School of thought
Transcendentalism
Movement
Classification
- Period
- c. 1836-1860 CE
- Regions
- North America (origin)
- Domains
- Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Nature
Overview
American Transcendentalism held that the individual soul has direct access to spiritual truth through intuition, nature, and self-reliance, without the mediation of institutions or inherited tradition. Emerson celebrated the divinity within each person; Thoreau put these ideas into practice through simple living at Walden Pond and principled civil disobedience.
Key ideas
- Self-Reliance: Trust your own inner voice over social conformity. 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.' Imitation is suicide; each person must find and follow their own genius.
- The Oversoul: All individual souls participate in one universal spirit — the Oversoul — connecting every person to every other and to nature itself.
- Civil Disobedience: Thoreau argued that when the law is unjust, the moral individual has a duty to resist. His ideas later inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Key figures
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Henry David Thoreau · Margaret Fuller · Amos Bronson Alcott
Influenced by
- Kantian Critical Philosophy
Emerson took three of Kant's claims, learned at second hand through Coleridge, Hedge and de Staël: the mind itself forms experience, that fact answers Locke's skepticism, and 'transcendental' names what makes experience possible rather than what lies beyond it. He blended them with Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism, and for many in the movement the word meant confidence in the mind's powers more than an inquiry into the conditions of experience.
- Romanticism
- Vedic Philosophy
Later connections
- Environmental Ethics Influenced by this tradition
- Pragmatism Influenced by this tradition
Took from Emerson a way of doing philosophy as cultural criticism that turns away from European philosophy's preoccupation with the foundations of knowledge, together with his stress on human power to transform circumstances.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism (the entry's narrative closes in early 1860, months before the Civil War, with Emerson and Thoreau's commemorations of John Brown), the end date used here
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism, §1 — Formation: the movement arose in New England around Emerson's circle and his Nature (1836).
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism, §1 'Origins and Character' (Hedge, de Staël and Marsh's edition of Coleridge as sources for Kant; Emerson's 'The Transcendentalist' (1842) and the three Kantian claims traced through his philosophy)
- Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Walden — Henry David Thoreau