Presentation Outline
Historical Background
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The Mexican War
Definition
TRANSCENDENTALISM was a movement for religious renewal, literary innovation, and social transformation.
Its ideas were grounded in the claim that divine truth could be known intuitively. Based in New England and existing
in various forms from the 1830s to the 1880s, transcendentalism is usually considered the principal expression of
romanticism in America.
Figures
Many prominent ministers, reformers, and writers of the era were associated with it, including Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Theodore Parker (1810–
1860), Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Orestes Brownson (1803–1876).
Details
Ethymology
The name of transcendentalism movement was derived from Kant's philosophical term. Immanuel Kant, argued that
sense data were structured by the mind according to certain "transcendental" categories (such as space, time, and
cause and effect), which did not inhere in the data, but in the mind itself. The transcendentalists liked the Kantian
approach, which gave the mind, not matter, ultimate control over the shape of human experience.
Charachteristics
These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the
senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition. In this school of thought, God was not remote
and unknowable; believers understood God and themselves by looking into their own souls and by feeling their own
connection to nature.
Development
.
Transcendentalism emerged from Unitarianism, or "liberal Christianity"—an anti-Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian,
(The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (from Latin trinitas "triad", from trinus "threefold")[1] defines God as three
consubstantial persons,[2]expressions, or hypostases:[3] the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit; "one
God in three persons") anticreedal offshoot of Puritanism that had taken hold among the middle and upper classes
of eastern Massachusetts. The founders of transcendentalism were Unitarian intellectuals who came of age, or
became Unitarians, in the 1820s and 1830s. From Unitarianism the transcendentalists took a concern for self-
culture, a sense of moral seriousness, a neo-Platonic concept of piety, a tendency toward individualism, a belief in
the importance of literature, and an interest in moral reform. They looked to certain Unitarians as mentors,
especially the great Boston preacher William Ellery Channing. Yet transcendentalists came to reject key aspects of
the Unitarian worldview, starting with their rational, historical Christian apologetic.
Nonetheless, Unitarians held that only "objective" evidence could prove Jesus had delivered an authoritative
revelation from God.
Transcendentalists rejected as "sensual" and "materialistic" Unitarianism's Lockean assumptions about the mind,
and were inspired instead by German philosophical idealism
The most famous transcendentalist magazine was the Dial (1840–1844), edited by Fuller and then by Emerson; other
major periodicals associated with the movement included the Boston Quarterly Review (1838–1842), edited by
Brownson, and the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847–1850), edited by Parker.
A number of transcendentalist ministers established experimental churches to give their religious ideas institutional
form.
Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the
skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of
their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson's words, “an
original relation to the universe” (O, 3). Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in
their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of
Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
Intuitionism also affected the transcendentalist approach to social and political problems.
Transcendentalists believed laws should be disobeyed if moral intuition held them to be unjust.
More broadly, the transcendentalists held that inspiration was blunted by social conformity, which therefore must
be resisted.
Transcendentalists also came to criticize existing social arrangements, which they thought prevented individual
spiritual development. There were calls and attempts to change what were seen as oppressive economic structures.
The transcendentalists saw slavery as inherently wrong because it crushed the spiritual development of slaves.
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