transcendentalism 5 paragraph essay

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist as well as the foremost representative of the transcendentalist movement of the early to mid-19th century. Known mostly for his essays Self-Reliance , The American Scholar , and Nature , he was also a major poet, although he did not consider himself one.

His works not only inspired writers of his own generation (e.g. Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne) but also authors of the 20th century such as Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, and Ralph Waldo Ellison. His home in Concord, Massachusetts, became a haven for many young "like-minded New Englanders."

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 25 May 1803, the second of five surviving sons; three other siblings died in childhood. When he was eight, his father, a Unitarian minister, died, leaving his family in poverty, often on the brink of starvation. These early years of poverty would foster in Emerson a streak of independence visible in his essays and poetry. To survive, his mother ran a boardinghouse but was determined that her sons would receive a good education. At the age of nine, Emerson attended the Boston Public Latin School. His years at Harvard (1817-1821) were seen as frugal, industrious, and undistinguished.

In 1825, he attended the Harvard Divinity School to study theology. The years 1826-1827 were spent outside Boston recovering from tuberculosis. With his health restored, he began preaching, and in 1829, he was ordained a Unitarian minister at Boston Second Church, but he soon realized that church life was not to his liking, especially the daily mundane duties of a minister. His contempt began to grow and become more serious. He became skeptical of Christianity , developing a faith "greater in individual moral sentiment than revealed religion " (Norton, 1104).

Tour of Europe & Lecturing

Around 1831, having read the works of the English philosopher and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Emerson underwent an intense religious experience. In 1832, he notified the church that he had grown skeptical of the validity of the Lord's Supper and would no longer administer it. He believed that the God he had found in his consciousness had little need for dogma and rituals. He also believed that the Christ that once had moved him was not a God that had come to earth. Emerson had grown to totally reject the church's institutional life and their claims to a unique revelation. Although he had the support of members of his congregation, he resigned from his position.

The following year he left Boston and went on a tour of England and the continent, needing to recover from his young wife's death . In 1829, he married Ellen Tucker, who had died of tuberculosis 16 months later. The trip was not only an attempt to recover from Ellen's death but also a chance to come to terms with his faith. While in Europe, he listened to Coleridge speak and heard William Wordsworth (1770-1850) read his poetry. He visited the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), with whom he became life-long friends.

After returning from Europe, he turned his attention to a need to earn an income. He turned to lecturing across New England on ethical and cultural subjects. Over time, he would expand his circuit to include the Midwest. Mead wrote that Emerson's journals, which he had kept since college, provided him with the necessary source of material for his lectures as his prose style was very close to the oral rhetoric of his lectures. Although Ellen's legacy had provided him with a steady source of income, he continued to write.

Writing & Transcendentalism

The majority of his writing was done from 1835 to 1865. After marrying Lydia Jackson in 1836, he moved to Concord. In 1836, he published Nature , confirming his future as a prose writer. Published anonymously, Nature did not reach a wide audience. As a poet, he was considered to be one "who used the materials of other areas and disciplines to provide colors for his palette" ( Essays , 21). Regarding his essays, he is said to have had a gift for "reducing a whole chapter of experiences to a single sentence" (22). Robert Mead in his Literature of the American Nation claimed that his prose was always close to that of a lecture. At the heart of Emerson's influence on the writers of his own time was a body of ideas that became known as transcendentalism. Although not a coherent philosophy , it was a state or attitude of the mind. It was a belief in the divinity of human nature. All of these ideas were held together by Emerson's "practical wisdom about life … and the optimism of his personality" (Mead, 89).

Transcendentalism has been called by some as the "flowering of the Puritan spirit" (Morison, 526) Others, however, disagree with this assessment and contend that the transcendentalists were revolting against Yankee Puritanism. Some saw transcendentalism as extreme individualism while to others it was passionate sympathy for the poor and oppressed. They spoke out for a changing mood in the young republic's spiritual life, and some so it as the "first outcry of the heart against the materialistic pressures of a business civilization " (Miller, ix). The transcendentalists championed both individualism and self-reliance as well as a belief in human intuition, which enabled the discovery of truth without reference to dogma or established authority. To Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists, God dwelt in nature and thereby in the human mind. Emerson's love of nature is most evident in his essay Nature , where he contended that nature is infused with the divine or God. It was a philosophical and literary reaction against the Unitarian intellectualism of the times. (Morris, 704)

In The American Scholar , Emerson spoke of the need for scholarly leadership to escape the " muses of Europe" and develop an American character. The essay was initially a Phi Beta Kappa commencement address at Harvard College in 1837 and has been called an "American intellectual declaration of independence ." (Mead, 97) In the audience was the future essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). According to Emerson, the first thing of importance to a scholar is the influence of nature. Next, he must recognize and accept the influence of the past, its literature and arts. The best source of the past is books. Books are the best of things when used well but the worst when abused. Emerson pointed out that the scholar has duties: guiding men by showing them the facts amidst appearances. A scholar must take upon himself all the contributions of the past, the present, and the future. The scholar is the young man "now crowding to the barriers for a career, do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him" (Norton, 1147). Emerson ended by saying: "We will walk on our own feet, we will work with our own hands, we will speak with our own minds" ( ibid ).

The following year, Emerson was invited to return to Harvard and address the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Published as a pamphlet the following day, he lectured on the state of Christianity. He told the class that Christianity was lost and the ills of the church were manifest. His comments were not well received, and he was attacked for heresy. He was banned from giving any further addresses at Harvard for three decades.

In 1841, he published his Essays, which earned him a lasting reputation in both the United States and Europe. Among the essays was Self-Reliance, in which Emerson wrote about the need for an individual to be independent and non-conformist. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance and that imitation is suicide that he must take for himself, for better, for worse, as his portion" (Norton, 1160), He added, "Trust thyself." An individual must accept the place that "divine Providence" has found for him ( ibid ). Emerson claimed that society has a conspiracy against its members where the individual has to surrender his liberty and must conform. But Emerson stressed non-conformity. "Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist" (Norton, 1162). Society does not like a non-conformist. Emerson believed: "What I must do is all that concerns me not what the people think" ( ibid ). A person will always find those who think they know what is best, but one must be consistent: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statemen and philosophers and diviners" (Norton, 1164). With self-reliance change would be necessary, changes in religion, education, pursuits, and modes of living. "Trust in yourself, never imitate ... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." (Norton, 1176)

In the late 1840s, he began to write less and less and immersed himself in the political and social issues of the day. The two decades prior to the American Civil War (1861-65) were a period of dramatic change, and Emerson did not shy away from controversy. He protested President Martin Van Buren's (1837-1841) treatment of the Cherokee nation's forced march westward (1830-1850), a trek known as the Trail of Tears. Like Thoreau, he opposed the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In a lecture in March 1854, he said: "… the Fugitive Slave Law did much to unglue the eyes of men and now the Nebraska bill leaves us staring. The Anti-Slavery Society will add new members this year" ( Essays , 1216).

For the remaining years of his life, Emerson faded from public view; the years of toil and travel had taken its toll on him. In 1866, he penned Terminus . In the poem's first few lines, he speaks of old age:

It is time to be old, To take in sail; The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said "No More!" (Mead, 95)

He died in Concord on 27 April 1882. He has been called the father of American literature.

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Bibliography

• Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Lewis Mumford (editor). Essays and Journals. International Collectors Library, 1968.
• Levine, Robert S. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
• Mannion, James. Essential Philosophy. Adams Media.
• Mead, Robert D. Literature of the American Nation. Signet, 1976.
• Miller, Perry. The American Transcendentalists, Their Prose and Poetry. Doubleday & Company, INC.
• Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People, Vol. 2. Oxford University Press.
• Morris, Richard B. Encyclopedia of American History. Collins Reference, 1996.

