American Transcendentalism

The claim

Each person has direct access to truth through intuition, without mediation by church, tradition or authority. Nature is not scenery but a language in which the same truths are written.

What it held

Transcendentalism is what happened when German idealism arrived in New England through Coleridge and Carlyle and met Unitarianism, Puritan conscience and an enormous amount of unsettled land.

Emerson's argument in Nature and the essays is that revelation is not finished. Every person can have the original relation to the universe that the founders of religions had, and deferring to their account of it is a failure of nerve. Self-Reliance is the manifesto and it is more astringent than its reputation: it says explicitly that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that most people live at second hand.

Thoreau took it to practice. Two years at Walden was an experiment in how little is actually required, and Civil Disobedience — written after a night in jail for refusing a tax that funded slavery and the Mexican war — argues that a person of conscience must be a counter-friction to the machine.

Margaret Fuller applied the same principles to women's position, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which predates Mill's Subjection of Women by twenty-four years.

How it argued

Essay and lecture rather than treatise, with nature and biography as evidence, and deliberate refusal of system.

What it was arguing against

Lockean empiricism as taught at Harvard, established religion, and the pressure to conform that Emerson thought the greatest American vice.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether intuition can be a source of knowledge or is a name for unexamined conviction. Whether the movement's individualism supported its politics or undercut them.

Common misconceptions

That Thoreau was a hermit. Walden Pond is a mile and a half from Concord, he walked into town constantly, and his mother did some of his laundry — none of which touches the argument, though it is regularly used as if it did.

How it began

The Transcendental Club, formed in 1836 by young Unitarian ministers dissatisfied with the philosophy they had been taught.

What became of it

Dispersed by the Civil War, its energies going into abolition. As a movement it lasted about twenty-five years.

Lasting influence

Civil Disobedience reached Gandhi and King, both of whom acknowledged it. American nature writing and environmentalism descend from Thoreau. Whitman is unimaginable without Emerson.

Why it still matters

The argument that conscience may require breaking the law is one of the most consequential in political ethics, and its clearest statement is here.

Put another way

A pond, small and local, in which someone found it worth looking closely at everything.

Where to start

Self-Reliance, then Civil Disobedience. Both are short and both are arguments.

The surprising bit

Thoreau spent one night in jail. An aunt paid the tax against his wishes and he was released, annoyed about it, and the essay is the result.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

German Idealism

Opposed by

British Empiricism

Influenced

Classical Pragmatism

The verdict

A small New England movement that produced the founding text of modern nonviolent resistance.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy