AmLit – lecture notes

Transcendentalism

The emergence of Transcendentalism took place during the late 1820s and
1830s. T. is not a unitary movement but rather a fluid and often elusive
collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social
reform, and the general state of American culture. It was more a spirit and an
attitude of mind than a consciously reasoned-out theory of the world.

Transcendentalism represented a complex and incredibly influential

response to the democratization of American life in the early 19 th c., it
marked a major paradigm shift in epistemology, in conceptualizing how the
mind knows the world, the divine, and itself.

Transcendentalism is hard to define as a doctrine, a creed common to all

transcendentalists, because of its intensely individualistic nature.
Transcendentalism was, at its core, a philosophy of naked individualism,
aimed at the creation of the new American, the self-reliant man, complete
and independent. What follows is a grouping of certain important concepts
shared by many of them.

Basic Assumption:
The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sensical, became the means
for a conscious union of the individual psyche (known in Sanskrit as Atman)
with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, life-force, prime mover
and God (known in Sanskrit as Brahma).
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Basic Premises:
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual
can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the
individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This
is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a
living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-
realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal
psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to
embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the
world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to
withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.

Influences:
a. From Plato came the idealism according to which reality subsists beyond
the appearances of the world. Plato also suggests that the world is an
expression of spirit, or mind.
b. From Kant came the notion of the 'native spontaneity of the human mind'
against the passive conception of the 18th c. empiricism (also known as the
philosophy of ‘sensationalism’ of John Locke and David Hume; the concept
that the mind begins as a tabula rasa and that all knowledge develops from
sensation).
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c. From Coleridge came the importance of wonder, of antirationalism, and

the importance of individual consciousness.
d. From Puritanism came the ethical seriousness and the aspect of Jonathan
Edwards that suggested that an individual can receive divine light
immediately and directly.

To sum up, Transcendentalism is not concerned with a metaphysics that

transcends our daily lives but rather with a new view of the mind that
replaces Locke's empiricist, materialistic model with one emphasizing the
role of the mind itself in actively shaping experience. The mind can
apprehend absolute spiritual truths directly without having to go through the
detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions,
and without the labor of ratiocination.

The word “transcendental” came to be applied, in New England in

particular, to whatever in man’s mental and spiritual nature is above the
experience of the senses. Innate, original, universal, a priori, intuitive —
these are all words which convey the larger meaning of the term.

Transcendentalism centers on the divinity of each individual, but this

divinity could be discovered only if the person had the independence of
mind to do so. Transcendentalists were idealistic and optimistic, they
believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. As
Emerson says, when they learn to translate, through intuition, the external
symbols of nature, they can read the underlying spiritual facts, they
"transcend" the apparent confusion and chaos of the world and see order in
nature's design. The important thing is to allow our inner voice—our
intuition—to correctly and creatively interpret the sensory input.
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For the Transcendentalists, the human soul is part of the Oversoul or

universal spirit (or "Float", Whitman). The soul of each individual is
identical with the soul of the world, and contains, latently, all that that larger
soul contains. God can be found in both nature and human nature (Nature,
Emerson stated, has spiritual manifestations, God and Nature are merely
two aspects of a single spirit, Nature is the embodiment of spirit in the world
of sense).

Miracles are all about us - the whole world is a miracle and the smallest
creature is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of
infidels." – Whitman

More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for
this life - "the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." – Emerson.
Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a
time." – Thoreau

Transcendentalism declared meaning in everything, and all meaning was

good, part of and connected by divine plan. Emerson refuted evil, insisting it
was not an entity in itself, but simply the absence of good. If good is
introduced, evil dissipates. Light is more powerful than darkness because
one ray of light penetrates the dark.

Emphasis on self-reliance and an insistence that true reform comes from

within.
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However, anti-transcendentalists declared such optimism naïve and

unrealistic. They reflected a more pessimistic attitude, focusing on man's
uncertainty and limited potential in the universe: Nature is vast and
incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good and evil.
Humans are innately depraved and must struggle toward goodness. In fact,
goodness is actually attainable only for a few. Sin is an active force, not
merely the absence of good. Finally, because nature is the creation and
possession of God, humans cannot interpret or understand any symbolism it
may contain. Intercession between the common man and higher authority is
required in heaven and on earth.