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Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. This is David Taylor, and I'm here to talk to you today about this thing right here. The five-paragraph essay. The five-paragraph essay goes by a lot of different names. Some of them you've probably heard. Let's see. You could call it the basic essay. You could call it the academic essay. You could call it the 131 essay, and that 131 is going to be important for us in just a moment. But no matter what name you call it, no matter what name you've heard about it, there's one name that I want you to remember and to use throughout this lesson, and that name is the easy essay. Because once I show you these three formulas for this five-paragraph essay, you're going to know that it's something that is easy for you to write and easy for you to deploy and use in all your other courses. Not that everything that you write in life is only going to have five paragraphs. That's not the point. The point is you're learning something basic that can be applied in various permutations in a variety of courses. So let's talk about the five-paragraph essay and talk about the three formulas that I'm going to give to you to produce the five-paragraph essay. And that first formula is the magic of three. You know, three has an important place in our culture, kind of a magic place in our culture, whether it's something like the three little pigs or the three wishes that you get from a genie or sayings like three times a charm or three strikes you're out. Three seems to have an important place in human memory. And we're going to use that important place and the role it plays in human memory to help create our five-paragraph essay. And this is how we're going to do it. Let's pretend that you're given, oh, a general topic like this one. What are the essential characteristics of a good parent? Okay, before you do anything else, you apply the magic of three. Boom. One, two, three. In other words, you're going to come up with three things and three things only. Sure, there are more than three characteristics of good parents, let's hope. But the point is, when writing this five-paragraph essay, you're going to limit yourself to three. And they can be the three you consider most important. Something like patience. Something like respect. Something like unconditional love. Again, there can be more, but limit yourself to three. Let's take another kind of topic. Let's take a more controversial topic. Something like, should women in the military be given front-line combat duties? Very controversial. You're going to read about it. You're going to talk about it. You're going to listen to your professor lecture on it. You're going to consult sources on it. And after you do all that, you still do one thing and one thing only. One, two, three. You come up with a position, because you've got to have a position. That's what being in college is all about. You're able to take a position, state an opinion, and then support it in a logical, acceptable way. And we're going to do it with three main points. Our three main points could be something like, well, the first reason would be women can be assigned to combat is equality. The second reason is their great teamwork. Or the third reason is their proven courage. Now, if you notice something repetitious there, and you're asking yourself, wait a minute, is this repetition good? The answer is yes, it is very good. Because although something might seem repetitious when it's close together in these sentences, remember, these are your main points. And they're going to be separated by paragraphs. So by the time your reader looks at them, they're not going to seem repetitious at all. As a matter of fact, they're going to seem clever. They're going to seem like a student who really knows how to organize an essay, and more importantly, use certain kinds of words, first, second, and third, to signal organization to their reader. So in this case, repetition is a manifest good thing. Okay, let's take one more topic, an academic topic. Why do so many students fail to complete their college degree? What are you going to do? Boom. One, two, three. And you're going to use that formula. That's something like, well, first, students often. Second, many students cannot. Third, third students find that, you see what I'm saying? No matter what the topic is, general, controversial, academic, you're going to apply one, two, three, and you're going to apply the repetition of those words to signal your structure. And that's called the academic expository essay structure. Fill it in with whatever you came up with in your reading, in your thinking, in your discussion, in listening to your professor. Fill in with whatever you want to, but use the structure. Okay, that's secret number one. Now let's go to the next secret, and that secret is the essay formula for the thesis. Every essay has to have a thesis, and a thesis can be written with a formula. You know, these thesis statements sound kind of intimidating. They go by names like controlling idea, overall point, the position statement. Okay, fine, position statement, fine. But you know what? They're all the same thing. They're all your opinion on the topic. Your position on the topic. And more importantly, there's a very set formula for producing that position on your topic, that thesis statement. Let's go over that formula. First, you take a topic that we've already looking at, that we've already seen, and then you add to it your position or your opinion. Remember, you've got to have one in college, and you have to be able to defend it. And then you put those two together, and you will get your thesis. Let's take an example. Let's take a topic we've already used. What are the essential characteristics of a good parent? There's our topic. We know our opinion on that topic. It was patience, respect, and love. All you have to do is add those two things together, and you get your thesis. The essential characteristics of a good parent are patience, respect, and love. You see how simple it is? Add together the words of the topic with the words of your opinion equals your thesis statement. Now here, it just so happened our opinion contained our three main points, and that's great. When it happens, don't avoid it. Don't resist it. Go with it. But there are other ways of doing it. Let's take a more broad, general way of doing it with this topic. Let's say in this topic, we're going to have, should women be assigned combat duties in the military? Again, you do your reading. You do your discussion. You do your note-taking. You listen to your professor, and you come up with an opinion. You say, yes, they deserve it. That's a position, and that's a great position to have. And that is your opinion. And now, and you're allowed your opinion, and now all you have to do is support it. But before you do that, let's put together the topic with your position into the thesis statement. Thesis, and that would be women deserve front-line combat duties in the military. See what you did? The topic. Should women be assigned? Yes, they should. They deserve it. And we added those two together, and we got our thesis statement. Now comes those three main points that we came up with earlier. They deserve it because of equality, because of teamwork, and because of their courage. So that's how it works. Now, for the thesis statement, it's a simple matter of adding the topic to your position into a single sentence equaling your thesis. Now, one last formula that I want to show you. And that formula is the 1-3-1 outline. What does the 1-3-1 outline look like? It looks exactly like this. One paragraph for your introduction, three paragraphs for your body. And remember, you can have more than three sometimes, but we're just playing with three. And then one paragraph for your conclusion. 1-3-1. Looks like we're doing the YMCA song at a wedding. Now, the main points and the main sentences that we've been coming up with go in special places in this outline. The first is the thesis statement. Let's remind ourselves of our topic. What are the essential characteristics of a good parent? Remember our thesis. Look where we're going to put that thesis. We're going to put it as the last sentence of that introduction paragraph. Why? Because it is the purpose of the introduction paragraph to introduce the thesis. Not the entire essay. Most people think the introduction paragraph introduces the essay. Not really. The introduction paragraph's purpose is to lead up to, provide context to, and then provide a position for the thesis statement. And it's the thesis statement that acts as the umbrella or the introduction to the entire essay. So that's why you want to put that thesis statement as the last sentence of your introduction or near the last sentence of your introduction. Now, as far as those three main points, you put those three main points as the three topic sentences or three first sentences of your three body paragraphs. And there they are. The first, the second, and the third essential characteristics. Patience, respect, and love. So, your three main points become your three main topic sentences of your three body paragraphs. And then at the end, you're going to have a conclusion. Conclusion, you revisit your thesis in a special way, kind of telling the overall importance of what you've written. So, those are the three formulas. The magic of three, always come up with three somethings. Three reasons. Three causes. Three effects. Three whatevers. The second formula was to produce that thesis statement, combine your topic plus your position on that topic, combine them into one sentence, and it's your thesis sentence. And then the last formula you see, the one, three, one outline. And once you've got that outline, and once you've got the thesis statement stated in the introduction, you've got your three main points in your three body paragraphs, all you've got to do is fill it in with your intelligence, your words, your thoughts, your opinions. Follow those three formulas, and you'll be producing a good, tight, organized essay. Okay, good luck on them, and I'll talk to you later.

Virtual Gilman Writing Workshop - Getting Started on the Three Essays!

Wednesday, September 11, 2024 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Online Faculty, Staff, Students

Gilman Program Application Is Now Open ! 

NOW is the time to start on your essays by opening an application account in the IIE Gilman portal.  You will want to work closely with Katie Jones, the Graduate Assistant in the Fellowships Office and Dr. Brenda Tooley, who leads the GVSU Fellowship Office. In this Virtual Workshop, we will go over the three required essays, talking about the prompts for each. 

You’ll want to copy us on your google doc drafts of your essays – just use my gmail address, [email protected] (we work just like the Writing Center). Definitely DO NOT WAIT until the last minute to begin working on your essays! 

What is the IIE Gilman International Scholarship? It is a US State Department fellowship for US students who are Pell recipients to help defray the cost of undergraduate study abroad. Here is the Gilman blurb:

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means (Pell recipients) to study or intern abroad, providing awards of up to $5,000 for study-abroad programs. The program aims to encourage students to study and intern in a diverse array of countries or areas and world regions. The program also encourages students to study languages, especially critical need languages (those deemed important to national security by adding a supplement of up to $3,000 for intensive language study of designated critical need languages). Are you planning to study abroad? Are you eligible for the IIE Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship? Join us to learn more about the application process!

AM I ELIGIBLE?

-  I am a U.S. citizen.

-  I am a GVSU undergraduate  in good standing  (not on probation; with no conduct violations).  Spring/Summer Applicants can walk at April graduation but their degree cannot be conferred until after they complete their study abroad program.

-  I am eligible for the  Pell Grant .    Not sure?  Ask  GVSU Financial Aid Office .

OR  —  dependent child of an active-duty military member(s) during the time of application . Parent/guardian must serve in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, or Coast Guard. Applicant must currently receive any type of Title IV federal financial aid. Study abroad program must meet all other Gilman eligibility. The  Gilman-McCain Scholarship uses the same application as the Gilman Scholarship .

Thinking about study abroad? Receive up to $5,000 to go abroad as a college student if you’re a U.S. citizen and Federal Pell Grant recipient! If you’re studying a critical need language in a country in which the language is predominantly spoken, you can apply for the supplemental Critical Need Language Award of up to $3,000. If you’re interested in conducting STEM-related research while studying or interning abroad, you could receive an additional $1,000 by applying for the STEM Supplemental Award.

The application closes October 10! Learn more at Gilman Scholarship Program - Study Abroad with a Gilman Scholarship . And see Application Overview - Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship (gilmanscholarship.org) for an overview of the application process!

And this is ONLY ONE of MANY fellowship opportunities that help with the costs of study abroad - others include IIE Freeman-Asia, Phi Kappa Phi, Bridging (for study in Japan), Watanabe (for year-long study in Japan), Boren (for intensive language study of a critical need language) and more.

Click here for additional information

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The information session will take place via Zoom. Once registered you will receive a link to the session. 

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For information about this and other fellowships, email [email protected] .

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This event was added to the calendar by Brenda Tooley ( tooleyb@gvsu.edu ) on Thursday, August 22, 2024 and was last updated on Wednesday, August 28, 2024 at 8:26 a.m.

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Teachers' Day 2024: Ten Lines, Short and Long Essays For School Students

Published By : Suramya Sunilraj

Trending Desk

Last Updated: September 04, 2024, 09:00 IST

New Delhi, India

Students celebrate their teachers’ dedication and arduous work on this day by participating in exciting activities (Representative Image/ Shutterstock)

This special day encourages students to express their gratitude and admiration for their teachers, who have a significant impact on their lives and future

Teachers’ Day is an occasion set aside to celebrate and appreciate their hard work, dedication and contributions. Teachers’ Day is held every year on September 5 to commemorate the birth anniversary of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a prominent scholar, teacher and India’s second president. This special day encourages students to express their gratitude and admiration for their teachers, who have a significant impact on their lives and future.

Students celebrate their teachers’ dedication and arduous work on this day by participating in exciting activities and events such as delivering speeches and writing essays, making cards and posters, reciting poetry and slogans, engaging in fun games, and singing and dancing. Here are some simple essays to write and share with your adored teachers.

10 Lines Essay on Teacher’s Day (Primary Level):

– Teachers play an important role in our lives.

– In India, people celebrate this day on September 5 of every year.

– The Teacher’s Day celebration was started in 1962.

– The day is commemorated to honour Dr S Radhakrishnan, the first vice president and second president of India, on his birthday.

– In addition to being a renowned scholar, diplomat and President of India, he was also acommitted teacher.

– He stated that people shouldcelebrate September 5 as Teacher’s Day rather than his birthday.

– The teaching community is respected on this day and is widely observed across the country.

– To show love and appreciation for teachers, students make greeting cards and give presents.

– Schools and other institutions host a variety of events and programmes on this day.

– A few exceptional teachers get awarded with National Awards from the Ministry of Education in recognition of their outstanding work.

Teacher’s Day 2024: Short Essays 150 words (Secondary Level)

Every year on the birth anniversary of Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, India observes Teachers’ Day. He was deeply committed to the teaching profession. Some kids reportedly approached him and asked whether he wanted to celebrate his birthday on September 5. He then suggested that they honour all teachers on this day to mark their outstanding efforts and accomplishments. Teachers are the genuine builders of the nation’s future, influencing the lives of students, who in turn shape the nation’s destiny.

Teachers have an essential role in nation-building. However, one hardly recognises the necessity of teachers in the community. Teachers’ Day has been honoured on September 5 each year since 1962. Our teachers not only teach us, but they also help us develop our personalities, confidence and abilities. They assist us in overcoming whatever hurdles we may encounter in life. Here’s a Happy Teachers’ Day to all the hardworking teachers across India!

Teachers’ Day 2024: Long Essays 250 words (Higher Secondary Level)

Every year on September 5, students observe Teacher Day. It honours the birth anniversary of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India’s first Vice President and a dedicated teacher. He was a staunch promoter of education and was well-known for his work as a scholar, diplomat, educator and former President of India.

Teachers’ Day is a wonderful time to honour and cherish the relationship between teachers and students. Nowadays, students and instructors in schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions exhibit their enthusiasm and excitement. Students often wish their teachers a long life. The relationship between teachers and students is something to be thankful for and treasure for a lifetime. These days, students and professors gladly participate in the celebrations at schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions.

Students organise several events on Teachers’ Day to show respect for their teachers. These activities include cultural programmes, lectures, poems and small expressions of gratitude. Some students show their gratitude through heartfelt comments or notes. In some schools, senior students serve as instructors for the day, gaining experience with the problems and responsibilities of teaching.

We should recognise and cherish the teachers in our lives, and we should celebrate Teachers’ Day every year to express our gratitude for their work. Teachers, like our parents, help us develop our minds to thrive in life. And, it is our responsibility to honour them by adhering to all of their lessons and teachings. Happy Teachers’ Day to all!

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Republican Donors, Do You Know Where Your Money Goes?

