Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement of the nineteenth century that was characterized by the beliefs set forth Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature." Emerson characterized the "transcendentalist", in general, as a person who displayed a "tendency to respect [his] intuitions." Transcendentalism came about as a result of theological discussions that began during the mid 1830s by a group of diverse individuals who came to be known as "The Transcendental Club." The members included the above mentioned Emerson as well as authors like Henry David Thoreau, clergymen like William Channing, mystics and educationalists like Amos Alcott; it eventually included farmers, college professors, merchants, and even women like feminist literary critic, and author of Women in the 19th Century, Margaret Fuller.

Emerson claimed that the term, transcendental was derived from Kant who spoke of "Transcendental forms" which were "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." In addition to its roots in European philosophies such as Kant's, Transcendentalism's origins can also be found in Romanticism and the ideas of European Romantic movement. Several of the ideas like the transcendentalists' vague conception of godlike nature of the human spirit, the insistence on the authority of individual conscience, the placing of imagination above rationality, and the conception of nature as an organism, a symbol, an analogue of the mind, and a moral educator to the intuitive can all be traced back to roots in European Romanticism.

The "absolute truths" for transcendentalists were the insights gained through "creative intuition" which was a capacity that everyone had unless it had been "destroyed by living a life of externals and accepting as true only secondhand and traditional beliefs." The central purpose of Emerson's essay "Nature" was to answer the question "What is the end of nature?" Nature was defined as everything that is "not I" including the body, the environment, etc. Emerson believed that nature was manifestation of the order of the divine (i.e. the mind, God, etc.) and it served to educate the human mind through its adversity to humans and through its being something to be analyzed and understood. Coleridge defined understanding as the uncertain knowledge of appearances of objects in nature, and he defined reason as the a priori knowledge of necessary truths gained through intuition. Transcendentalism, in addition to being a somewhat mystical philosophy, was also an idealistic one because of the belief that nature need not exist independently of the mind in order to serve its purpose.

Since transcendentalists believed that this pathway to absolute truth was accessible to everyone, they strongly emphasized the importance of individualism and this is most apparent in the works of Henry David Thoreau who said,

It is easy to live in the world after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.