over-soul is a higher sense of shared humanity, a “one” to which everything is related. Emerson’s definition of the Over-soul is essentially a repository, where an individual soul is allowed to break through human limitations to realize spiritual unity. Souls recycle according to this idea, and they are thought to exist outside of time and history; it is a part of the universe’s continuing wholeness.
In such a way, everything is circular, moving from the Deity to the individual. As Emerson notes in his essay “Circles” (1841), humans rest at the center of a circular universe—and humans are circular, too. The spark of God lies within us. Thus, in humans the nature of the universe can be seen, for everything is circular. In fact, the universe is mirrored in humans; human character, God’s nature, and Nature exist in fluid circles that continue to move and expand. Nature is impermanent, and individual lives and history are the same. Since humans have not come up with an adequate way to describe God, nature stands in for it.
Emerson wrote poetry as a means of modeling these ideas. He believed that poets come the closest to sharing ideas of the Deity with other humans. All of writing, history and poetry, is a record of the human mind as it grapples with these ideas. History is Nature’s biographer, but poetry is the enlightener. Poets, for Emerson, come very close to mirroring this natural beauty, stringing words together in harmonious ways. An engineer, says Emerson, sees a part of the picture; a poet sees the whole. Language reveals the analogy between nature and spirit. Poets can mirror in the naming of certain analogies, and poets can write perpetual analogies. For Emerson, the entire world is a book “written” by the Deity, and we can learn to “read” this book. Nature is a system of appearances, which we all can read—but poets do it best.
In “The American Scholar,” a speech given in 1837 to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Emerson builds upon the foundation he set in place in “Nature.” For Emerson, Nature as an entity exists as one of the three educators of the scholar, the other two being action and books. The past is a tyrant; the scholar must study the present to be free from the chains of the past. Boundless nature, argues Emerson, has no beginning or end; instead, it is a circular spiritual power always existing for itself. In this way, nature resembles the spirit, or soul, of the individual. Each soul exists individually and collectively, part of the larger web of nature.
Emerson’s “The American Scholar” addresses a fundamental spiritual crisis arising in an America on the brink of industrial explosion. To get back to reality—for Emerson, reality exists as spirituality in connection with its divine source—the American scholar must lead the way. He seeks to explain that when humans can “read” God correctly, they need no other readings or teachings.
Transcendentalism was, some have argued, a religious movement for the new American, a self-reliant individual capable of a brand of individualism linked with the divine. Ultimately, the Transcendentalist Deity symbolized a unity of life and the universe, a relationship between all things, spiritual and material, and their connections to the individual. The individual, in turn, had intuitive faith in this connection, for no organized religion could communicate it; true knowledge came from within. Emerson hoped that this American spirit would continue in people’s minds and hearts and be passed along, so that a truly unique and more spiritual generation of Americans might flourish.
Michael Modarelli
See also Great Spirit; Myths
Walden Pond
Thoreau’s work Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) was to prove an inspiration to generations of Americans who wanted to follow a simpler, more deliberate life. The cabin that Thoreau built at Walden Pond was to prove iconic, and even today the site draws thousands of visitors a year. Thoreau went to the cabin at Walden Pond because he wished to live “deliberately,” in his term, close to nature and entirely on his own. Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from July 1845 through September 1847. Thoreau’s experience drew together threads of the American sense of self as a self-reliant loner and wove them into a coherent philosophy that was deeply imbued with love of and respect for the natural world. This has continued to be a force in American thought for nearly two centuries, and it was a motive force in the development of the modern environmental movement. Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was a touchstone of the 1960s counterculture, as evidenced by the fact that the initial iteration of Doonesbury, the archetypal comic of the Baby Boomer generation, was set first at Walden College and then at Walden Commune.
C. Fee
Further Reading
Lewis, Jone Johnson. 2009. Ralph Waldo Emerson—Texts website. http://www.emersoncentral.com/. Accessed July 18, 2015.
Myerson, Joel, et al., eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robinson, David, ed. 2003. The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings. Boston: Beacon Press.
Van Leer, David. 1986. Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press.
“The Web of American Transcendentalism.” Website of Texas A & M University. http://transcendentalism.org/index.html. Accessed May 5, 2015.