What is Transcendentalism?

Definition 

Transcendentalism was a philosophical, literary, and spiritual movement that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Inspired in part by Romanticism and Unitarianism (a nontrinitarian branch of Christianity), Transcendentalism sought to better understand the world and humankind’s place within it, focusing on self-discovery, nature, and God. Through this engagement with the natural world around them, Transcendentalists believed that a spiritual ascendance—or, rather, transcendence—to a higher state of being was possible. 

Beginning in New England in Concord, Massachusetts with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and rallying lectures, Transcendentalism grew to a small coterie of writers, thinkers, and social activists including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Within this circle, they pondered ontological ideas about identity, centering on individualistic ideas, warning against the pitfalls of modern society, and celebrating the inherent goodness within the individual.

These ideas profoundly shaped American thought, literature and culture. Indeed, Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen write that “[w]e may, with some exaggeration, say that America’s cultural independence begins with Emerson” (American Literature, 2013). Philip Gura situates the Transcendentalists as “one of the nation’s first coherent intellectual groups” and writes that “[w]e cannot overestimate the excitement the Transcendentalists’ ideas generated” (American Transcendentalism, 2008); and Octavius Brooks Frothingham declares Transcendentalism as “an important factor in American life”:

Indeed, Transcendentalism influenced abolitionist work and also impacted attitudes towards education. It also shaped what Mary Kupiec Cayton calls the modern “culture of bourgeois individualism” in America (Emerson’s Emergence, 2017). With all this in mind, one can start to trace Transcendentalism’s footsteps across the landscape of American culture throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

This guide examines some of these footsteps, with an overview of Transcendentalism’s origins and influences, its core philosophical tenets, the movement’s investments in literature and politics, and its legacy.

Origins and influences 

As many critics have noted, the word “Transcendentalism” is “notoriously vague” (Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 2016). This ambiguity is quite fitting as “the Transcendentalists had no specific program or common cause, and their beliefs were often in a state of flux” (Buell, 2016). Instead of an organized school of thought, Transcendentalism was a loose constellation of thinkers parsing ideas about selfhood and spirituality. Similarly, it was brought to life by a number of different artistic and philosophical influences. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Christianity, and Romanticism 

Although he often side-stepped such labels, Ralph Waldo Emerson is often positioned at the center of this constellation of Transcendentalist thinkers as the inciting spark that brought the movement to life. Born in 1803, Emerson attended Harvard College before training for the Unitarian ministry—a sect which had rejected some of the more rigid doctrines of Calvinism—where he was ordained in Boston in 1829 (American Literature, 2013). Emerson found the structures of Unitarianism “too formalistic and restrictive” and he resigned from his pastorate in 1832 and instead leaned into what would become Transcendentalist thought (Bertens and D’haen, 2013). As Bertens and D’haen state, "Emerson saw systems and dogmas as constraints that keep us from realizing our full potential as human beings"(2013).

After a tour through Europe, where Emerson encountered many poets and writers—including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, who further crystallized his Romantic thought—he returned to New England and began what would become a phenomenal career of writing and lecturing. As Phyllis Cole explains, it was Emerson’s combination of theology and poetry that prompted this "enfranchisement of the individual mind, a movement known among its adherents simply as ‘the newness” (“Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Transcendentalism,” A Companion to American Literature, 2020). 

Kant’s influence

Along with the poets he met in Europe, Emerson was inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that individuals can use reason to make sense of the world. Kant's work, as Frothingham writes, “opened a new epoch in metaphysical thought” (2001).

Transcendentalism was thus angled sharply away from empiricism and the philosophy of John Locke. Locke theorized that knowledge can only be garnered through our senses: the external world, what we see and hear, and directly experience. Instead, Emerson believed in intuition and insight. He wrote in his 1836 essay “Nature”: 

The belief in an inherent self who possessed innate intuition and ‘goodness’ motivated much of Transcendentalism’s philosophical expressions. (To learn more about Kant, see our guides "What is Kantian Ethics?" and "What is the Enlightenment?")

Sparked by Romantic poets, developed in resistance to empiricism, and formed through Kant’s criticism of “Reason,” Transcendentalism was fashioned out of this cross-webbed network of thought, poetry and philosophy. 