By Juleanna Glover

Juleanna Glover is the chief executive of Ridgely Walsh, a corporate consultancy, and a former adviser to many Republican officials.

We long ago blew past any meaningful controls on political giving in American elections. Now we should focus on the rules governing political spending, which are in equally terrible shape. For that we can blame the Trump campaign and the federal government’s feeble enforcement efforts.

Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.

Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center . How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team , according to news reports shortly after the election.

All but 18 of the 150 largest expenditures on a Trump campaign’s 2020 F.E.C. report went to A.M.M.C. None of the expenses were itemized or otherwise explained aside from anodyne descriptions including “placed media,” “SMS advertising” and “online advertising.” F.E.C. rules require candidates to fully and accurately disclose the final recipients of their campaign disbursements, which is usually understood to include when payments are made through a vendor such as A.M.M.C. This disclosure is intended to assure donors their contributions are used for campaign expenses. Currently, neither voters nor law enforcement can know whether any laws were broken.

A.M.M.C.’s first president was reported to be Lara Trump , the wife of Mr. Trump’s son Eric. The New York Times reported that A.M.M.C. had a treasurer who was also the chief financial officer of Mr. Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner signed off on the plan to set up A.M.M.C., and one of Eric Trump’s deputies from the Trump Organization was involved in running it.

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Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. 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.

1. Origins and Character

2. high tide: the dial , fuller, thoreau, 3. social and political critiques, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” (T, 4).

The Unitarians were “modern.” They attempted to reconcile Locke’s empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the accounts of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for the truth of religion. It was precisely on this ground, however, that the transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism. For although they admired Channing’s idea that human beings can become more like God, they were persuaded by Hume that no empirical proof of religion could be satisfactory. In letters written in his freshman year at Harvard (1817), Emerson tried out Hume’s skeptical arguments on his devout and respected Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in his journals of the early 1820s he discusses with approval Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion and his underlying critique of necessary connection. “We have no experience of a Creator,” Emerson writes, and therefore we “know of none” (JMN 2, 161).

Skepticism about religion was also engendered by the publication of an English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s Critical Essay Upon the Gospel of St. Luke (1825), which introduced the idea that the Bible was a product of human history and culture. Equally important was the publication in 1833—some fifty years after its initial appearance in Germany—of James Marsh’s translation of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious texts and humanly-produced poetry, casting doubt on the authority of the Bible, but also suggesting that texts with equal authority could still be written. It was against this background that Emerson asked in 1836, in the first paragraph of Nature : “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs” (O, 5). The individual’s “revelation”—or “intuition,” as Emerson was later to speak of it—was to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean skepticism.

An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “German metaphysics” and his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant, (T, 87)—that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “[S]ince the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge” (T, 92). Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.

Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766–1817), whose De l’Allemagne ( On Germany ) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.

James Marsh (1794–1842), a graduate of Andover and the president of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging philosophy of transcendentalism. Marsh was convinced that German philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced Coleridge’s version—much indebted to Schelling—of Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson’s early work. In Nature , for example, Emerson writes: “The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world” (O, 25).

German philosophy and literature was also championed by Thomas Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip to Europe in 1831. Carlyle’s philosophy of action in such works as Sartor Resartus resonates with Emerson’s idea in “The American Scholar” that action—along with nature and “the mind of the Past” (O, 39) is essential to human education. Along with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle embraced a “natural supernaturalism,” the view that nature, including human beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to an independent deity.

Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth, whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820s. Wordsworth’s depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping power of the mind that his collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of such power pervades Emerson’s Nature , where he writes of nature as “obedient” to spirit and counsels each of us to “Build … your own world.” Wordsworth has his more receptive mode as well, in which he calls for “a heart that watches and receives” (in “The Tables Turned”), and we find Emerson’s receptive mode from Nature onward, as when he recounts an ecstatic experience in the woods: “I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; The currents of the universal being circulate through me.” (O, 6).

Emerson’s sense that men and women are, as he put it in Nature , gods “in ruins,” led to one of transcendentalism’s defining events, his delivery of an address at the Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838. Emerson portrayed the contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an “eastern monarchy of a Christianity” that had become an “injuror of man” (O, 58). Jesus, in contrast, was a “friend of man.” Yet he was just one of the “true race of prophets,” whose message is not so much their own greatness, as the “greatness of man” (O, 57). Emerson rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak, but because proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken view of the nature of religion: “conversion by miracles is a profanation of the soul.” Emerson’s religion is based not on testimony but on a “perception” that produces a “religious sentiment” (O, 55).

The “Divinity School Address” drew a quick and angry response from Andrews Norton (1786–1853) of the Harvard Divinity School, often known as the “Unitarian Pope.” In “The New School in Literature and Religion” (1838), Norton complains of “a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,” which he traces to German “speculatists” and “barbarians” and “that hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle.” Emerson’s “Address,” he concludes, is at once “an insult to religion” (T, 248) and “an incoherent rhapsody” (T, 249).

An earlier transcendentalist scandal surrounded the publication of Amos Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels (1836). Alcott (1799–1888) was a self-taught educator from Connecticut who established a series of schools that aimed to “draw out” the intuitive knowledge of children. He found anticipations of his views about a priori knowledge in the writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection for the idea that idealism and materiality could be reconciled. Alcott replaced the hard benches of the common schools with more comfortable furniture that he built himself, and left a central space in his classrooms for dancing. The Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels , based on a school Alcott (and his assistant Elizabeth Peabody) ran in Boston, argued that evidence for the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of children’s thought. What people particularly noticed about Alcott’s book, however, were its frank discussions of conception, circumcision, and childbirth. Rather than gaining support for his school, the publication of the book caused many parents to withdraw their children from it, and the school—like many of Alcott’s projects, failed.

Theodore Parker (1810–60) was the son of a farmer who attended Harvard and became a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist. He published a long critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu , and translated Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament , both of which cast doubt on the divine inspiration and single authorship of the Bible. After the publication of his “A Discourse Concerning the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) he was invited to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (he did not), and was no longer welcome in many pulpits. He argued, much as Emerson had in the “Divinity School Address,” that Christianity had nothing essential to do with the person of Jesus: “If Jesus taught at Athens, and not at Jerusalem; if he had wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had forever perished at his birth, Christianity would still have been the Word of God … just as true, just as lasting, just as beautiful, as now it is…” (T, 352). Parker exploited the similarities between science and religious doctrine to argue that although nature and religious truth are permanent, any merely human version of such truth is transient. In religious doctrines especially, there are stunning reversals, so that “men are burned for professing what men are burned for denying” (T, 347).

Surveying the scene in his 1842 lecture, “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson begins with a philosophical account, according to which what are generally called “new views” are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of idealism. It is not a skeptical idealism, however, but an anti-skeptical idealism deriving from Kant:

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg [sic], who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (O, 101–2).

Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims, which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind “forms” experience; that the existence of such mental operations is a counter to skepticism; and that “transcendental” does not mean “transcendent” or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which experience is made possible. Emerson’s idealism is not purely Kantian, however, for (like Coleridge’s) it contains a strong admixture of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of Reason, for example, as a faculty of “vision,” as opposed to the mundane understanding, which “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues….” ( Letters , vol. 1, 413). For many of the transcendentalists the term “transcendentalism” represented nothing so technical as an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind’s powers, and a modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states, believes in miracles, conceived as “the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power…” (O, 100).

Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by speaking always of what “they” say or do, despite the fact that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading transcendentalist. He notes with some disdain that the transcendentalists are “’not good members of society,” that they do not work for “the abolition of the slave-trade” (though both these charges have been leveled at him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (O, 106). This critique is Emerson’s own in such writings as “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar”; and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the “Economy” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden .

The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at first The Christian Examiner , then, after the furor over the “Divinity School Address,” The Western Messenger (1835–41) in St Louis, then the Boston Quarterly Review (1838–44). The Dial (1840–4) was a special case, for it was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental Club, with Margaret Fuller (1810–50) as the first editor. Emerson succeeded her for the magazine’s last two years. The writing in The Dial was uneven, but in its four years of existence it published Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” (the core of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century ) and her long review of Goethe’s work; prose and poetry by Emerson; Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” (which gave the magazine a reputation for silliness); and the first publications of a young friend of Emerson’s, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). After Emerson became editor in 1842 The Dial published a series of “Ethnical Scriptures,” translations from Chinese and Indian philosophical works.

Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and, later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls “her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress” (P, 443), Fuller became friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. In the winters of 1839–44, Fuller organized a series of popular and influential “conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. She journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes the following year. After this publishing success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson’s and the editor of the New York Tribune , invited her to New York to write for the Tribune . Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms: for example, of Longfellow’s poetry and Carlyle’s attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846–9, sending back hundreds of pages for the Tribune . On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of Fire Island, New York.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision of her “Great Lawsuit” manifesto in The Dial , is Fuller’s major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and femininity pass into one another, that there is “no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (T, 418). In classical mythology, for example, “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo; woman of the Masculine as Minerva.” But there are differences. The feminine genius is “electrical” and “intuitive,” the male more inclined to classification (T, 419). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them. What they most want, Fuller maintains, is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom necessary not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, Fuller calls for periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of “distraction” and “imbecility,” and a return only after “the renovating fountains” of individuality have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage. “Union,” she holds, “is only possible to those who are units” (T, 419). In contrast, most marriages are forms of degradation, in which “the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him” (T, 422).

Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson’s “The American Scholar” as the commencement address in 1837. He first published in The Dial when Emerson commissioned him to review a series of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast about for a literary outlet after The Dial’ s failure in 1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers . He also wrote a first draft of Walden , which eventually appeared in 1854.

Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in Emerson’s Nature , which it followed by eighteen years. Nature now becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau’s subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He finds himself “suddenly neighbor to” rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and he learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he can properly sit. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds, he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer, who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his operations.

In Walden ’s opening chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did in The Republic , what are life’s real necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a “life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust” (W, 15). Considering his contemporaries, he finds that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (W, 8). Thoreau’s “experiment” at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality—a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor—he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of “improving the nick of time” (W, 17).

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain—July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other” (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully” (W, 141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town. (It was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance, an episode that became the occasion for “Resistance to Civil Government.”)

At the opening of Walden’s chapter on “Higher Laws” Thoreau confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and hunting for their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle age he has given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in such literary works as Hamlet and the Iliad; and even in certain forms of society: “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet” (“Walking” (1862), p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or uplifting, however. In The Maine Woods , Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world; and in Cape Cod (1865), he records the foreignness, not the friendliness, of nature: the shore is “a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it” (P, 577).

Although Walden initiates the American tradition of environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and writing. In the chapter on “Reading,” Thoreau speaks of books that demand and inspire “reading, in a high sense” (W, 104). He calls such books “heroic,” and finds them equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: “Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares…” (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that Walden is or aspires to be such a book; and indeed the enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built but the book he wrote.

Thoreau maintains in Walden that writing is “the work of art closest to life itself” (W, 102). In his search for such closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the journal as a work in itself, “each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be” (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the days, but it may have no order; or what order it has emerges in the writer’s life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters on “Reading,” “Solitude,” “Economy,” “Winter,” and “Spring,” Walden is more “worked up” than the journal; in this sense, Thoreau came to feel, it is less close to nature than the journal.

The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient: a “mass” of “bugs or spawn” as Emerson put it in “The American Scholar”; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says in Walden . Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles: Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organized by the Transcendental Club; Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. As the nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists’ dissatisfaction with their society became focused on policies and actions of the United States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the war with Mexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.

Emerson’s 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a “removal” agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a minority faction to agree to move to territories west of the Mississippi. Despite the ruling by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall that the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty had been violated, Jackson’s policies continued to take effect. In 1838, President Van Buren, Jackson’s former Vice-President and approved successor, ordered the U. S. Army into the Cherokee Nation, where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they could and marched them west and across the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way. In his letter to President Van Buren, Emerson calls this “a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?” (A, 3).

Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the country, but the question of its morality and entrenchment within the American political system came to the fore with the annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the 28th state in 1845. Emerson’s breakout address “On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844) was delivered in this context. (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and celebrated annually in Concord.) In his address Emerson wrote: “Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, … the producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world. … I am heartsick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers” (A, 9).

Frederick Douglass spoke in Concord at Thoreau’s invitation, and was on the dais in Concord in August 1844, when Emerson delivered his emancipation address, where he states: “The Black Man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization” (Wirzbicki, 95; A, 31). Douglass took up Emerson’s term “self-reliance” in advice to his readers and hearers, and he quotes “The American Scholar” in his abolitionist newspaper North Star . “It is a mischievous notion,” Douglass quotes Emerson as saying, “that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God so is it ever to so much of his attribute that we bring to it” (Wirzbicki, 53; O, 47).

Another important black abolitionist with Transcendentalist leanings and connections was William C. Nell, who founded Boston’s Adelphic Union Library Association in 1836. Nell attended Bronson Alcott’s conversations, heard Emerson speak, and participated in Emerson’s Town and Country Club. He referred to Emerson as the “ever-to-be-honored friend of equal rights” (Wirzbicki, 55). The leadership of Nell’s Association was black, but invited speakers included prominent black and white abolitionists, including Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Angelina Grimké. Nell founded the New England Freedom Association in 1842 to “extend the helping hand to the ‘chattel’ who may have taken to itself ‘wings’” (Wirzbicki, 148); and he joined with Lewis Hayden (who had escaped slavery in Kentucky) to establish the Boston Vigilance Committee after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Thoreau worked with both Nell and Hayden. He brought Hayden to Concord to speak to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, and he contributed to the Underground Railroad by hosting fugitives in his cabin at Walden Pond (Wirzbicki, 158).

Fuller addresses American slavery directly in Woman in the Nineteenth Century , recalling her dread at the news that James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to Texas, had been elected the nation’s 11th president (by an all-male electorate). The “choice of the people,” she wrote, “threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of Texas!” (F, 97). Addressing “[t]he women of my country,” she asks: “have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls for a money market and political power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which can check, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in union” (F, 98).

This call both to the individual and to individuals acting together characterizes Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed “in letting one another alone” (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a “peaceable revolution,” he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76).

The Fugitive Slave Law passed by the United States Congress in 1850 had dramatic and visible effects not only in Georgia or Mississippi but in Massachusetts and New York. For the law required all citizens of the country to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their owners. This extension of the slave-system to the north, the subject of Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), was on public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to the harbor, where he was taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner placed him in a notorious “slave pen” outside Richmond, where Burns was handcuffed, chained at the ankles and left to lie in his own filth for four months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a court in Boston “trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE,” when the question has already been “decided from eternity” (R, 92). In his “Lecture on Slavery” of 1855, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution’s recognition of slavery a “crime” (A, 100), and he contrasts the written law of the constitution with the “Laws” and “Right” ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and Confucius. An immoral law, he holds, is void.

Although Thoreau advocated nonviolent action in “Resistance to Civil Government,” he later supported the violent actions of John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau portrays Brown as an “Angel of Light” (R, 137) and “a transcendentalist above all” (115) who believed “that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave” (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown’s life and actions.

Other Primary Sources

• Buell, Lawrence. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings , New York: Modern Library, 2006. [Anthology with commentary]
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Robert B. Spiller, et al. (eds.), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1971–
• –––, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939. 6 vols.
• –––, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals: 1820–1842 , Lawrence Rosenwald (ed.), New York: Library of America, 2010.
• Fuller, Margaret, Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846 , Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• –––, “ These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850 , Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (eds.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
• Hochfield, George (ed.), Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists , 2nd edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 (orig. 1966). [Anthology]
• Mikics, David. The Annotated Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. [Anthology with commentary]
• Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 (orig. 1950). [Anthology with commentary]
• Thoreau, Henry David, Cape Cod , Joseph J. Moldenhauer (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
• –––, Journal , John C. Broderick, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, et al. (eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984
• –––, The Maine Woods , Joseph J. Moldenhauer (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.
• –––, Political Writings/Thoreau , Nancy L. Rosenbaum (ed.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• –––, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , Carl Hovde, et al. (eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
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• –––, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• ––– (ed.), 2014. American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron , Bloomsbury Academic.
• –––, 2016. “Against Pessimism: On Emerson’s ‘Experience’,” Arizona Quarterly , 72 (3): 175–193.
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• –––, 2003. Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cameron, Sharon, 1985. Writing Nature , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2007. “The Way of Life by Abandonment,” in Impersonality: Seven Essays , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 79–107.
• Capper, Charles, 1994/2007. Margaret Fuller: an American Romantic Life , New York: Oxford University Press (Vol. 1, 1994; Vol. 2, 2007).
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• –––, 1990. “Introduction” and “Aversive Thinking,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes , ed. David Justin Hodge, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2004. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Clebsch, William, 1973. American Religious Thought: a history , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915. Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Follett, Danielle, 2015. “The Tension Between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature , Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (eds.), London: Routledge, 209–221.
• Friedl, Herwig, 2018. Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition , New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Furtak, Rick Anthony, James Ellsworth, and Jonathan D. Reid (eds.), 2012. Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy , New York: Fordham University Press.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1990. “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51 (4): 625–45.
• –––, 2015. American Philosophy before Pragmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gross, Robert A., 2021. The Transcendentalists and Their World , New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Grusin, Richard, 1991. Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible , Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.
• Harding, Walter, 1965. The Days of Henry Thoreau , New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Horsman, Reginald, 1992. Expansion and American Indian policy, 1783–1812 , Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• –––, 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: the origins of American racial anglo-saxonism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kateb, George, 1992. “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics,” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 77–105.
• –––, 1995. Emerson and Self-Reliance , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• La Rocca, David and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (eds.), 2015. A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture , Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
• Lysaker, John T. and Rossi, William, 2009. Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Marshall, Megan, 2013. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life , Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Miller, Perry, 1967. Nature’s Nation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Myerson, Joel, 1980. The New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and its Contributors , Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
• –––, 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982. Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 1995. “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature , Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 329–604. Reprinted as The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
• Poirier, Richard, T., 1987. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992. Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1986. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• –––, 1995. Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth S., 2003. Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Urbas, Joseph, 2016. Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes , Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2021. The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Von Frank, Albert J., 1998. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021. Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Walls, Laura Dassow, 2017. Henry David Thoreau: A Life , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wright, Conrad, 1957. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America , Boston: Beacon.
• –––, 1970. The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History , Boston: Beacon.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Transcendentalists website by Jone Johnson Lewis (M. Div.), available at the Internet Archive.

civil disobedience | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Hume, David: on religion | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments | Thoreau, Henry David

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Walden , series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau , published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism , the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.

Walden is the product of the two years and two months Thoreau lived in semi-isolation by Walden Pond near Concord , Massachusetts. He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and was almost totally self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing odd jobs. It was his intention at Walden Pond to live simply and have time to contemplate, walk in the woods, write, and commune with nature. As he explained, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” The resulting book is a series of essays, or meditations, beginning with “Economy,” in which he discussed his experiment and included a detailed account of the construction (and cost) of his cabin. Thoreau extolled the benefits of literature in “Reading,” though in the following essay , “Sounds,” he noted the limits of books and implored the reader to live mindfully, “being forever on the alert” to the sounds and sights in his or her own life. “Solitude” praised the friendliness of nature, which made the “fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant.” Later essays included “Visitors,” “Higher Laws,” “Winter Animals,” and “Spring.”

Relatively neglected during Thoreau’s lifetime, Walden achieved tremendous popularity in the 20th century. Thoreau’s description of the physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond gave the book authority, while his command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic. Oft-repeated quotes from Walden include: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”; and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

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Transcendentalism : essential essays of Emerson & Thoreau : including Self-reliance & Civil disobedience

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The Friend writes thus.

"Hold fast, I beseech you, to the resolution to wait for light from the Lord. Go not to men for a creed, faint not, but be of good courage. The darkness is only for a season. We must be willing to tarry the Lord's time in the wilderness, if we would enter the Promised Land. The purest saints that I have ever known were long, very long, in darkness and in doubt. Even when they had firm faith, they were long without feeling what they believed in . One told me he was two years in chaotic darkness, without an inch of firm ground to stand upon, watching for the dayspring from on high, and after this long probation it shone upon his path, and he has walked by its light for years. Do not fear or regret your isolation from men, your difference from all around you. It is often necessary to the enlargement of the soul that it should thus dwell alone for a season, and when the mystical union of God and man shall be completely developed, and you feel yourself newly born a child of light, one of the sons of God, you will also feel new ties to your fellow men; you will love them all in God, and each will be to you whatever their state will permit them to be. "It is very interesting to me to see, as I do, all around me here, the essential doctrines of the Quakers revived, modified, stript of all that puritanism and sectarianism had heaped upon them, and made the foundation of an intellectual philosophy, that is illuminating the finest minds and reaches the wants of the least cultivated. The more I reflect upon the Quakers, the more I admire the early ones, and am surprised at their being so far in advance of their age, but they have educated the world till it is now able to go beyond those teachers. "Spiritual growth, which they considered at variance with intellectual culture, is now wedded to it, and man's whole nature is advanced. The intellectual had so lorded it over the moral, that much onesided cultivation was requisite to make things even. I remember when your intellect was all in all, and the growth of the moral sense came after. It has now taken its proper place in your mind, and the intellect appears for a time prostrate, but in due season both will go on harmoniously, and you will be a perfect man. If you suffer more than many before coming into the light, it is because your character is deeper and your happy enlargement will be proportioned to it."

The identity, which the writer of this letter finds between the speculative opinions of serious persons at the present moment, and those entertained by the first Quakers, is indeed so striking as to have drawn a very general attention of late years to the history of that sect. Of course, in proportion to the depth of the experience, will be its independence on time and circumstances, yet one can hardly read George Fox's Journal, or Sewel's History of the Quakers, without many a rising of joyful surprise at the correspondence of facts and expressions to states of thought and feeling, with which we are very familiar. The writer justly remarks the equal adaptation of the philosophy in question "to the finest minds, and to the least cultivated." And so we add in regard to these works, that quite apart from the pleasure of reading modern history in old books, the reader will find another reward in the abundant illustration they furnish to the fact, that wherever the religious enthusiasm makes its appearance, it supplies the place of poetry and philosophy and of learned discipline, and inspires by itself the same vastness of thinking; so that in learning the religious experiences of a strong but untaught mind, you seem to have suggested in turn all the sects of the philosophers.

We seize the occasion to adorn our pages with the dying speech of James Naylor, one of the companions of Fox, who had previously been for eight years a common soldier in the army. Its least service will be to show how far the religious sentiment could exalt the thinking and purify the language of the most uneducated men.

"There is a spirit which I feel," said James Naylor a few hours before his death, "that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned, and it takes its kingdom with entreaty, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life."

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Theme Analysis

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the central figures associated with the American philosophical and literary movement known as transcendentalism. Transcendentalism thrived during the late 1830s to the 1840s in the US and originated with a group of thinkers in New England that included Emerson. The transcendentalists believed that the US needed reformation in its religion, arts, higher education, and culture. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is one of the most important statements of transcendentalist beliefs and how they apply to everyday life.

In Emerson’s transcendentalism, the individual is the supreme source of truth because the universe (or “Oversoul”) is inside each individual, and each individual is a part of the universe, just as nature is. Emerson further argues that there is an underlying unity to everything, including the individual, and that seeing the parts of the universe as separate from the individual is nothing more than a bad habit. That is why Emerson sees “children, babes, and brutes” as being “pretty oracles nature yields”—he means that they are not yet in the habit of seeing themselves as separate from everything around them.

Emerson therefore believes that the search for truth should always start with contemplation of the individual self and nature . He posits that when the individual engages in self-contemplation, they come to understand that the individual isn’t separate from all parts of the universe but is instead “one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed.” Emerson also argues that because all of creation is simply a reflection of an underlying truth, contemplating the individual is a very good shortcut to understanding the truth of existence. He believes that if each individual can just pay close enough attention to themselves and ignore the noise of other individuals and the senses, they will eventually understand that “we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.”

Emerson’s definition of the self-reflection needed to find this truth is very specific. He is careful to make clear that self-reflection is not merely intellectual, in the sense that it applies only to the individual reflecting on their own personal thoughts. While he certainly does believe that the individual should reflect on thoughts and ideas, Emerson explicitly makes clear that self-reflection also involves simply listening to one’s instincts. In other words, he sees the individual’s intuition as also containing the individual’s truth. In fact, as Emerson puts it, intuition is the “primary wisdom... whilst all later teachings are tuitions.” Ultimately, Emerson’s guidelines for the practice of self-reflection can be summed up in his famous saying: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” He insists that the individual can only find truth within themselves — their whole self, in their conscious thoughts and deeper intuitions — and that only by “trusting thyself” can they access that truth. This idea is the foundation of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance.

This philosophy was a radical departure for the time, and in conflict with traditional thought and society . In fact, Emerson specifically argues against the prevailing beliefs by stating that truth cannot be found in either the conventional morality of mass culture or in institutions, such as the church or government, because they discourage the individual from contemplating the self. Emerson argues that, instead, the individual can only find the truth by paying attention to their own mind and intuition. To Emerson, then, it is solitude, rather than the company of others, that is most conducive to the discovery of the truth. Being able to hear one’s inner voice, despite the influence of society, is what makes a person great.

But Emerson is under no illusion that hearing one’s inner voice is easy. When Emerson states that “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages,” he is pointing out two related but distinct things. First, he is stating that the individual’s own insights and intuitions are more valuable and contain more truth than any of the received wisdom from society, and second, he is acknowledging that each individual has to learn this for himself. In other words, Emerson is admitting that such trust in oneself takes effort and is attained only through practice.

He also argues that the institutions and thinkers that most people assume serve as sources of truth are not truly such sources; upon examination, Emerson says, important religious and ethical moments in history are always the result of specific individuals. He claims that “[a]n institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called ‘the height of Rome’; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” The individual’s influence underlies what eventually became the institution.

Emerson goes a step further by arguing that the institutions themselves and society as a whole can in fact serve as impediments to finding truth. Society actively reduces the likelihood of an individual accessing their own internal truth. As he puts it: intuition and insight “are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” Society, in Emerson’s transcendentalist view, is a force that the individual must escape in order to gain access to truth.

Transcendentalism ThemeTracker

Transcendentalism Quotes in Self-Reliance

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.

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All About Philosophy

Transcendentalism – Beliefs, Principles, Quotes & Leading Figures

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.

It is grounded in the belief that individuals can transcend the physical world to reach a deeper spiritual experience through intuition and the contemplation of the natural world.

Table of Contents

Transcendentalism Meaning

At its core, transcendentalism posits that people have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that “transcends” or goes beyond what they can see, hear, touch, or feel.

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This idea is rooted in the inherent goodness of both people and nature.

Transcendentalists argue that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupt the purity of the individual.

They have faith that people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent.

How Are Romanticism and Transcendentalism Connected?

Romanticism and Transcendentalism are closely connected, as both philosophies emphasize the importance of the individual and the individual’s relationship with the natural world.

The difference between the two lies in their view of nature.

Romanticism generally portrays nature as dark and mysterious, while Transcendentalism sees nature as a divine and universal symbol of metaphysical truth.

Beliefs & Principles of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism holds several fundamental beliefs.

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First, it posits that the individual is the spiritual center of the universe.

Second, not only can all individuals access an ‘inner light’ to gain an understanding of the world, but such insights transcend sensory experience and rationality.

Transcendentalists also believe in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Lastly, they have a deep faith in self-reliance and individual intuition, both of which are pathways to achieving personal independence and realizing one’s relationship to the universe.

What is Transcendentalism? (Transcendentalism Defined, Meaning of Transcendentalism)

Tenets of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism’s basic tenets include individualism , self-reliance, and the belief in a higher reality than that perceived by the senses.

The movement emphasizes personal intuition, freedom from social conventions, and a simple, mindful lifestyle.

It also promotes a deep connection with nature, viewing it as a direct expression of the divine.

In essence, Transcendentalists advocate for a spiritual understanding that transcends logical reasoning and empirical proof, hailing intuition and self-exploration as the means to attain such insight.

Leading Figures

Two of the leading figures of Transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Emerson, a former Unitarian minister, was a prolific writer and speaker, known for his essays like “Self-Reliance” and “Nature.”

His ideas and eloquent expression of Transcendentalist beliefs helped the movement gain significant influence in the mid-19th century.

Thoreau, a student and friend of Emerson, is best known for his work “Walden,” a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.

He embodied the Transcendentalist belief in personal freedom and non-conformity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement.

His essay , “Nature,” published in 1836, is considered the movement’s seminal work.

In it, Emerson promotes the belief that individuals can directly experience God and truth through nature.

He emphasized the idea of self-reliance, asserting that each person should avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas.

Henry David Thoreau Transcendentalism

Henry David Thoreau is another prominent figure in the Transcendentalist movement.

He expanded upon Emerson’s ideas, particularly the relationship between the self and nature.

Thoreau’s famous work “Walden” records his experiences living in solitude for two years near Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

His writings promote individualism, simplicity, and a close connection with nature, embodying the ideals of Transcendentalism.

Summary of Transcendentalism Literature

Transcendentalism significantly influenced American literature.

Prominent works such as Emerson’s “Nature” and Thoreau’s “Walden” are key texts in this philosophical movement.

These pieces illustrate the movement’s core beliefs in the inherent goodness of nature and individuals, the corruption of society, the importance of self-reliance, and the spiritual insights gained through personal intuition and nature contemplation.

In a broader sense, the literature of Transcendentalism represented a counter-culture to the prevailing societal norms of the time , emphasizing spiritual over material wealth.

American Transcendentalism

American transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that emerged in the 19th century, primarily in New England, United States.

It was a response to the intellectual and spiritual climate of the time , which emphasized reason and scientific inquiry, often at the expense of individuality and spirituality.

Key figures associated with American transcendentalism include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.

Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of both humans and nature, and they emphasized the importance of intuition, self-reliance, and the connection between the individual and the divine.

They sought to transcend the limitations of the material world and traditional religious institutions through direct spiritual experiences and a deep appreciation of nature.

They believed that through self-exploration and self-expression, individuals could discover profound truths and achieve personal fulfillment.

The writings of American transcendentalists encompassed a wide range of subjects, including nature, social and political issues, individualism, and the potential for personal growth.

Some of the notable works associated with this movement include Emerson’s essay “Nature,” Thoreau’s book “Walden,” and Fuller’s book “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.”

American transcendentalism had a lasting impact on American literature, philosophy, and culture, and it played a significant role in shaping the development of individualism and intellectual thought in the United States.

Anti-Transcendentalism

Anti-transcendentalism, also known as dark romanticism or Gothic literature, was a literary movement that emerged as a reaction against the optimistic beliefs of transcendentalism.

It arose in the mid-19th century, overlapping with the transcendentalist movement but offering a contrasting perspective.

Anti-transcendentalists believed in the inherent darkness, sinfulness, and limitations of human nature.

They rejected the transcendentalist notion of inherent human goodness and the idea that individuals could achieve transcendence through personal growth and spiritual experiences.

Instead, anti-transcendentalists focused on the darker aspects of human existence, exploring themes such as the grotesque, the macabre, the supernatural, and the destructive forces of nature and society.

Prominent anti-transcendentalist authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.

Their works often delved into the complexities of the human psyche, explored the consequences of moral ambiguity and guilt, and highlighted the conflict between human desires and social expectations.

Examples of anti-transcendentalist literature include Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

In contrast to the optimistic and idealistic worldview of the transcendentalists, anti-transcendentalism offered a more skeptical, pessimistic, and introspective perspective on the human condition, examining the inherent flaws and potential darkness within individuals and society.

Overall, while American transcendentalism focused on the potential for spiritual growth and the innate goodness of individuals, anti-transcendentalism explored the darker aspects of human nature and the limitations of human existence.

FAQs – Transcendentalism

1. what is transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism is a philosophical and literary movement that emerged in the United States in the mid-19th century, particularly in New England.

The movement centered on the belief in inherent goodness of both people and nature, emphasizing individualism, self-reliance, and the importance of personal connection with nature and the universe over organized institutions and religious doctrine.

2. Who were some of the key figures in the Transcendentalist movement?

Some of the key figures in the Transcendentalist movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott.

These individuals were noted for their writings and lectures, which profoundly influenced American thought and literature during their time and continue to do so today.

3. What are the core beliefs of Transcendentalism?

The core beliefs of Transcendentalism include the inherent goodness of nature and humanity, the primacy of individual thought and emotion over societal norms or organized religious doctrine, and the belief that people are at their best when they are self-reliant and independent.

They also believed in the existence of an “Over-Soul,” a universal spirit to which all beings are connected.

4. How did Transcendentalists view nature?

Transcendentalists viewed nature as a direct connection to the divine or the universal spirit.

They believed that by immersing oneself in nature, an individual could gain profound insight and wisdom, and could escape from the corruption and materialism of society.

5. What impact did Transcendentalism have on American literature?

Transcendentalism had a profound impact on American literature, with works like Emerson’s “Nature” and Thoreau’s “Walden” being seminal texts in American literary history .

The movement influenced subsequent literary and philosophical movements, such as realism and romanticism, and shaped the themes of individualism and nature in much of American literature.

6. How does Transcendentalism relate to religion?

Transcendentalists often challenged the established religious institutions of their time, preferring personal spiritual experiences over organized doctrine.

They believed that individuals could directly experience the divine through nature and introspection, without the need for churches or religious intermediaries.

7. How is Transcendentalism relevant today?

Transcendentalism’s emphasis on individuality, self-reliance, and personal connection with nature continues to resonate in today’s society.

These ideas can be seen in movements that advocate for environmental protection, individual rights, and mindfulness practices, demonstrating that Transcendentalist philosophy still holds relevance in contemporary thought.

8. What was the relationship between Transcendentalism and the social reform movements of the 19th century?

Many Transcendentalists were deeply involved in social reform movements of their time.

For instance, they played active roles in the abolitionist movement, women’s suffrage, and educational reform.

They believed that their ideals of individual freedom and inherent goodness could extend to societal structures, prompting societal change.

9. How does Transcendentalism differ from Romanticism?

While both Transcendentalism and Romanticism value individualism and nature, they differ in their views of humanity and society.

Romanticism often portrays a more pessimistic view of humanity, emphasizing emotions, including fear and awe.

On the other hand, Transcendentalism typically holds an optimistic view of human nature and its potential, emphasizing self-reliance and individual agency.

10. How can I see Transcendentalist ideas in everyday life?

Transcendentalist ideas can be observed and applied in various aspects of everyday life.

Here are some ways you can see Transcendentalist principles reflected in your day-to-day experiences:

Connection with nature

Transcendentalists placed great importance on the relationship between humans and the natural world.

You can experience Transcendentalist ideas by spending time in nature, appreciating its beauty , and seeking solace and inspiration from it.

Take walks in parks or forests, go hiking, or simply spend time in your backyard or a nearby green space.

Individuality and self-reliance

Transcendentalists emphasized the importance of individuality and self-reliance.

You can embody these ideas by cultivating your unique qualities and expressing your individuality rather than conforming to societal norms.

Trust your own instincts, make independent decisions, and have the courage to follow your own path, even if it goes against the grain.

Simplifying your life

Transcendentalists believed in living a simple and deliberate life, free from unnecessary material possessions and distractions.

You can incorporate this idea into your daily routine by decluttering your living space, minimizing your consumption, and focusing on what truly matters to you.

Consider embracing minimalist principles and prioritizing experiences and relationships over material possessions.

Inner reflection and contemplation

Transcendentalists encouraged introspection and self-reflection as a means of attaining deeper understanding and connecting with the divine.

Take time each day to engage in practices like journaling, meditation, or mindfulness.

This can help you explore your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and gain clarity about your purpose and values.

Social and environmental activism

Transcendentalism also had a strong social justice component.

Many Transcendentalists advocated for causes such as abolitionism and women’s rights.

You can apply Transcendentalist principles by engaging in activism and working towards positive social change.

Stand up for justice, equality, and the rights of all individuals, and contribute to efforts that protect and preserve the environment.

Transcendentalism is a philosophy that encourages personal interpretation and individual experience.

Therefore, you may find other ways to see Transcendentalist ideas in your daily life that are meaningful and relevant to you.

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Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

After a brief introduction to the transcendentalist movement of the 1800s, students develop a working definition of transcendentalism by answering and discussing a series of questions about their own individualism and relationship to nature. Over the next few sessions, students read and discuss excerpts from Emerson's “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau's Walden . They use a graphic organizer to summarize the characteristics of transcendental thought as they read. Students then examine modern comic strips and songs to find evidence of transcendental thought. They gather additional examples on their own to share with the class. Finally, students complete the chart showing specific examples of transcendental thought from a variety of multimodal genres.

Featured Resources

Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture Final Project : Give this handout to students to guide them in their final project for this lesson. Examples of Transcendental Thought : Students can use this chart or the interactive version to record specific examples of transcendental thought in the texts they examine.

From Theory to Practice

In the article that inspired this lesson plan, Colleen A. Ruggieri explains, "As we English educators spend our days in the classroom, we want all of our students to come to love language as much as we do, even if they don't have a natural aptitude for the subject. We also want all of our students to be able to understand the material covered in class, as well as to see its relevance in the real world" (68). Ruggieri's technique of using comics and music to catch the interest of students work well to urge students to think more openly about the language and creative choices that an artist makes-whether a writer, a musician, or a comic strip author. Students are more willing to embrace the world of comic strips and the speaker of lyrics, especially when the songs and comics are left to students' own choice. Once they've identified concepts like transcendentalism in popular culture resources such as these, the relevance of texts by writers such as Emerson and Thoreau becomes simpler to establish.

Note: Because of the importance of this article to the lesson plan, the entire article has been made available. The article is protected by copyright and all rights are reserved. Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 2. Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

Materials and Technology

• Songs demonstrating transcendental thought (and copies of lyrics)
• Excerpts from Emerson's " Self-Reliance " and " Nature "
• Excerpt from Thoreau's Walden
• Comic strips demonstrating transcendental thought (see the Comic Stip Collections booklist)
• Four to five CD players and/or MP3 players
• Headphones for students (optional)
• Student journals or looseleaf paper
• Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture Final Project
• Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture Final Project Rubric
• Examples of Transcendental Thought (optional instead of interactive)

Preparation

• Choose the excerpts from Emerson's and Thoreau's essays that you'll share with your class. You might rely on excerpts from your class anthology or make selections from the works yourself. Copies of the works are available online. Adjust the discussion prompts during the class sessions to match the readings that you select.
• Familiarize yourself with the basic characteristics of transcendentalism using the resources available from The Web of American Transcendentalism , The Thoreau Reader: The Works of Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862 , and The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson .
• Frank Sinatra's "My Way" works well for this assignment as do the songs "Wide Open Spaces" by the Dixie Chicks, "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan, and "You Gotta Be" by Desiree.
• Additional recommendations are available in the article " Multigenre, Multiple Intelligences, and Transcendentalism ."  Comic strips such as Calvin and Hobbes , Peanuts, and Shoe are also good choices.
• Check your library for collections of comics that will work for the lesson. The lesson works especially well if you students can explore a collection in small groups; however, the lesson can be completed by looking at several particular comics if desired.
• Invite students to bring their own songs to class to share.
• Make arrangements for students to view comic strips, listen to the songs, and, if possible, read the lyrics to the songs. You may want to make photocopies or overhead transparencies of some of the resources.
• Make copies of the handouts for all students.
• Since students will use the same chart graphic organizer several times, you will need to make 3 to 4 copies of the chart handout for each student if you are using photocopies (e.g., one copy for analyzing the Emerson essays, one copy for Thoreau, one copy for the comic strips, and one copy for the songs). If students are working online, they can print their observations for each section. Naturally you can mix the resources students use as well—students might work online at some points and with handouts at others.
• Test the Examples of Transcendental Thought Interactive (online chart tool) and Comic Creator on your computers to familiarize yourself with the tools and ensure that you have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in from the technical support page .

Student Objectives

Students will:

• identify elements of transcendentalism such as the connection between people and nature, an individual's ability to think freely, and the importance of spiritual self-reliance to the individual found in the works of Emerson and Thoreau.
• identify the elements of transcendentalism as represented in present-day genres (comic strips, lyrics, and music).
• investigate the representation of transcendentalist thought in social commentaries.
• develop their own views on the subjects of individualism, nature, and passive resistance.

Session One

From 1840-1855, literature in America experienced a rebirth called the New England Renaissance. Through their poetry, short stories, novels, and other works, writers during this period established a clear American voice. No longer did they see their work as less influential than that of European authors. Transcendentalism was a part of this "flowering" of American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were important voices in this philosophical movement that sought to have individuals "transcend" to a higher spiritual level. To achieve this goal, the individual had to seek spiritual, not material, greatness and the essential truths of life through intuition. Emerson was the philosopher and teacher. Thoreau was the student and the practitioner. To learn more about this complex philosophy visit the Web of American Transcendentalism .

• How are you affected by nature? Do you find comfort in it? Do you reflect the moods of nature?
• What is the role of nature in your life?
• What is meant by an individual's spiritual side? How to you define it?
• Is there a connection between the individual's spirit and nature? If so, what is that connection?
• What does it mean to know something intuitively? For example, has a parent or a sibling ever known something was wrong with you without having talked with or seen you? What do we mean when we say "I just know it"?
• How do you demonstrate that you are an individual? Do you think independently of others or do you follow the crowd?
• Circulate among groups as they work. Ask students to record their answers on chart paper and post for the class as they finish their responses to the questions.
• Ask groups to share their notes with the class as you note similarities among the findings.
• By the end of the session, you should have established a shared, class definition of transcendentalism.  Post this definition on the board or chart paper for the students to refer to in following sessions.

Session Two

• What different moods does Emerson note in the excerpt?
• How is nature connected to these moods?
• What effect does nature have on Emerson? What does he mean when he says "I become a transparent eyeball"?
• In what ways does Emerson connect nature, humankind, and God?
• In what way does Nature serve as a teacher?
• How is nature portrayed as noble? As a source of comfort?
• How are human beings represented as part of nature?
• What can human beings learn from nature? How does this learning affect the individual's spirituality?
• Give students a few minutes to identify key quotations from the excerpt that reveal Emerson's thinking about the relationship between humans and nature and to record their observations in their journals. Encourage students to explain the relationship between the quotations they've chosen and the basic characteristics of transcendentalism, as identified in the previous session.
• After students have all had a chance to identify a quotation, ask them to share their quotation and ideas with the class.

Session Three

• Return to the ideas gathered in the previous sessions and summarize what you've discovered about transcendentalism to this point.
• Introduce Emerson's essay " Self-Reliance " as another text that demonstrates transcendental thought.
• What does Emerson mean when he says that "envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide"?
• What does he want each individual to recognize about him/herself? What does he say about "power" and "work"?
• How is trust a part of being self-reliant?
• Why does Emerson see society as the enemy of individuality?
• What is the role of nonconformity? What did that word mean to Emerson?
• What is a "foolish consistency"? How does it get in the way of genius?
• Ask students to identify the key elements of self-reliance as defined by Emerson in their readings. These elements should be generated by the responses to the questions.
• To summarize the characteristics of transcendental thought covered so far in the lesson, have students fill in the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive or handout . If time is short, this work can be completed as homework.
• Collect and review the graphic organizer to check students' understanding to this point.

