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Transcendentalism Transcendentalism is philosophical and literary movement that existed in New England in nineteenths century. Transcendentalism was originated in among group of people who were against traditional Calvinist views. Immanuel Kant was the one who actually produced ideas from which transcendentalism was developed. Transcendentalism was not a systematic philosophy; it had some basic ideas that were generally shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is immanent in man and nature and that persons intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of any authority. In American literature the ideas of Transcendentalism were developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson's works such as Self-Reliance (1841) and The Over Soul (1841) fully reflected transcendental beliefs of the author. Another famous American transcendentalist writer was Henry David Thoreau, whose book Walden (1854) was regarded as a flight from reality, and his individualism was equated with asocial behavior. American transcendental movement began with meetings of writers and philosophers that led to creation of Transcendental Club. The American landscape inspired the Transcendentalists reverence for nature, which provided them with much of the sustaining language and metaphor of their philosophy.
Among the chief proponents of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded as its central figure and catalyzing force. Critics often cite his essay Nature and An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College as touchstones of the movement. His subsequent essays, journals, and poems are credited with giving further shape to its ideals. Emerson was also an important inspiration to such authors as Walt Whitman, who, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe, were strongly influenced by Transcendentalism (Mullen and Wilson 1). Perhaps the best known and most influential of Emerson's immediate disciples is Henry David Thoreau, noted for his book Walden; or Life in the Woods, which has been regarded as a nature study, spiritual autobiography, and philosophical abstract, for his Civil Disobedience, a seminal essay outlining peaceful social protest. Thoreau was sent to jail for not paying taxes, and this famous and influential essay is the result of that gesture.
If the demands of a government of a society are contrary to an individuals conscience, it is his / her duty to reject them. Thoreau's main emphasis is on the simplifications and enjoyment of life now. Literary scholars and philosophers, though employing various methods in the study of Transcendentalism, are unanimous in regarding Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers, not just writers and poets. Transcendentalists and their contemporaries, Poe and Melville, to see Emerson's influence in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and in the works of 20 th century American authors Thornton Wilder, J. D.
Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Gardner, to mention but a few. A typically romantic idealization of nature went side by side with an understanding that nature was a result of the interaction of physical and chemical forces in the endless space and endless time. This double consciousness helped Emerson to change focus and study phenomena from different viewpoints. In one of his early lectures, Mans Relation To the World, he spoke of a wonderful consistency of nature, its perfect structure into which all parts (including man) fit well.
Emerson assessed mans actions and the activity of human community from the point of view of their consistency with the laws of nature. This was a very early anticipation of the principles of Social Darwinism. Emerson's Naturphilosophie had features of pantheism and mysticism, and at the same time contained ideas consistent with progressive theories of nature of the mid- 1850 s. It marked a stage in the development of American philosophic thought from the metaphysical materialism of the beginning of the 19 th century to the dialectical idealism of the Transcendentalists to the positivism of the end of the century.
Emerson believed in order to comprehend the divine, God, and the universe, one must transcend or go beyond the physical and emotional descriptions of normal human thought. With that philosophy, Emerson became the leader of philosophers and writers termed Transcendentalist. His essay Nature, is considered the gospel of American Transcendentalism. Emerson separated the universe into two primary categories, nature and soul, and constantly sought to elucidate the interrelations of both.
Mans key to these relations, what Emerson called analogies, was individual intuition, which cannot fail because it is necessarily and originally linked to the universal spirit. Emerson's Transcendentalism thus proposed a resolution of the duality that defines the human condition through the powers of human intuition. The ideas of the leading Transcendentalist are not just a matter of academic interest and scholarly pursuit. Being essentially American, he is also universal, as any great writer and philosopher is. Emerson's legacy may prove helpful.
The Concord sage did not give the final answers to fundamental questions of being, but he showed methods of enquiry and ways of conducting spiritual quests. In this we see his modernity and his universality as a thinker, a man, whose reputation (to use his words) has no parallax. The American Transcendentalist are considered visionaries in their attitudes toward such issues as social protest, equality of the sexes, creative and participatory education for children, and labor reform. The Transcendentalism movement is acknowledged as having infused American literature with its own distinctive character. The authors of what has been called the Renaissance period, including Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Dickinson, were immensely influenced by American Transcendentalism in style, theme, and thought.
They were not the creators they believed themselves, but they were unconscious prophets of a true state of society; one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it; but they were described of that which is really being done. Bibliography: Mullen, Janet and Wilson, Robert Thomas, ed. Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism. New York: Gale Research Company, 1989. Cavell, S. , In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines in Skepticism and Romanticism.
Chicago & London, 1988 Van Leer, D. , Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays. Cambridge, 1986. Emerson, R. W. , Complete Works Vol. 3.
Boston: Riverside Edition, 1883 - 1893. Robinson, D. , Emerson and The Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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Research essay sample on Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau
