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Transcendentalism

This article is about the 19th-century American movement. For other uses, see Transcendence (disambiguation).
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Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.

Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States;[4] it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past transcendentalists. Its rise was a protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.[5] The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume",[1] and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.[6][7]

  1. ^ a b c Goodman, Russell (2015). "Transcendentalism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 2010-07-11. Retrieved 2007-11-07. "Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson."
  2. ^ Wayne, Tiffany K., ed. (2006). Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. Facts On File's Literary Movements. ISBN 9781438109169. Archived from the original on 2024-02-08. Retrieved 2016-10-16.
  3. ^ "Transcendentalism". Merriam Webster. 2016. Archived from the original on 2022-01-28. Retrieved 2016-10-17."a philosophy which says that thought and spiritual things are more real than ordinary human experience and material things"
  4. ^ Coviello, Peter. "Transcendentalism" The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 23 Oct. 2011
  5. ^ Finseth, Ian. "American Transcendentalism". Excerpted from "Liquid Fire Within Me": Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early Evangelicalism, 1820–1860, – M.A. Thesis, 1995. Archived from the original on 16 April 2013. Retrieved 18 April 2013.
  6. ^ Miller 1950, p. 49.
  7. ^ Versluis 2001, p. 17.