Transcendentalism

While Thoreau was at Walden Pond, the Mexican War erupted. Believing it an unjust war to advance the cause of slavery, he refused to pay his state poll tax as a gesture of opposition, for which he was put in jail (for only one night; an aunt paid the tax). The incident was so trivial as to be almost comic, but out of it grew the classic essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849), which was later to influence the passive-resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the American South.

A group of New England writers that came to be known as transcendentalists believed that individuals should not conform to the materialistic world or to some abstract notion of religion. Instead, people should look within themselves for truth and guidance. The leading transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson – an essayist, poet, and lecturer – proclaimed that most Americans failed to lift their eyes from the mundane task of making a living. “We hear…too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts," Emerson wrote. The power of the solitary individual was nearly limitless. Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and other transcendentalists agreed with Emerson that “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” In many ways, transcendentalism represented less an alternative to the values of mainstream society than an exaggerated form of the rampant individualism.

It was a literary and philosophical movement known a transcendentalism that inspired the era’s most memorable experiments in thinking and living on a higher plane. The main idea was that the individual could transcend material reality and ordinary understanding, attaining through a higher form of reason – or intuition – a oneness with the universe as a whole and with the spiritual forces that lay behind it. Transcendentalism was the major American version of the romantic and idealist thought that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Throughout the Western world, romanticism was challenging the rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment. Most American transcendentalists were Unitarians or ex-Unitarians who were dissatisfied with the sober rationalism of their denomination and sought a more intense kind of spiritual experience.

Their prophet was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a brilliant essayist and lecturer who preached that each individual could commune directly with a benign spiritual force that animated nature and the universe, which he called the “oversoul.” A radical individualist committed to “self-culture” and “the sufficiency of the private man,” Emerson avoided all involvement in organized movements or associations because he believed they limited the freedom of the individual to develop inner resources and find a personal path to spiritual illumination. In the vicinity of Emerson’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, a group of like-minded seekers of truth and spiritual fulfillment gathered during the 1830s and 1840s.

As intellectuals, the transcendentalists were probably the first group in America to establish a substantial cultural presence without church or state sponsorship. Although some, like Emerson and George Ripley, began as Unitarian ministers, by the transcendental heyday of the 1840s most had left that calling for lecturing, publishing, freelance teaching and writing, or subsistence pursuits that left time free for philosophizing and writing. Both their insistence on the radical integrity of individual judgment and their reliance on new forms of disseminating their ideas secure their status as the first intellectual flowering of American democratic culture. Not that transcendentalists joined the Democratic party; most, in fact, to the extent that they were overtly political, supported the Whig party's moralistic programs of self-culture and reform. Their relationship to the marketplace, moreover, was ambivalent, as they utilized the burgeoning commercial medium of print to criticize the new economic order By the late 1850s, transcendentalism as a distinct movement had disbanded. But enough of the transcendental worldview had filtered into the popular imagination that one can say not that the movement collapsed, but rather that the culture absorbed it.