http://www.google.fr/#hl=fr&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=inventing+ +american+literature&oq=inventing+ +american+literature&gs_l=hp.12...624.4945.0.6988.22.16.0.2.2.2.1341.7350.43j2j3j2.10.0...0.0.xjjL8HjwAyE&pbx=1&fp=1&biw=1280&bih=601&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw .r_qf.,cf.osb&cad=b : inventing american literature http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/ideas/studentdef.

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Transcendental Ideas: Definitions

Student Definitions
Meg Brulatour, Virginia Commonwealth University Gertrude Reif Hughes calls Emerson a "vitalist" in Emerson's Demanding Optimism. Thoreau might better appreciate the term; it has a robust ring to it. She quotes The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought as defining vitalism as "a miscellany of beliefs united by the contention that living processes are not to be explained in terms of the material composition and physicochemical performances of living bodies" (162). This returns to Kant; it seems that to be a transcendentalist, one must first be a vitalist, although critics of transcendentalism would say "miscellany" is a correct if somewhat mild term for its rather fluid tenets. (Charles Dickens said, "I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would certainly be Transcendental.") But take "vitalism" one step further: animation is a vital principle in its own right, yes but if the "material composition," etc., are the symbols of that lively spirit then Emerson's vision of transcendentalism is clarified. The universe is one great entity, "composed of Nature and the Soul . . . . Nature is the symbol of the spirit" (Nature). Transcendentalism earned a reputation as a "collection of miscellany" because such variety of thought is built into the definition. Emerson and Thoreau admonish their audiences to go their own way rather than emulate the authors. Emerson declared he wanted no followers; it would disappoint him if his ideas created hangers-on rather than "independence;" he would then doubt his own theories and fear he was guilty of some "impurity of insight." Discipleship would automatically break two prime tenets of transcendentalism: first, that individualism stems from listening to one's "inner voice;" and that one's life is guided by one's intuition; societal leadership is not necessary nor desirable. However, under that light, many written works fall under the title "transcendentalism"! After all, particularly in modern poetry, the author usually is expressing a very personal point of view, frequently framed in an "unconventional" meter that further expresses his or her meaning. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the German philosopher Immanuel Kant the credit for making "Transcendentalism" a familiar term. Contrary to Locke's theory, that before any concept could be intellectualized it must first be experienced by the senses, Kant said there were experiences that could be acquired through "intuitions of the mind;" he referred to the "native spontaneity of the human mind." In his essay, "Nature," Emerson explained how every idea has its source in natural phenomena, and that the attentive person can "see" those ideas in nature. Intuition allowed the transcendentalist to disregard external authority and to rely, instead, on direct experience.

In his essay "The Transcendentalist," Emerson explained transcendentalism is "Idealism as it appears in 1842" and linked it with "the very oldest thoughts" such as Buddhism. Transcendentalism in the 19th Century was more than a trend in American literature. It was a philosophical movement, but it owed its development as much to democracy as to European philosophers. Transcendentalism centered on the divinity of each individual; but this divinity could be self-discovered only if the person had the independence of mind to do so. American thought lent itself to this concept of independence. If one can judge by the voter participation in presidential elections (at least 70% of those registered to vote did so, throughout Emerson's lifetime and up to the turn of the century), Americans certainly thought their individual voices were of value. Emerson, and others, believed in what he called the Oversoul. (Walt Whitman called it the "float").There is an inner "spark" contained by and connecting all facets of nature, including humankind, which can be discovered not through logical reasoning but only through intuition, the creative insight and interpretation of one's own inner voices. Transcendentalists called for an independence from organized religion; they saw no need for any intercession between God and man. Divinity is self-contained, internalized in every being. Transcendentalism gives credence to the unlimited potential of human ability to connect with both the natural and spiritual world. The chief aim is to become fully aware not only of what our senses record, but also to recognize the ability of our inner voiceour intuitionto wisely and correctly interpret the sensory input. Transcendentalists were idealistic and optimistic because they believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. All they had to do was learn to read, through their intuition, the external symbols of nature and translate them into spiritual facts. A transcendentalist declared there was meaning in everything and that meaning was good, all connected by and parts of a divine plan. Emerson refuted evil by insisting it was not an entity in itself but rather simply the absence of good. If good was allowed, evil dissipated. One ray of light can penetrate darkness. According to the transcendentalists, everyone had the power to "transcend" the seeming confusion and chaos of the world and understand nature's signs. Everything on earth has the divine "spark" within and thus is all part of a whole. This philosophy led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism. One aspect of individualism is the value of the individual over society. To "transcend" society one must first be able to look past and beyond it. One must follow his instincts and not conform to what society dictates. Although society will influence an individual towards conformity, it is important to remain true to one's self and to one's identity. Secondly, individualism includes being self-reliant. In his essay, "Self-Reliance", Emerson urges the reader to "trust thyself." Anti-transcendentalists rejected this optimistic outlook on humanity and life. They declared such optimism nave and unrealistic. The anti-transcendentalists reflected a more pessimistic attitude and focused on man's uncertainty and limited potential in the universe. They viewed nature as vast and incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good and evil. The anti-transcendentalist felt humans were depraved and had to struggle for goodness. Although they thought goodness was attainable for some, they believed in evil as its own entity. They believed sin was an active force; it was not just the absence of good; they really did think, on some level, that the devil existed. The anti-transcendentalists believed in a higher authority and that nature is ultimately the creation and possession of God and can not be understood by humans.