Session Four

• Return to students' observations on the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive or handout . Invite students to share their findings and answer any questions about transcendentalism that they have at this point.
• Read the excerpts from Thoreau's Walden .
• Ask students to identify how Thoreau is practicing the philosophy Emerson writes about in the excerpts read previously. Students can use the information that they have recorded on the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive or handout as a resource at this point.
• Explain the historical connection between the two writers: Emerson as teacher and Thoreau as practitioner.
• If desired, students can complete the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive or copies of the handout again, this time recording examples from Thoreau's writings as a class, in small groups, or individually.
• Ask students to go back to the questions they answered in Session One, and have them revise their responses based on what they have learned so far about Transcendentalism.
• By the end of the session, you should have revised and clarified your class definition of transcendentalism (post/repost this new definition). Students should have a good working knowledge of the characteristics of transcendentalism before moving on to the next session.

Session Five

• Explain that during the next few sessions, you'll look for examples of transcendental thought in popular culture. In particular, you'll be looking at comic strips and songs, but encourage students to share examples that they find in other media as well (e.g., sitcoms, television dramas, children's cartoons, movies, commercials).
• Divide students into small groups, and provide each group with copies of several comic strips that reflect the transcendental qualities discussed to this point (see the article " Multigenre, Multiple Intelligences, and Transcendentalism " for examples and ideas). Ideally, if you have published collections of comic strips available, each group can search a book.
• Ask the students to read the strips paying close attention to both the text and the drawings with the goal of identifying the literary elements of transcendentalism.
• Review the characteristics of transcendentalism from previous sessions.
• Give the groups 15 to 20 minutes to read and enjoy the comics, asking them to find connections to the concepts you've discussed regarding transcendentalism. In their groups, ask students to record their findings using the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive or copies of the handout .
• After the allotted reading time, each group can share at least two comics that they've identified that have strong literary connections to the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau. As students share the comic strips, encourage them to discuss specific lines from the texts that you've studied that can be connected to the comics.
• As a homework assignment, students can locate other examples of comics that would provide literary links to what you've studied and bring those comics to class along with a paragraph of explanation. If desired, you could extend the lesson by inviting students to find examples in any media (e.g., sitcoms, television dramas, commercials) rather than limiting them to finding comic strips. Any connection to the ideas of transcendentalism is valid evidence of students' understanding of the concept—no need to limit their exploration to comics!

Session Six

• Spend the first 15–20 minutes of the session inviting students to share the examples that they found. Encourage students to connect the examples they've found to the examples from previous sessions.
• Explain that during this session you'll begin looking for examples of transcendentalism in songs. If one of your students has shared an example song for the homework, be sure to point to that song as an example of the kind of resources you'll be looking for during the next sessions.
• Play the example song that you've chosen for students. Provide copies of the lyrics if possible.
• Ask students to listen carefully and follow along with the lyrics while the song is playing. If students have copies of the lyrics, they can underline or highlight the relevant lyrics. Otherwise, ask students to write any words they hear that suggest the ideas of transcendentalism in their journals.
• After the song has finished playing, ask students to share their observations. Encourage students to make connections to the readings and the comic strips, as appropriate.
• For a more structured analysis, you can work as a class to complete the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive using an LCD project or to complete an overhead of the handout .
• Once you've explored the lyrics for an example song, explain the project that students will complete. Ask students to consider their own favorite songs and to bring a song to class—along with the lyrics and a brief paragraph of explanation of the connection between their choice and the ideas you've been exploring. Ideally, you should have some CDs or MP3s available in the classroom for students to choose from as well. If your library has music resources, be sure to point students to these collections as well. Be sure to provide enough options that students will be able to find a song to share regardless of the resources they may own personally.
• Remind students of the any school guidelines regarding violent or explicit lyrics. Students should choose songs that are appropriate to share with the class.
• If your school's guidelines allow, you might invite students to bring personal CD players to the next class session to facilitate sharing the songs.

Session Seven

• Play portions of songs expressing transcendental thought between classes and for the first few minutes of the period. Post chart paper around the room, listing musical genres—oldies/classics, pop/rock, R&B/rap, new age/classical, country. You may want to adjust the categories based on the kinds of music students show an interest in. For instance, you might separate R&B and rap if there are many songs in the two categories that students have brought to share.
• Invite students to discuss the reasons that the songs fit the characteristics of transcendental thought while the songs are playing.
• Take a few minutes for students to share some of the titles that they identified.
• Divide students into four to five small groups. Each group should have a CD player/MP3 player available so that students can play the songs that they've brought to class. If your facilities allow, spread groups out.
• Allow students the remainder of the class to explore the songs they've found.
• Taking turns, students from each group can add the artist and title for songs that they've identified to the chart paper in the room.

Session Eight

• Again, play portions of songs expressing transcendental thought between classes and for the first few minutes of the period.
• Provide time, if necessary, for groups to finish sharing their songs and recording artists and titles on the chart paper.
• Gather students together, and review the information on the posted chart paper.
• Which category has the most songs?
• What did you expect to see on the charts? Do they match your expectations?
• What surprises do you see about the lists?
• Are there kinds of songs that aren't well-represented?
• What would happen if songs were divided further, into sub-genres (e.g., heavy metal, alternative rock)?
• Are there artists whom you think of as following transcendental ideas? Do their songs represent those ideas?
• How do the songs that are listed represent your (e.g., the students') individualism?
• For a more structured analysis of the songs, you can work as a class to complete the Examples of Transcendental Thought interactive using an LCD project or to complete an overhead of the handout .
• Return to the class definition of transcendentalism. Ask students to consider how the class exploration of comic strips and music affect the definition. Revise the definition to fit students' observations (post/repost this new definition).
• Assign the final project for the unit , which will be used to assess students' understanding of the characteristics of transcendentalism. Provide students with another copy of the Examples of Transcendental Thought handout and the rubric for the activity.  Allow time for students to discuss and ask questions about the assignment and rubric.
• Make a point of explaining whether students can return to songs and comics for their final project, depending upon your goals. If you prefer that students use new genres for this final activity, you may adjust the rubric .
• As a class, brainstorm examples of resources that students can consult as they complete their charts. Encourage students to consider print and nonprint resources from a variety of genres and sources as they build their list of potential resources.
• Use the Comic Creator to write your own transcendental comics.
• Block out time for a free reading unit that allows students to explore additional genres and transcendentalism. See the article " Multigenre, Multiple Intelligences, and Transcendentalism " for more details and a booklist.

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Ongoing assessment for this activity should be based on observation of students’ work on the various genres considered by the class.
• Use the final project to gauge students’ comprehension of the characteristics of transcendentalism and their ability to analyze resources independently. Generally speaking, if students are able to complete the chart for the final project with specific examples from popular culture resources, they comprehend the characteristics of the transcendental movement. The rubric for the final project can structure your feedback for individual students.
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The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on).

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What Is Transcendentalism? Understanding the Movement

General Education

Confused about transcendentalism? You’re not alone! Transcendentalism is a movement that many people developed over a long period of time, and as a result, its complexity can make it hard to understand.

That’s where we come in. Read this article to learn a simple but complete transcendentalism definition, key transcendentalist beliefs, an overview of the movement's history, key players, and examples of transcendentalist works. By the end, you’ll have all the information you need to write about or discuss the transcendentalist movement.

What Is Transcendentalism?

It’s all about spirituality. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It centers around the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition. In other words, transcendentalists believe spirituality isn’t something you can explain; it’s something you feel. A transcendentalist would argue that going for a walk in a beautiful place would be a much more spiritual experience than reading a religious text.

The transcendentalism movement arose as a result of a reaction to Unitarianism as well as the Age of Reason. Both centered on reason as the main source of knowledge, but transcendentalists rejected that notion. Some of the transcendentalist beliefs are:

• Humans are inherently good
• Society and its institutions such as organized religion and politics are corrupting. Instead of being part of them, humans should strive to be independent and self-reliant
• Spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion
• Insight and experience are more important than logic
• Nature is beautiful, should be deeply appreciated, and shouldn’t be altered by humans

Major Transcendentalist Values

The transcendentalist movement encompassed many beliefs, but these all fit into their three main values of individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature.

Individualism

Perhaps the most important transcendentalist value was the importance of the individual. They saw the individual as pure, and they believed that society and its institutions corrupted this purity. Transcendentalists highly valued the concept of thinking for oneself and believed people were best when they were independent and could think for themselves. Only then could individuals come together and form ideal communities.

The focus on idealism comes from Romanticism, a slightly earlier movement. Instead of valuing logic and learned knowledge as many educated people at the time did, transcendentalists placed great importance on imagination, intuition and creativity . They saw the values of the Age of Reason as controlling and confining, and they wanted to bring back a more “ideal” and enjoyable way of living.

Divinity of Nature

Transcendentalists didn’t believe in organized religion, but they were very spiritual. Instead of believing in the divinity of religious figures, they saw nature as sacred and divine. They believed it was crucial for humans to have a close relationship with nature, the same way religious leaders preach about the importance of having a close relationship with God. Transcendentalists saw nature as perfect as it was; humans shouldn’t try to change or improve it.

History of the Transcendentalist Movement

What’s the history of transcendentalism? Here’s an overview of the movement, covering its beginning, height, and eventual decline.

While people had begun discussing ideas related to transcendentalism since the early 1800s, the movement itself has its origins in 1830s New England, specifically Massachusetts. Unitarianism was the major religion in the area, and it emphasized spirituality and enlightenment through logic, knowledge, and rationality. Young men studying Unitarianism who disagreed with these beliefs began to meet informally. Unitarianism was a particularly large part of life at Harvard University, where many of the first transcendentalists attended school.

In September 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson organized the first meeting of what would later be called the Transcendental Club. Together the group discussed frustrations of Unitarianism and their main beliefs, drawing on ideas from Romanticism, German philosophers, and the Hindu spiritual texts the Upanishads. The transcendentalists begin to publish writings on their beliefs, beginning with Emerson’s essay “Nature.”

The Transcendental Club continued to meet regularly, drawing in new members, and key figures, particularly Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, published numerous essays to further spread transcendentalist beliefs. In 1840, the journal The Dial was created for transcendentalists to publish their works. Utopia communities, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands attempted to make transcendentalism a complete lifestyle.

By the end of the 1840s, many key transcendentalists had begun to move onto other pursuits, and the movement declined. This decline was further hastened by the untimely death of Margaret Fuller, one of the leading transcendentalists and cofounder of The Dial. While there was a smaller second wave of transcendentalism during this time, the brief resurgence couldn’t bring back the popularity the movement had enjoyed the previous decade, and transcendentalism gradually faded from public discourse, although people still certainly share the movement’s beliefs. Even recently, movies such as The Dead Poets Society and The Lion King express transcendentalist beliefs such as the importance of independent thinking, self-reliance, and enjoying the moment.