Hinduism 

Alongside Emerson’s interest in German Idealism and European Romanticism, Transcendentalism was also indebted to Indian religions and Hinduism in particular. In his famous Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau directly acknowledges these vital influences: 

Excited by the divergences from American Christianity, both Emerson and Thoreau drew from the well of thought, religion, and philosophy of Brahmanism (an ancient sacred tradition that was borne out of the early Vedic religion). As Michael Altman writes, 

Transcendentalism was thus formed through a number of different approaches: from ancient Indian religions and philosophies, to Romanticism and Kant’s German Idealism. Inspired by these ideas, Transcendentalism was brought to life through club meetings and the circulation of these ideas, expressed through essays and speeches. 

The emergence of the movement and key thinkers 

A small social club grew out of Emerson’s ideas. Cole writes that this sect blossomed out of a “hunger for anti-establishment talk,” where only later did its members find and accept the term “Transcendentalists” (2020). At first, they playfully called themselves the “Symposium,” which was a nod to the conversational network around Plato, whom they greatly admired. Margaret Fuller joined this group in 1837, where she would play an active role.

The club launched a journal named The Dial in 1840, which Fuller edited. Elizabeth Peabody, who owned a bookshop named the Foreign Library in Boston, hosted readings, discussions, and some of the club’s formal meetings, and published the Dial in 1842 and 1843, as well as other works by Fuller and William Henry Channing (Cole, 2020). These conversations—both in person and within the pages of the Dial—served as the basis for Transcendentalism as a movement, where their ideas circulated and gained traction. 

Other key Transcendentalist thinkers include writer Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) and journalist and reformer, George Ripley.

Core tenets 

The belief that God is located in the soul

In “Nature”, Emerson announced that “God is within us” (1836). In Transcendentalism's rebellion from American Christianity, the movement’s spiritual impulse proposed a new spiritual orientation that was propelled through an inward turn, locating God within the soul. As E. Brooks Holifield writes: 

Thus, this was not the personal God of American Christianity but, rather, a universal spiritual truth. 

Nature vs. society

Transcendentalists believed that individuals could become closer to this truth, to God, through an engagement with nature. Nature was viewed both as a conduit for spiritual insight and as a reflection of the divine. Max Oelschlaeger elaborates on Emerson’s beliefs:

These ideas were developed through Thoreau’s work, which was informed by two years living at Walden Pond, and travels across Canada, Minnesota, and Maine’s various rivers, forests, and mountains. These “excursions,” Oelschlaeger writes, 

Where excursions and engagements with the natural world offered the route to transcendence and a connection to spiritual truth; society and civilization are viewed as corruptive forces. As Emerson writes, 

This is a two-way exchange:

If a commune with nature and solitude promises cosmic connection with a higher plane, inner growth and empowerment; then society was thought to detracted from this. 

Education and self-development

Accompanying this idealization of the “self-made manhood in the wilderness,” as Stefan L. Brandt describes it, was a radical belief in the potential for renewal and enlightenment through education (“Lighting for our Territories: Ecomasculinities in U.S. American Literature,” The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture, 2021). Unlike the Calvinist doctrines and their belief in original sin, Transcendentalists believed that the individual is inherently good and therefore has an innate potential for transcendence and, a closeness to divine truth. Alongside this ran a core belief in the power of education, as a means of what Martha Davis explains as a “calling forth” and cultivating “the divinity within man” (Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists, 2004). Thus, education was viewed as an integral tool for an individual's moral growth. 

Literature 

Transcendentalism was a literary movement, as well as a philosophical and spiritual one. Indeed, these aspects were often interlinked, where Lawrence Buell explores how Transcendentalists admired the vocation of the “poet-priest” (Literary Transcendentalism, 2016). There was, Buell argued, a distinct literary method at play, working across various (and sometimes contradictory) styles that flitted between manifesto, mediation, prophecy, sermon, reverie, pastoral, bardic, and poetic, in order to explore Transcendentalism (2016).

For example, Walt Whitman’s poetry drew on ideas of nature, the individual self and spirituality, combining these elements in free verse to form pieces like “Song of Myself” (1855): 

Transcendentalism’s core belief in the profound connection between the individual and nature can be seen in this joyous celebration. 

Many works of literature were inspired by Transcendentalism, including Emily Dickinson’s poems and Louisa May Alcott’s work. (For more on these writers, see The Poems of Emily Dickinson [2005] and Louisa May Alcott: Complete Works [2023].)

Politics

As abstract or dreamy as Transcendentalism can sometimes appear, set around a small privileged set of New England thinkers, the movement was actively invested in social action, advocating for the abolition of slavery, supporting women’s rights, and religious tolerance. The Romantic rhetoric that Transcendentalism developed was motivated by moral beliefs, ethical engagements, and a belief in the goodness of the individual. As Bill E. Lawson writes, this focus on the individual was both a belief in “the role of the individual as both an agent of change and the embodiment of the nature of personhood” (“Douglass among the Romantics,” The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, 2009).