Anti-transcendentalists feared that people who desired complete individualism would give into the worse angles of man's nature. They viewed transcendentalism as selfish and impractical. Anti-transcendentalists were concerned that without external constraints, such as societal mores, people would be motivated only by their immediate need and desire for sensory gratification. Here, they apparently missed a basic idea of transcendentalism: the call to rise above "animalistic" impulses as one moves from the rational to the spiritual realm.

Lee Gentry, Virginia Commonwealth University In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist":
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own . . . . Is Transcendentalism any more than Idealism? Can it offer the human race any profound wisdom and guidance as we live our lives in a world where there seems to be constant need to validate human existence? Is it then enough for a philosophy to encourage instinct and reason and self-reliance, and to profess as its only doctrine that God is of immanent principle in every individual?

Is transcendentalism just another sect, another tributary of a major religion, trying in a unique way to find the light that leads to truth? Are the transcendentalist followers really no different than the Christians and the Jews and Buddhists all who claim their way to be the only way? Possibly, but rather than view the transcendentalists as egotistical men and women rooted in a faith (perhaps to others thwarted in vain) we might consider the side of transcendentalists that allows the encompassing of all religions and does not exclude the religions of the world. Thus transcendentalism, in its broadest sense, has no doctrine of expectations, but believes the spiritual reflection of each person as they move from the rational to the spiritual is the very essence of life. And this is an individual accomplishment. The word transcend implies a movement toward something. If transcendentalism is considered a religion it is the all-encompassing religion that transcends all other man-made philosophies. As Thoreau said "Give me one world at time" and we might consider his purpose in these words. Does he mean we are to enjoy this earthy world and not consider what lies ahead or beyond the physical? I think not. Not in the sense that Thoreau would justify ignoring the world around us as a miracle in itself. He certainly made it clear that even in Concord there were plenty of miracles to explore without traveling too far! Yet the transcending of the physical self still applies here in this message-- to live in the physical and live one world at a time. Yet it is in this living we move toward the conscience of the reality we cannot see, and this is part of Thoreau's point.

The nature that reveals (itself) is only half of the mystery of life. If we look to nature as our guide we will discover we are not including the other half of the miraclethe part we don't seethe part that science is merely at the brink of discovering. With this thought in mind we can understand Whitman's point, "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels." In otherwords, the very components of the mouse are almost beyond human comprehension. Likewise, if the mouse is representation of one of the smallest miracles what are we not seeing? This is where (I think) transcendentalism retains its most power. There is a concealed realitythere is a beginning with no beginning that we, as humans cannot seethe mystery among mysteries. It is in embracing the smallest of miracles on a daily basissuch as the leaves on a tree and the flower only half bloomed, that we begin to understand the reality we experience is relative to our thought process. To transcend our 'thinking reality' we begin to transcend human limitation and move toward divine perfection. (For Emerson the self and self-reliance is the way to knowing the source of all creation, divine perfection or the Over-soul.) I believe there is no limit to one's practicing transcendentalism. We know from our studies the most brilliant of minds think differentlyand are not only allowed to, but encouraged to do so. That which is progressive is transcendental. Thus it is a possibility that the creed of Transcendentalism would state that the only limitation in finding God is in not finding oneself.

Bryan Hileman, Virginia Commonwealth University Transcendentalism is not a metaphysical system. It is rather a corpus of ideas, some metaphysical, some ethical, originally held by a circle of friends and acquaintances in New England during the early to middle 19th century. These ideas were a combination of NeoPlatonism, Swedenbourgian mysticism, Romanticism, German Idealistic philosophy, reaction against Empiricism a la Hume, New England Puritanism and a dash of personal genius. Transcendentalism was both a highly personal, idiosyncratic creation of Emerson and others and an ambient cloud which first materialized over Massachusetts in the 1830's. For Emerson, transcendentalism was "Idealism for 1842." If I may add, it was Idealism for Emerson in 1842. So what were these beliefs? At its base, transcendentalism is certainly on the idealistic side of the great divide between idealism and realism. There is an ideal world that coexists with the real world, a world of noumena and a world of phenomena. Nature parallels the individual mind. The natural, sensual world of phenomena is a representation by which we may better comprehend the world of noumena. God is energy, a force, not a particular separate being. God breathes through nature and man attempts to open himself up to this influx. Nothing is static. The greatest goal is to achieve the transcendental moment, the moment when one is open to the to and fro flow of the influx. Though not essentially a religion, transcendentalism is fraught with theological consequences. A case could be made for transcendentalism as a form of secular religion, as opposed to revealed religion. Man is at the center of a fundamentally moral universe. Ethically the central concept is self-reliance. One's own soul is capable of holding the universe; it follows that one need be true to oneself, or rather the God in oneself.; Emerson strongly believed in a fundamental morality. The sensual side of man is regarded as mostly

evil in that it distracts man from higher pursuits. Strong emotion of the baser varieties is discouraged. There is also a tendency towards hero worship, the holding up of a few great men as exemplars for the great mass of men.

Shannon Riley, Virginia Commonwealth University The Latin translation of Transcendentalism is "overpassing" and a good place to start to understand the basic tenets shared by its adherents. I think that the term transcendentalism means different things to different individuals, which allows us to fully understand Thoreau when he once wrote, "I should have told them at once that I was a Transcendentalist-- That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations" and also Emerson when he wrote "to be great is to be misunderstood." Transcendentalism embodied the adventurous spirit of a young United States, encouraging others to eschew material things and not be fettered by ideas of the past. Individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge. Through this spirit it encouraged those people to cherish individualism over established political and social order. It stressed the importance of harmony with natureGod was imminent in our natural surroundings, there's a goodness that's inherent in all mankind. Emerson said: "Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulating through me; I am part or parcel of God" (Nature). One of the most important aspects of the movement was the publication of The Dial, which allowed a new crop of inspired and talented writers to establish themselves in American history. Transcendentalism is an idealism that encompasses a diverse and sometimes confusing set of beliefs regarding man's role in nature and the universe. Loosely, the doctrine refers to any view which holds that there's an aspect to reality that is higher than (or transcends) our everyday life and world. Emerson was the most notable Transcendentalist-- a great thinker with deep insight, and over time his ideas evolved and grew; however, he was always seeking "To what end is nature?" Transcendentalists eschewed materialism, and advocated a philosophy of self-reliance and self-fulfillment. Living in accordance with nature and a perpetual striving toward cultivation of character were other common attitudes. However, like most philosophies, not all transcendentalists strictly adhered to basis premises, which makes transcendentalism a thought provoking and challenging belief.
Transcendentalism had a very large impact on American literature. Emerson's ideas published in "Essays" (1841) probably did the most to ensure his lasting reputation. And it has been said that without Emerson's endorsements, Thoreau wouldn't have been anywhere near as well known as he is today. Modern day writers are still moved and inspired by Emerson's writings"Emerson's persisting influence upon twentieth century American writers is evident in astonishing permutations, on writers diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, his namesake Ralph Waldo Ellison, and A. R. Ammons." (Baym, 317). http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/ideas/definitionbickman.html

Transcendental Ideas: Definitions

An Overview of American Transcendentalism

Martin Bickman, University of Colorado Although Transcendentalism as a historical movement was limited in time from the mid 1830s to the late 1840s and in space to eastern Massachusetts, its ripples continue to spread through American culture. Beginning as a quarrel within the Unitarian church, Transcendentalism's questioning of established cultural forms, its urge to reintegrate spirit and matter, its desire to turn ideas into concrete action developed a momentum of its own, spreading from the spheres of religion and education to literature, philosophy, and social reform. While Transcendentalism's ambivalence about any communal effort that would compromise individual integrity prevented it from creating lasting institutions, it helped set the terms for being an intellectual in America. It is easier to note its pervasive influence, though, than it is to clarify its doctrines. The fluidity and elusiveness of Transcendentalism was registered even by some of its most intelligent contemporaries. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, writes: "He is German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist, but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that neither he for himself nor anybody for him has ever been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern's mouth we caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an ill-proportioned figure but considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted." [from "The Celestial Railroad" ] On an American visit, Charles Dickens was told "that whatever was unintelligible would certainly be transcendental" and Edgar Allan Poe instructs a young author to write the Tone Transcendental by using small words but turning them upside down. A Baltimore clergyman noted that "a new philosophy has risen, maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular." While these quotations imply that Transcendentalism had a language problem compounded of foreign borrowings and oracular jargon, the underlying difficulty in comprehension is that it was both a cause and a result of a major paradigm shift in epistemology, in conceptualizing how the mind knows the world, the divine, and itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson, its leading exponent, described both this shift and the derivation of the movement's name thus: "It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was 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; and he denominated them Transcendental forms." [from "The Transcendentalist"] Transcendentalism, then, is not as much concerned with a metaphysics that transcends our daily lives but rather with a new view of the mind that replaces Locke's empiricist, materialistic, and passive model with one emphasizing the role of the mind itself in actively shaping experience. Against Locke's claim that there is nothing in the mind not first put there through the senses, the Transcendentalists answer with Leibnitz, yes, nothing except the mind itself. But while Kant emphasized the power of the mind he also stressed its limits, its inability to know reality absolutely. The Transcendentalist vision went beyond Kant in insisting that the mind can apprehend absolute

spiritual truths directly without having to go through the detour of the senses, without the dictates of past authorities and institutions, and without the plodding labor of ratiocination. In this sense particularly, it was the logical--or supralogical--extension of both the Protestant reformation and American democratic individualism. To grasp the significance of this paradigm shift, we have to understand how dominant, even hegemonic, Lockean thought was in America, and particularly at Harvard College through the 1830s, where most of the male Transcendentalists were educated. For example Edward Everett, who exemplified, along with William Ellery Channing and Andrews Norton, the venerated group of Unitarian ministers and public men who taught the generation of transcendentalists, impressed his Harvard peers as a student by reciting verbatim throughout several class periods Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Here matter melded with method, since the chief instructional medium at Harvard and throughout American education was the "recitation," where knowledge was demonstrated by replicating the words of the lesson without necessarily showing any operational mastery. The Unitarians used Locke both negatively, to undermine the orthodox Calvinist belief in original sin-if the mind is a blank slate at birth it cannot be innately depraved-and positively, to underwrite belief in the special dispensation of Christianity through the evidence of Jesus's miracles, sensory testimony of his spiritual power, the flesh testifying to the word. So while Unitarianism was more optimistic and rationalistic than the orthodoxy it reformed, it weakened the foundation of Protestant faith by giving more authority to what happens outside the individual conscience than within it and elevating matter over spirit in shaping the mind. The Transcendentalists, in turn, took advantage of the multiple meanings of "idealism" as both an epistemology and as a moral and social critique of the "materialism" underlying the Unitarian alliance of commercial and religious interests, an alliance called by Emerson in another generalizing pun the "Establishment," stressing its static nature, contrasted with the Transcendentalist "Movement," a word suggesting youth, flux, and novelty. An early challenge to the Unitarian synthesis came from a Swedenborgian, Sampson Reed, who in a Harvard M.A. speech in 1821 and a pamphlet, Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826), posited a more organic unfolding of the mind's powers, at once romantic and apocalyptic: "There is a unison of spirit and nature. The genius of the mind will descend, and unite with the genius of the rivers, the lakes, and the woods." Ironically an even stronger challenge was from a Calvinist, James Marsh, who in 1829 published an American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, the very title of which emphasizes not only a new epistemological doctrine but an entirely different approach to spiritual knowledge, a turning inward to our own mental drama as the bedrock of religious truth. Marsh, who tried to enact this vision educationally as president of the University of Vermont, added his own "Preliminary Essay," underscoring the distinction between "the understanding," that distinctly Lockean faculty of rationalizing from the senses and "the Reason," those higher intuitions valued not only by German idealists but by mystics through the ages. Soon afterward, Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister equally conversant with German thought, wrote for that denomination's journal, The Christian Examiner, a laudatory article on Coleridge that Emerson declared "a living leaping Logos." Hedge, later to be one of the first members of the informal Transcendentalist Club that began in 1836 and met most frequently on his visits to Boston from his Maine congregation, soon faded from the forefront of the movement through his own caution about changing the structure of the church. He later described himself as "ecclesiastically conservative, though intellectually radical."

The issues were soon taken up by more activist Unitarian ministers such as Orestes Brownson, who was influenced as much by French writers like Victor Cousin and Benjamin Constant as by English and German ones. In an 1834 Christian Examiner article, Brownson made a crucial link between the new epistemology and the limiting temporality and instrumentality of all cultural forms, including those of religion: "Every positive form, however satisfactory it may be for the present, contains a germ of opposition to future progress. It contracts, by the very effect of its duration, a stationary character, that refuses to follow the intellect in its discoveries, and the soul in its emotions." Two years later George Ripley and Henry Furness would specifically question the Unitarian stress on Christ's miracles as opposed to more personally inward and universally moral validations of Christianity. Emerson stated this position most eloquently in his "Divinity School Address" of 1838: "But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." Andrews Norton soon labeled the Transcendentalist position "the Latest Form of Infidelity. " Heeding his own words that "there is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding," Emerson refused to become entangled in the ensuing theological debates led on the Transcendentalist front first by Ripley and then by Theodore Parker. While these two ministers had youthful energy and wide learning on their side, they soon found themselves embattled and isolated within the institution as pulpit exchanges were refused and social pressures mounted. The controversy within the church was paralleled by another conflict between the Establishment and the Movement in the field of education. Bronson Alcott, one of the few non-ministerial Transcendentalists and a self-taught teacher who had run other innovative schools in his native rural Connecticut, opened in 1834 near the Boston Common his Temple School. Alcott translated Transcendentalism into pedagogy by having the students shape and share their own thoughts in discussions and journals, instead of rote memory and textbook recitation. Language was seen as not simply a skill but the bridge between the individual soul and the physical and social worlds, so that lessons on vocabulary and grammar were integrated with spiritual matters. Elizabeth Peabody, Alcott's usually unpaid assistant, brought the school to the attention of the larger public in her 1835 Record of a School, but the stormclouds did not break until Alcott published under his own name in 1836-37 two volumes of her transcriptions of his Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Although the explicit outcry was against Alcott's discussions with young children of physical birth--Andrews Norton, again in the forefront of reaction, called it "one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and one-third obscene"--the underlying challenge was to the very structures of church and secular authority. By granting a Neoplatonic/Wordsworthian spiritual wisdom to the young, Alcott's practice threatened to invert the normal flow of teaching from adult to child, clergy to laity, institution to individual. Again, a reversion to a more primitive and protestant Christianity was seen as subversively to established Christianity. Despite Emerson's defense in the newspapers, Alcott's student body dwindled and he was never to be a classroom teacher again. He did go on to pioneer, along with Margaret Fuller and Peabody herself, that uniquely Transcendentalist form of adult education, the Conversation, where the interplay of the participants' minds becomes more important than any specific doctrine, process more important than product. Through means like these and Elizabeth Peabody's founding of the Kindergarten movement in postbellum America, Transcendentalist education went underground only become a constant progressive current in American education.

The Transcendentalists, then, lost their immediate skirmishes within the Unitarian church and the field of education, however much their ideas were later to shape both these institutions. An alternative strategy was to extrapolate Transcendentalist ideas in a world outside these spheres, and no one did this more expansively than Margaret Fuller. She applied the notions of self-reliance and equality to gender roles in the first significant feminist essay in America, published in 1844 in The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal she edited and helped found in 1840. Later, the piece was expanded to the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). She then left New England scene completely to become first literary reviewer and then reporter on social issues for the New York Tribune, finally widening her circle even beyond America to become involved in the failed Italian revolution of 1848 and dying soon thereafter in a tragic shipwreck. The largest organized secession, though, from Boston Unitarianism and its values was the communitarian experiment in rural living known as Brook Farm, initiated by George Ripley in 1841. The goal was to unite the mind with the hand, and eliminate the corresponding invidious distinctions between classes in society. Everyone participated in farm work and its excellent school on the premises underlined the pedagogical nature of the entire enterprise. There was a tension, however, between Trancendentalism's spontaneous anti-formalism and the prescriptive systematic dictates of the French utopian thinker Fourier which were increasingly taken as blueprints. Even before a disastrous and uninsured fire the community's vision thus became blurred, and ended in 1847. Despite its demise and that of the even smaller, shorter-lived Fruitlands community of Bronson Alcott, the notion of a pastoral retreat of simplicity and cooperation confronting by example the capitalist industrialism of the larger society became fixed in the American imagination. Brook Farm threw into relief a basic tension in Transcendentalism between joint action and individual development. At one pole, Emerson and Thoreau, who both declined to be Brook Farmers, felt that improvement must begin with the self, that many of the specific reforms rampant in Jacksonian America such as prohibition and vegetarianism were too narrowly conceived and that to engage in social and political action was to dissipate creative energies. One the other side were Brownson, Peabody, and, intermittently Alcott, who felt that rampant individualism was part of the problem, not part of the solution, and that social change could be effected only through social means. But even Emerson and Thoreau recognized that when evils such as slavery and imperialistic war reach a certain enormity, one must speak out and act, and they, along with other Transcendentalists, most notably Theodore Parker, joined the abolitionist cause. Well before the firebell of the Civil War, Transcendentalism as a living force seemed to be extinguished as quickly as it flared up. As Perry Miller pointed out: "Parker killed himself with overwork, and Thoreau expended himself; Emerson dissolved into aphasia, Ripley subsided into disillusion, Hedge became a Harvard professor. . . Brownson became a Catholic, as did Sophia Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody became a 'character.'" There were a number of younger and secondary figures such as Franklin Sanborn and Thomas Wentworth Higginson who perpetuated the movement through their memoirs and their own actions-Sanborn ran a progressive school in Concord, Higginson encouraged women such as Emily Dickinson to write--but the energy was gone and the social forms-clubs, periodicals like The Western Literary Messenger and The Dial, schools and communes--had in proper Transcendentalist fashion self-destructed.

What did remain as a living movement was the ongoing effect of Transcendentalism in literature and philosophy. Most of the Transcendentalists were writers: they wrote voluminous personal journals, sermons, letters, manifestoes, poems, translations, and essays. Of this, perhaps only Emerson's essays and Thoreau's Walden were in the highest artist rank, but taken together the body of writings imply a theory of language. As often the most influential formulations are in the works of Emerson. In that epitome of Transcendentalism, Nature (1836), Emerson posits language as originating in names for natural objects which, through the doctrine of correspondences, have intrinsic spiritual and symbolic significance. Thus, every word was once a poem, or, more specifically, a metaphor, since it combines a sensory meaning with a more intangible or psychological one, the "natural fact" conveying a corresponding "spiritual fact." But the sensory component of language begins to fade through use, as language entropically drifts towards abstraction, and becomes only a set of one dimensional verbal counters that buffers us from immediate perception of the inner and outer worlds. The truly creative writer is one who can "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things," liberating us from the most pervasive and imprisoning of cultural forms, the categories of ordinary language. Emerson thus rescues the creative writer from the belletristic margins of American society to the epistemological center where the husks of old meanings are discarded and new ones made. This aesthetic of deconstructing conventional language to open the doors of perception, of using fresh concrete description that at the same time has symbolic resonance, was internalized by writers who reject any trace of Transcendentalist metaphysics like Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams ("No ideas but in things"). It particularly shaped American poetry, especially when joined with Emerson's rejection of traditional poetic forms in favor of each utterance creating its own appropriate form, "a metre-making-argument. . . a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own." While Emerson himself and the younger poets he directly nurtured like Jones Very, a mad Harvard tutor, and Ellery Channing, the ne'er do well nephew of William Ellery Channing, formulator of American Unitarianism, were unable to make a successfully break from regular forms, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in widely different ways created poetic forms that are an extension of content. Between them they helped modern poetry find its most compelling subject in its embrace of the common, in grasping the immediacies of our lives with a visionary intensity so that facts flower into truths, in Thoreau's phrase. Transcendentalism also remains a shaping force at the heart of American philosophy, but unlike its role in literature, its centrality to American philosophy has only recently been argued, by contemporary philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Cornel West. To trace this lineage more precisely, we can return to Nature, which begins with a distinction between the ME and the NOT ME. Any reader of German philosophy would then predict that through a long series of dialectical manipulations of abstract propositions the two turn out to be identical, two faces of the same unitary reality. But Emerson takes a different road and immediately collapses the distinction through a direct personal experience, that of crossing a bare common and becoming "a transparent eye-ball" instead of simply an "I." Later in the work Emerson pulls back from monistic Idealism not because it is false but because it disparages nature and leaves no Other to love. Both this privileging of direct experience over coherent system-building and this weighing of philosophical propositions not by their truth value but by how best they help us live were to be developed later in the century by William James and John Dewey in America's most crucial contribution to philosophy, Pragmatism. Both Transcendentalism and Pragmatism articulate and conceptualize peculiarly American dispositions towards knowing, as Daniel Boorstin writes: "We sometimes forget how gradual was the 'discovery' of America; it was a by-product of the occupation of the

continent. To act, to move on, to explore also meant to push back the frontiers of knowledge; this inevitably gave a practical and dynamic character to the very idea of knowledge. To learn and to act became one." This vision is at the center of Emerson's 1838 address, "The American Scholar," which reunifies divisions that have plagued western philosophy such as contemplation vs. action, soul vs. body, concept vs. specific object. The Transcendentalists and Pragmatists viewed knowledge and cultural forms not as perpetual truths but as temporary constructions, and insisted that all such constructions be open to the tests of continuing experience, that we put more faith in the mind's ability to order the world moment by moment than in complete and self-enclosed systems. For this reason Transcendentalism remains in American life less as a specific doctrine--no one now calls oneself a "Transcendentalist"--than as presiding spirit behind many movements that resisting the dominant culture. The writings of Thoreau, for example, shaped both the passive resistance methods of the civil rights movement and the underlying vision of the ecology movement. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody are role models for feminist intellectuals who also espouse activism. The Transcendentalist efforts in education were reincarnated both in Dewey' laboratory school and the open school movement of the 1970s, and Brook Farm was the prototype of many of the communes of this same period. At its core, Transcendentalism was a youth movement, making eloquently obvious one of the first generation gaps in American history. Emerson wrote, "This deliquium, this ossification of the soul, is the Fall of Man. The redemption is lodged in the heart of youth," and went on to contrast the Party of Hope with the Party of Memory. Based on the foundational American assumption that the future can be better than the past through imagination and effort, the Transcendentalists envisioned a culture that would foster further acts of culture-making, a community that would also liberate the individual, a way of thinking that would also become a way of doing.
http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/ideas/contempdef.html : Transcendental Ideas:

Definitions
http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/ : Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-

1882
http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/roots/rootsintro.html

Transcendental Forerunners

Introduction
Emerson wrote Nature, the little book which is the base text of American Transcendentalism, after over ten years of extensive reading. Kenneth Cameron spent much of his scholarly life collecting and publishing these intellectual sources of Emerson's thought, most notably in Young Emerson's Transcendental Vision, through his Transcendental Books press in Hartford, Connecticut. His massive collections, listed in his Bibliography on Transcendentalism or the American Renaissance [formerly Transcendentalism and American Renaissance Bibliography], bring together manuscripts and reprints by Transcendentalists, newspaper articles, lists of library reading and key passages from those readings, and much else. Many of

these materials are useful and illuminating, though usually fragmented and presented with little context, critique, or ordering. One might think of them as a massive, unlinked hypertext, useful primarily when linked to the context of Transcendentalism as a way of understanding the works and the people. The Transcendentalists, Emerson in particular, read widely and appropriated ideas freely and eclectically from their reading. Emerson and Thoreau both kept notebooks in which they recorded choice passages, and those are increasingly available to scholars for study. When they drew on these ideas in their works, sometimes they explored them in some depth, as Emerson did in his essays on Montaigne and Swedenborg; more often we find the ideas greatly modified and pulled together into the fabric of their own ideas, with little attribution. Margaret Fuller was particularly interested in German literature, translating and writing Dial essays on Goethe and Bettina von Arnim [see Arnheim's book on her correspondence with Goethe]. The study of their reading and how they used it has attracted many scholars, primarily in academic source studies. Joel Myerson's The Transcendentalists: a Review of Research and Criticism is the best source for finding many of those. Emerson was profoundly influenced by European philosophical and religious thought, as well as literature, while he thought through his ideas about nature before 1836, as his journal and notebooks show. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as introduced to the Transcendentalists by James Marsh, was especially influential. (See Yoder thesis) Emersons Inheritance: The Influence of English and German Metaphysics and Literature on the Philosophy and Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Bryan Hileman, VCU] Emanuel Swedenborg. Emerson was introduced to Swedenborg through the agency of Sampson Reed's "Observations on the Growth of the Mind." Cameron has listed ideas and values that Emerson found in Swedenborg's ideas (at least, as conveyed by Reed). Emerson would later write an essay on Swedenborg [Representative Men. 1850.] Platonism and Neo-Platonism. Emerson acknowledged his great debt to the thought of Plato in two essays in Representative Men, "Plato; or the Philosopher" and "Plato: New Readings." Nature is grounded in Platonism, especially Neo-Platonism, as embodied in the writing of the Cambridge Neo-Platonists such as Ralph Cudworth. The transcendentalists were all dedicated, life-long readers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott were especially attracted to Oriental philosophy and religion, reading in translations available to them and copying favorite passages (from Confucius, Laws of Menu, Hinduism, Buddhism, and more) into their personal notebooks and from there into the Dial, their prose and poetry [see Emerson's Hamatreya, Saadi, and Brahma, for example.] Tracking these influences can be difficult, as David Ch'en's essay on Thoreau and Taoism shows. See also East Meets West: Oriental Seeds in Occidental Soil. by Swami B. G. Narasingha and Satyaraja dasa (Steven Rosen). There were also profound influences from American thought and literature. Foremost may have been the eloquent sermons of Reverend William Ellery Channing of Boston, which anticipated much of Transcendentalism, in particular its philosophy and opposition to slavery.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/trnscdntl1

transcendentalism, American literary and philosophical movement (trnsndnt lz m) [Lat.,=overpassing], in literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, notably that of Immanuel Kant, and from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religious teachings. Although transcendentalism was never a rigorously systematic philosophy, it had some basic tenets that were generally shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as "Nature" (1836), "Self-Reliance," and "The Over-Soul" (both 1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854). The movement began with the occasional meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. Originally calling themselves the Hedge Club (after one of the members), they were later dubbed the Transcendental Club by outsiders because of their discussion of Kant's "transcendental" ideas. Besides Emerson and Thoreau, its most famous members, the club included F. H. Hedge, George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and others. For several years much of their writing was published in The Dial (184044), a journal edited by Fuller and Emerson. The cooperative community Brook Farm (184147) grew out of their ideas on social reform, which also found expression in their many individual actions against slavery. Primarily a movement seeking a new spiritual and intellectual vitality, transcendentalism had a great impact on American literature, not only on the writings of the group's members, but on such diverse authors as Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. See anthologies ed. by G. W. Cooke (1903, repr. 1971) and P. Miller (1950; 1957, repr. 1981); O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876, repr. 1972); J. Porte, Emerson and Thoreau (1966); M. Simon and T. H. Parsons, ed., Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (1966); L. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (1973). http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA95/finseth/trans.html

The Emergence of Transcendentalism

The emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In exploring their respective departures from Calvinism we can begin to map out the common ground the two movements shared. Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth century. Unitarianism had developed during the late eighteenth century as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated from Orthodox Christianity during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. That

Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around the questions of divine election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism. The Liberals tended to reject both the persisent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity and the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the other stood pernicious "enthusiasm." The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation of Enlightenment principles with American Christianity, began to stress the value of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians descended as the Boston contingent of this tradition, while making their own unique theological contribution in rejecting the doctrine of divine trinity. Unitarians placed a premium on stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive morality, classical learning, and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity. Instead of the dogma of Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians offered a philosophy stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct and the ability of the intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct. Theirs was a "natural theology" in which the individual could, through empirical investigation or the exercise of reason, discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe and of God's laws. Divine "revelation," which took its highest form in the Bible, was an external event or process that would confirm the findings of reason. William Ellery Channing, in his landmark sermon "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) sounded the characteristic theme of optimistic rationality:
Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.... With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.22

The intellectual marrow of Unitarianism had its counterbalance in a strain of sentimentalism: while the rational mind could light the way, the emotions provided the drive to translate ethical knowledge into ethical conduct. Still, the Unitarians deplored the kind of excessive emotionalism that took place at revivals, regarding it as a temporary burst of religious feeling that would soon dissipate. Since they conceived of revelation as an external favor granted by God to assure the mind of its spiritual progress, they doubted that inner "revelation" without prior conscious effort really represented a spiritual transformation. Nonetheless, even in New England Evangelical Protestants were making many converts through their revivalist activities, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. The accelerating diversification of Boston increased the number of denominations that could compete for the loyalties of the population, even as urbanization and industrialization pushed many Bostonians in a secular direction. In an effort to become more relevant, and to instill their values of sobriety and order in a modernizing city, the Unitarians themselves adopted certain evangelical techniques. Through founding and participating in missionary and benevolent societies, they sought both to spread the Unitarian message and to bind people together in an increasingly fragmented social climate. Ezra Stiles Gannett, for example, a minister at the Federal Street Church, supplemented his regular pastoral duties with membership in the Colonization, Peace and Temperance societies, while Henry Ware Jr. helped found the Boston Philanthropic Society. Simultaneously, Unitarians tried to appeal more to the heart in their sermons, a trend reflected in the new Harvard professorship of Pastoral Theology and Pulpit Eloquence. Such Unitarian preachers as Joseph Stevens Buckminster and Edward Everett "set

the model for a minister who could be literate rather than pedantic, who could quote poetry rather than eschatology, who could be a stylist and scorn controversy."23 But they came nowhere near the emotionalism of the rural Evangelical Protestants. Unitarianism was a religion for upright, respectable, wealthy Boston citizens, not for the rough jostle of the streets or the backwoods. The liberalism Unitarians displayed in their embrace of Enlightenment philosophy was stabilized by a solid conservatism they retained in matters of social conduct and status. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Unitarians effectively captured Harvard with the election of Rev. Henry Ware Sr. as Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805 and of Rev. John Thorton Kirkland as President in 1810. It was at Harvard that most of the younger generation of Transcendentalists received their education, and it was here that their rebellion against Unitarianism began. It would be misleading, however, to say that Transcendentalism entailed a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it evolved almost as an organic consequence of its parent religion. By opening the door wide to the exercise of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the individual in his quest for divine meaning, Unitarians had unwittingly sowed the seeds of the Transcendentalist "revolt." The Transcendentalists felt that something was lacking in Unitarianism. Sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism failed to satisfy that side of the Transcendentalists which yearned for a more intense spiritual experience. The source of the discontent that prompted Emerson to renounce the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College" is suggested by the bland job description that Harvard issued for the new Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. The professor's duties were to
... demonstrate the existence of a Deity or first cause, to prove and illustrate his essential attributes, both natural and moral; to evince and explain his providence and government, together with the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments; also to deduce and enforce the obligations which man is under to his Maker .... together with the most important duties of social life, resulting from the several relations which men mutually bear to each other; .... interspersing the whole with remarks, shewing the coincidence between the doctrines of revelation and the dictates of reason in these important points; and lastly, notwithstanding this coincidence, to state the absolute necessity and vast utility of a divine revelation.24

