Transcendentalism

William Henry Channing(1810-1844)

"Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul."

Caricature of Emerson as a transparent eyeball by Christopher Pearce Cranch

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

"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 circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (996).

Key Ideas in Transcendentalism

• Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the normal means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a higher, more intuitive form of perception.
• According to Emerson, reason is "the highest faculty of the soul--what we mean by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By contrast, "The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary" (L1:412-413).
• Transcendentalism, like other Romantic movements, proposes that the essential nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature, human beings would seek the good.
• Transcendentalism also takes the Romantic view of man's steady degeneration from childhood to adulthood as he is corrupted by culture: "A man is a god in ruins."

Other ideas important to transcendentalism

1. Nature as teacher, nurturer, discipline. The best part of humanity can be found through community with nature, a belief shared with Romantic poets such as Wordsworth.

2. Microcosm and macrocosm: each part of nature contains all within it.

3. Principle of analogy, of perceiving correspondences: "[M]an is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects."

4. Emblematic Nature: "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

5. Universal soul ("Oversoul"): "Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related."

6. The principle of organicism; the concept of the circle.