Essays and public lectures by Emerson and Thoreau on individual freedom and a rejection of political conservatism contributed to the broader abolitionist movement. Peter Wirzbicki also explores how Transcendental thought was further developed as a political philosophy, stating that “the philosophy of Transcendentalism and the politics of abolitionism” were “mutually reinforcing” where they “helped create each other” (Fighting for the Higher Law, 2021).

Impact and legacy

Fostered around ideas of solitude and born through conversations in small meetings, the narrative of Transcendentalism’s beginnings sits in sharp contrast with its profound impact and legacy. Its ideas are stitched firmly into America’s intellectual fabric, where ideas about individualism, self-reliance, personal freedoms, and the groundwork of neoliberalism can be traced back to the Transcendentalists. 

At the heart of Transcendentalist thought, some core questions can be gleaned: how do we see the world and how should we interact with it? These deceptively simple questions that the Transcendentalists delved into are still incredibly pertinent ones, especially in light of our current relationships with the environment, global politics, and the climate crisis. 

The New York Unitarian minister Samuel Osgood, declared in 1876 that “[t]he sect of Transcendentalists has disappeared because their light has gone everywhere” (quoted in Cole, 2020). Indeed, Transcendentalism’s legacy continues and can act like a key, as Cole argues, to “understanding American culture both in the nineteenth century and since" (2020). It may be felt, in many different ways: through reading the foundational texts; in continuing to ask vital questions about humanity’s relationship to others and the non-human, too; in its paradoxes and imperfections; and perhaps when we look up at the stars on a clear night, as Emerson urged us to do.

Further reading on Transcendentalism 

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination (2020) by Devin P. Zuber

The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (2012) by Marek Paryz

Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (2016) by Paul Outka

Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (2014) edited by Jana Argersinger and Phyllis Cole

Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (2018) by Richard Francis

Walking (2016) by Henry David Thoreau

Wilderness in America (2017) by Henry Bugbee

External resources 

Cole, P. (1998) Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History. Oxford University Press. 

Gao, S. and Coles, B. (2024) Nature, Spirituality and Place: Comparative Study Between American Transcendentalism and Chinese Religions. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. 

Myerson, J. (2000) Transcendentalism: A Reader. Oxford University Press.

Myerson, J., Petrulionis, S. H., and Walls, L. D. (2010) The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Oxford University Press. 

Bibliography 

Alcott, L. M. (2023) Louisa May Alcott: Complete Works. Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. Available at:

https://www.perlego.com/book/3950100/louisa-may-alcott-complete-works-illustrated-little-women-eight-cousins-little-men-good-wives

Altman, M. (2022) Hinduism in America: An Introduction. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3282591  

Bertens, H. and D’haen, T. (2013) American Literature: A History. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1612540 

Brandt, S. L. (2021)"Lighting for our Territories: Ecomasculiniities in U.S. American Literature’, in Cooper, L. (ed) The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3042563 
Buell, L. (2016) Literary Transcendentalism. Cornell University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/593382 

Cayton, M. K. (2017) Emerson’s Emergence. The University of North Carolina Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/539648 

Cole, P. (2020) “Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Transcendentalism” in A Companion to American Literature, ed. by S. Belasco et al. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2749397

Davis, M. (2004) Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists. Yale University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1089922 

Dickinson, E. (2005)The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Belknap Press. Available at:

https://www.perlego.com/book/1148624/the-poems-of-emily-dickinson-reading-edition

Emerson, R. W. (2018) Essays Dreamscape Media. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/650102 

Emerson, R. W. (2018) Self-Reliance: The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living. CDED. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4326151 

Frothingham, O. B. (2001) Transcendentalism in New England: A History. Wipf and Stock. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1725081 

Gura, P. (2008) American Transcendentalism. Hill and Wang. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4376908 

Holifield, B. (2008) Theology in America. Yale University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1161363 

Kant, I. (2012) Critique of Pure Reason. Dover Publications. Available at:

https://www.perlego.com/book/113292/critique-of-pure-reason

Lee, M. (2009) The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3549154 

Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness. Yale University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1090054 

Thoreau, H. D. (2017) Walden, or Life in the Woods. Dreamscape Media. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/650263 

Thoreau, H. D. (2019) Civil Disobedience. Big Cheese Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2723087

Whitman, W. (2018) Leaves of Grass. Canterbury Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/838580 

Wirzbicki, P. (2021) Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3279382