The Transcendental Movement dramatically shaped the direction of

American literature. It meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and
forms in favour of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the
new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense
of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.

Many writers were and still are inspired by Emerson and Thoreau in
particular. Walt Whitman was not the only writer to claim that he was
"simmering, simmering, simmering" until reading Emerson brought him "to
a boil." Emily Dickinson's poetic direction was quite different, but she too
was a thoughtful reader of Emerson and Fuller.

Other writers would deliberately take their direction away from

transcendentalism, toward realism and "anti-transcendentalism" or "negative
Romanticism"; Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville found
extraordinarily creative ways to object to many aspects of their
transcendental contemporaries, even as they incorporated others. Few
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American writers since have been completely free of the influence of

Emerson’ essays and Thoreau’s Walden, whether in reaction or imitation.

Taken together, the body of Transcendentalist writings implies a theory of

language. As often, the most influential formulations are in the works of
Emerson. In his little treatise Nature (1836), Emerson posits language as
originating in names for natural objects which, through the doctrine of
correspondences, have intrinsic spiritual and symbolic significance. Thus,
every word was once a poem, or, more specifically, a metaphor, since it
combines a sensory meaning with a more intangible or psychological one,
the "natural fact" conveying a corresponding "spiritual fact." But the sensory
component of language begins to fade through use, as language entropically
drifts towards abstraction.

The truly creative writer is one who can "pierce this rotten diction and fasten
words again to visible things," liberating us from the most pervasive and
imprisoning of cultural forms, i.e. the categories of ordinary language.

This aesthetic of deconstructing conventional language to open the doors of

perception, of using fresh concrete description that at the same time has
symbolic resonance, was internalized by writers who reject any trace of
Transcendentalist metaphysics like Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos
Williams ("No ideas but in things"). It particularly shaped American poetry,
especially when joined with Emerson's rejection of traditional poetic forms
in favor of each utterance creating its own appropriate form, "a metre-
making-argument. . . a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit
of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own.", Walt Whitman
and Emily Dickinson, though in widely different ways, both created poetic
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forms that are an extension of content. Between them they helped modern
poetry find its most compelling subject in its embrace of the common, in
grasping the immediacies of our lives with a visionary intensity so that
“facts flower into truths”, in Thoreau's phrase.

Both this privileging of direct experience over coherent system-building and

this evaluation of philosophical propositions not by their truth value but by
how best they help us live were to be developed later in the century by
William James and John Dewey in America's most crucial contribution to
philosophy, Pragmatism. Both Transcendentalism and Pragmatism articulate
and conceptualize peculiarly American dispositions towards knowing, as
Daniel Boorstin writes:

"We sometimes forget how gradual was the 'discovery' of America; it was a
by-product of the occupation of the continent. To act, to move on, to explore
also meant to push back the frontiers of knowledge; this inevitably gave a
practical and dynamic character to the very idea of knowledge. To learn
and to act became one."

The Transcendentalists and Pragmatists viewed knowledge and cultural

forms not as perpetual truths but as temporary constructions, and insisted
that all such constructions be open to the tests of continuing experience, that
we put more faith in the mind's ability to order the world moment by
moment than in complete and self-enclosed systems.

For this reason Transcendentalism remains in American life less as a specific

doctrine-- no one now calls themselves a "Transcendentalist"-- than as a
presiding spirit behind many movements that resisted the dominant culture.
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Based on the foundational American assumption that the future can be better
than the past through imagination and effort, the Transcendentalists
envisioned a culture that would foster further acts of culture-making, a
community that would also liberate the individual, a way of thinking that
would also become a way of doing.

Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the

normal means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a
higher, more intuitive form of perception. According to Emerson, reason is
"the highest faculty of the soul--what we mean by the soul itself; it never
proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By contrast, "The Understanding
toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but strong-
sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the customary".

Transcendentalism, like other romantic movements, proposes that the

essential nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature,
human beings would seek the good. Society is to blame for the corruption
that mankind endures. Transcendentalism also takes the Romantic view of
man's steady degeneration from childhood to adulthood as he is corrupted by
culture: "A man is a god in ruins."