fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

Transcendentalism DefinedThough closely related to the English and European Romanticmovement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.the philosophy called Transcendentalism that gained a largefollowing in New England during the early 1830’s was notmerely an American restatement of Romantic ideas. Rather,it was the combining of these ideas with existing elements ofAmerican belief, The result was a philosophical movement inmany ways similar to that which had occurred in Englandand Germany, but at the same time different. The Romanticmovement, in holding with the individual worth and goodnessof humanity, glorifying the pleasures of communion withnature, condemning society for its distracting and corruptingmaterialism, and urging individual freedom of expressionfreedomfrom the rules and constraints of earlier philosophiesand theologies— appealed to a country beginning to chafe atthe restrictions of an already declining Puritanism.The term Transcendentalism is not itself an invention of theNew England Transcendentalists; the German philosopherImmanuel Kant (1724—1804) had used it In his writing. Toits New England advocates the term came to embody thecentral idea of their philosophy.’ that there is some knowledgeof reality, or truth, that man grasps not through logic orthe laws of science but through the intuition of his divineintellect. Because of this inherent, extra-intellectual ability,the Transcendentalists believed that each person should followthe sway of his own beliefs and ideas, however divergentfrom the social norm they might be. They believed that theindividual’s intuitive response to any given situation wouldbe the right thing for him to do. Closely related to this ideais that of the integrity of the individual, the belief that eachperson is inherently good, capable of making his own decisions,and worthy of the respect of every other human being. Theseideas found a sympathetic response among a people who hadlong held in high regard the democratic and individualisticprinciples of the early settler, statesman, and citizen.Inevitably, these ideas were to clash with the doctrinesof organized religion. An earlier group of New Englandintellectuals broke away from Puritanism and founded theUnitarian Church during the late eighteenth century. Theirspilt with the established church was in a large part due tothe intellectual and commercial trends of the age. In a daywhen commerce and science had become predominant,where material comfort and social mobility were becomingincreasingly accessible to more and more people, the oldreligion—Puritanism-must have indeed seemed irrelevant.By the 1830’s the Unitarians, yesterday’s rebels, had becomeBoston’s establishment, dominating the city’s intellectualcenters, both the church and Harvard UniversityIronically, Emerson as well as many other earlyTranscendentalists began their careers as divinity students.studying at the latter institution for the Unitarian minister.Many of these people were, in fact, the children of influentialmembers of the Unitarian church. The former rebels, Boston’seconomic, social, political, and cultural elite, found themselvesby the early 1830’s embroiled in yet another intellectualinsurrection, though this time it was they who were underattack.Transcendentalists like Emerson did not limit their attackssolely to questions of theology, but went beyond churchissues to the very fabric of society itself. To them, sterility inreligion had its analogues in both public and private life. Theybelieved that rationalism, the philosophy from which modernscience had sprung, denied the profound sense of mysterythat these thinkers found in both nature and humanity. Theyfelt that current thought had reduced God to a watchmakerwho once having built and wound the Universe now sat backand detachedly observed, The individual in this scheme waslikewise reduced, as Thoreau said, “to a cog” or wheel in thisuniversal machine, Social conformity, materialism, and whatthey believed to be a lack of moral commitment angered theseyoung men and women. In addition to their writings, theirbeliefs found expression in various movements: feminism,abolitionism, utopianism and communalism, and even thebeginnings of labor unionism.In their opposition to the rationalistic tendencies of their age,the Transcendentalists adopted a type of philosophy besttermed Idealism, Actually, Transcendentalism incorporatesrates elements from many philosophies and religions; NeoPlatonism, Puritan mysticism, Hinduism, Pantheism, andEuropean Romanticism, to name but a few, Unlike therationalists, idealists believe that material objects do nothave a real existence of their own. Rather, these objects arediffused parts or aspects of God, the Over-Soul, Materialobjects therefore mirror or reflect an ideal world. Thus, bycontemplating objects in nature, the individual can transcendthis world and discover union with God and the Ideal. The keyinnate quality used by the individual to achieve this state ofunion is his intuition, Intuition is granted every soul at birth.Tangential to this belief is reincarnation, for at death idealistsbelieve that the individual’s soul returns to its source, God,where it maybe again dispatched to this world as another life.Transcendentalism greatly influenced the course of Americanliterature, affecting the writings of both those who adhered toits principles and those who reacted against them.215