Perry Miller has argued persuasively that the Transcendentalists still retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction against the "pale negations" of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic side of Calvinism in which New England culture had been steeped. The Calvinists, after all, conceived of their religion in part as man's quest to discover his place in the divine scheme and the possibility of spiritual regeneration, and though their view of humanity was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism could give rise to such early, heretical expressions of inner spirituality as those of the Quakers and Anne Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians acted as crucial intermediaries between the Calvinists and the Transcendentalists by abandoning the notion of original sin and human imperfectability:
The ecstasy and the vision which Calvinists knew only in the moment of vocation, the passing of which left them agonizingly aware of depravity and sin, could become the permanent joy of those who had put aside the conception of depravity, and the moments between could be filled no longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.25

For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or conviction, was that finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism nor the Unitarians' sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of their religious philosophy. Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The Transcendentalists received inspiration from overseas in the form of English and German romanticism, particularly the literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but rather an introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy), the Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical investigation, which underlay both deism and the natural theology of the Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically of the ability of scientific methods to discover the true nature of the universe; now the rebels at Harvard college (the very institution which had exposed them to such modern notions!) would turn the ammuntion against their elders. In an 1833 article in The Christian Examiner entitled simply "Coleridge," Frederic Henry Hedge, once professor of logic at Harvard and now minister in West Cambridge, explained and defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence between internal human reality and external spiritual reality. He wrote:
The method [of Kantian philosophy] is synthetical, proceeding from a given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness, and deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelligences, with the whole system of their representations' .... The last step in the process, the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space, and variety, or, in other words (as time, space, and variety include the elements of all empiric knowledge), the establishing of a coincidence between the facts of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered within ourselves ....26

Although written in a highly intellectual style, as many of the Transcendentalist tracts were, Hedge's argument was typical of the movement's philosophical emphasis on non-rational, intuitive feeling. The role of the Continental Romantics in this regard was to provide the sort of intellectual validation we may suppose a fledgling movement of comparative youngsters would want in their rebellion against the Harvard establishment. For Transcendentalism was entering theological realms which struck the elder generation of Unitarians as heretical apostasy or, at the very least, as ingratitude. The immediate controversy surrounded the question of miracles, or whether God communicated his existence to humanity through miracles as performed by Jesus Christ. The Transcendentalists thought, and declared, that this position alienated humanity from divinity. Emerson leveled the charge forcefully in his scandalous Divinity School Address (1838), asserting that "the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain."27 The same year, in a bold critique of Harvard professor Andrews Norton's magnum opus The Evidence of the Genuineness of the Four Gospels , Orestes Brownson identified what he regarded as the odious implications of the Unitarian position: "there is no revelation made from God to the human soul; we can know nothing of religion but what is taught us from abroad, by an individual raised up and specially endowed with wisdom from on high to be our instructor."28 For Brownson and the other Transcendentalists, God displayed his presence in every aspect of the natural world, not just at

isolated times. In a sharp rhetorical move, Brownson proceeded to identify the spirituality of the Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy:
...truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man's soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of this inner light, and on the fact, that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.29

To Norton, such a rejection of the existence of divine miracles, and the assertion of an intuitive communion with God, amounted to a rejection of Christianity itself. In his reply to the Transcendentalists, "A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity," Norton wrote that their position "strikes at root of faith in Christianity," and he reiterated the "orthodox" Unitarian belief that inner revelation was inherently unreliable and a potential lure away from the truths of religion.
The religion of which they speak, therefore, exists merely, if it exists at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference perhaps to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated in childhood, or produced by the visible signs of religious belief existing around us, or awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles which nature presents.30

Despite its dismissive intent and tone, Norton's blast against Transcendentalism is an excellent recapitulation of their religious philosophy. The crucial difference consisted in the respect accorded to "undefined and unintelligible feelings." The miracles controversy revealed how far removed the Harvard rebels had grown from their theological upbringing. It opened a window onto the fundamental dispute between the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians, which centered around the relationship between God, nature and humanity. The heresy of the Transcendentalists (for which the early Puritans had hanged people) was to countenance mysticism and pantheism, or the beliefs in the potential of the human mind to commune with God and in a God who is present in all of nature, rather than unequivocally distinct from it. Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists continued to think of themselves as Christians and to articulate their philosophy within a Christian theological framework, although some eventually moved past Christianity (as Emerson did in evolving his idea of an "oversoul") or abandoned organized religion altogether.