Key Figures in the Transcendentalist Movement

At its height, many people supported the beliefs of transcendentalism, and numerous well-known names from the 19th century have been associated with the movement. Below are five key transcendentalists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is the key figure in transcendentalism. He brought together many of the original transcendentalists, and his writings form the foundation of many of the movement’s beliefs. The day before he published his essay “Nature” he invited a group of his friends to join the “Transcendental Club” a meeting of like-minded individuals to discuss their beliefs. He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches to promote transcendentalism. Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include “The Over-Soul,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and “Divinity School Address.”

Henry David Thoreau

The second-most important transcendentalist, Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s who is best known for his book Walden . Walden is focused on the benefits of individualism, simple living and close contact with and observation of nature. Thoreau also frequently opposed the government and its actions, most notably in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was perhaps the leading female transcendentalist. A well-known journalist and ardent supporter of women’s rights, she helped cofound The Dial , the key transcendentalist journal, with Emerson, which helped cement her place in the movement and spread the ideas of transcendentalism to a wider audience. An essay she wrote for the journal was later published as the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century , one of the earliest feminist works in the United States. She believed in  the importance of the individual, but often felt that other transcendentalists, namely Emerson, focused too much on individualism at the expense of social reform.

Amos Bronson Alcott

A friend of Emerson’s, Alcott (father of Little Women’ s Louisa May Alcott), was an educator known for his innovative ways of teaching and correcting students. He wrote numerous pieces on transcendentalism, but the quality of his writing was such that most were unpublishable. A noted abolitionist, he refused to pay his poll tax to protest President Tyler’s annexation of Texas as a slave territory. This incident inspired Thoreau to do a similar protest, which led to him writing the essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Frederic Henry Hedge

Frederic Henry Hedge met Emerson when both were students at Harvard Divinity School. Hedge was studying to become a Unitarian minister, and he had already spent several years studying music and literature in Germany. Emerson invited him to join the first meeting of the Transcendental Club (originally called Hedge’s Club, after him), and he attended meetings for several years. He wrote some of the earliest pieces later categorized as Transcendentalist works, but he later became somewhat alienated from the group and refused to write pieces for The Dial.

George Ripley

Like Hedge, Ripley was also a Unitarian minister and founding member of the Transcendental Club. He founded the Utopian community Brook Farm based on major Transcendentalist beliefs. Brook Farm residents would work the farm (whichever jobs they found most appealing) and use their leisure time to pursue activities they enjoyed, such as dancing, music, games, and reading. However, the farm was never able to do well financially, and the experiment ended after just a few years.

Criticisms of Transcendentalism

From its start, transcendentalism attracted numerous critics for its nontraditional, and sometimes outright alien, ideas. Many transcendentalists were seen as outcasts, and many journals refused to publish works written by them. Below are some of the most common criticisms.

Spirituality Over Organized Religion

For most people, the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism was that it promoted individual spirituality over churches and other aspects of organized religion. Religion was the cornerstone of many people’s lives at this time, and any movement that told them it was corrupting and to give it up would have been unfathomable to many.

Over-Reliance on Independence

Many people, even some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, felt that transcendentalism at times ignored the importance of community bonds and over-emphasized the need to rely on no one but one’s self , to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness. Some people believe that Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick was written as a critique of complete reliance on independence. In the novel, the character Ahab eschews nearly all bonds of camaraderie and is focused solely on his goal of destroying the white whale. This eventually leads to his death. Margaret Fuller also felt that transcendentalism could be more supportive of community initiatives to better the lives of others, such as by advocating for women’s and children’s rights.

Abstract Values

Have a hard time understanding what transcendentalists really wanted? So did a lot of people, and it made them view the movement as nothing more than a bunch of dreamers who enjoyed criticizing traditional values but weren’t sure what they themselves wanted. Edgar Allen Poe accused the movement of promoting “obscurity for obscurity's sake.”

Unrealistic Utopian Ideals

Some people viewed the transcendentalists’ focus on enjoying life and maximizing their leisure time as hopelessly naive and idealistic. Criticism frequently focused on the Utopian communities some transcendentalists created to promote communal living and the balance of work and labor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stayed at the Brook Farm communal living experiment, disliked his experience so much that he wrote an entire novel, The Blithedale Romance , criticizing the concept and transcendentalist beliefs in general.

Major Transcendentalist Works

Many transcendentalists were prolific writers, and examples abound of transcendentalism quotes, essays, books, and more. Below are four examples of transcendentalist works, as well as which of the transcendentalist beliefs they support.

“ Self-Reliance ” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson wrote this essay in 1841 to share his views on the issue of, you guessed it, self-reliance. Throughout the essay he discusses the importance of individuality and how people must avoid the temptation to conform to society at the expense of their true selves. It also contains the excellent line “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

There are three main ways Emerson says people should practice self-reliance is through non-conformity (“A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of conformity”), solitude over society (“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”), and spirituality that is found in one’s own self (“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps”). Self-reliance and an emphasis on the individual over community is a core belief of transcendentalism, and this essay was key in developing that view.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Published in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass included 12 untitled poems. Whitman was a fan of Emerson’s and was thrilled when the latter highly praised his work. The poems contain many transcendentalism beliefs, including an appreciation of nature, individualism, and spirituality.

A key example is the poem later titled “ Song of Myself ” which begins with the line “I celebrate myself” and goes on to extoll the benefits of the individual “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me”, the enjoyment of nature (“The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”), the goodness of humans (“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun”), and the connections all humans share (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”).

“ The Summer Rain ” by Henry David Thoreau

This transcendentalism poem, like many of Thoreau’s works, focuses on the beauty and simplicity of nature. Published in 1849, the poem describes the narrator’s delight at being in a meadow during a rainstorm.

The poem frequently mentions the enjoyment that observing nature can bring, and there are many descriptions of the meadow such as, “A clover tuft is pillow for my head/And violets quite overtop my shoes.” But Thoreau also makes a point to show that he believes nature is more enjoyable and a better place to learn from than intellectual pursuits like reading and studying. He begins the poem with this verse: “My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read/'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large/Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,/And will not mind to hit their proper targe” and continues later on with “Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,/What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,/If juster battles are enacted now/Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?”

He makes clear that he is comparing works of Shakespeare and Homer to the joys of nature, and he finds nature the better and more enjoyable way to learn. This is in line with Transcendentalist beliefs that insight and experience are more rewarding than book learning.

“ What Is Beauty? ” by Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child, a women’s rights activist and abolitionist, wrote this essay, which was published in The Dial in 1843. The essay discusses what constitutes beauty and how we can appreciate beauty.

It frequently references the transcendentalist theme that intuition and insight are more important than knowledge for understanding when something is beautiful, such as in the line “Beauty is felt, not seen by the understanding.” All the knowledge in the world can’t explain why we see certain things as beautiful; we simply know that they are.

Summary: Transcendentalism Definition

What’s a good transcendentalism definition? Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement centered around spirituality that was popular in the mid-19th century. Key transcendentalism beliefs were that humans are inherently good but can be corrupted by society and institutions, insight and experience and more important than logic, spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion, and nature is beautiful and should be respected.

The transcendentalist movement reached its height in the 1830s and 1840s and included many well-known people, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalists wrote widely, and by reading their works you can get a better sense of the movement and its core beliefs.

What's Next?

Taking the AP Literature exam? Check out our ultimate guide to the AP English Literature test and our list of AP Literature practice tests .

No matter what you're reading, it's important to understand literary devices. Here are 31 literary devices you should know.

There's a lot of imagery in transcendentalism poems and other writings. Learn everything you need to know about imagery by reading our guide.

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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74 Transcendentalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best transcendentalism topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting transcendentalism topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about transcendentalism, ❓ questions about transcendentalism.

• Transcendentalism in American Literature The emergence of new transcendental ideas reshaped the American literature introduced in the works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman in such a way that it contributed to the excellence and maturity of the literary world […]
• Transcendentalism: The Role of Emerson and Whitman Emerson argued that American intellectuals should create their unique style of scholarship and literature, while Whitman celebrated the beauty and diversity of America in his poetry.
• Albert Bierstadt’s “Rocky Mountain Landscape”: Transcendentalism Artwork Romanticism is one of the most famous periods of the development of art and the formation of new views about the world.
• Transcendentalism of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Olfactory imagery is mostly used, which indicates the utilization of smells and fragrances. The author emphasizes that he is alone and has no company, which enables him to blend in with his surroundings.
• History of American Transcendentalism The most prominent topic was the status of intellectualism at Harvard in addition, to the canon of the Unitarian church trained at Harvard School of religion.
• The Literary Movement of Transcendentalism
• The Philosophical and Religious Movement of Transcendentalism
• The Mockery of Transcendentalism in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Spirit of Individualism: Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism in Modern America
• Transcendentalism Through the Political Thought of Emerson Thoreau and Fuller
• The Emphasis on Freedom and Individuality in American Philosophy: Epicureanism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and Protestantism
• Transcendentalism in Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Relationship Between Romanticism and Transcendentalism
• The Philosophy Embodied by Dead Poets Society: Transcendentalism
• Understanding Thoreau and Transcendentalism
• The Important Role of Transcendentalism in American History
• Transcendentalism: The Antidote to Brainwashed Youth
• The Idea of Transcendentalism and the Search for Improvement in Society by Emerson and Thoreau
• The Impacts of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the Field of Philosophy and Transcendentalism
• Themes of Transcendentalism in Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
• The Influence of Transcendentalism in the Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Roots of Transcendentalism and the United States
• The Concept of Transcendentalism in Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Comparison Between Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• The Belief of Anti-Transcendentalism in A Man Said to the Universe, a Poem by Stephen Crane
• The Points of Transcendentalism and Anti-Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
• Understanding of Transcendentalism According to Henry David Thoreau
• The Features of Transcendentalism and Its Representatives
• Romanticism and Transcendentalism in Dead Poets Society
• The Ideas of Transcendentalism in the Works of William Bryant, Henry Thoreau, and Ralph Emerson
• Utopian Thought and Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism in Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson’s Literature
• The Transcendentalism in the 19th Century and the Plunge After the Civil War
• Transcendentalism: The Leading Power of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A Sociological Analysis of Transcendentalism, a Philosophical Movement of the Early 18th Century
• How Transcendentalism Is Impossible Without Change
• Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, and Puritan Theology
• An Analysis of the Anti-Transcendentalism in Moby Dick, a Novel by Herman Melville
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Influence of Transcendentalism
• The Principles of Transcendentalism Brought Out in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance
• Walt Whitman and the Emergence of Transcendentalism
• Identities and Transcendentalism in Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
• An Analysis of the Topic of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Concept of Transcendentalism
• The American Renaissance: Transcendentalism, Romanticism, and Dark Romanticism
• Man’s Relationship with Nature: Transcendentalism
• Puritanism and Transcendentalism in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• What Is a Simple Definition of Transcendentalism?
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• What’s the Difference Between Romanticism and Transcendentalism?
• Is Transcendentalism the Same as Individualism?
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