American Transcendentalism or “New England Transcendentalism” or American Renaissance” is more of a Tendency, an attitude, than the philosophy of Transcendentalists. To “transcend” something is to rise above it, to pass beyond its limits. Transcendentalists took their ideas from the romantic literature of Europe, from new-Platonism, from German idealistic philosophy, and from the revelations of Oriental-mysticism. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. The major features of New England Transcendentalism can be summarized as follows:
Firstly, the Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe.
Secondly, they stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society.
Thirdly, they offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life can be reached only by going beyond the world of senses.
As a philosophical and literary movement, Transcendentalism flourished in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.
Thoreau built and went to live in a small cottage on Walden Pond for a little over two years, and then came back to write about his experience there in his famous book Walden. To later generations, scarred by the horrors of the Civil War, the transcendentalist persuasion that humanity was godlike and that evil was non-existent appeared to be an optimistic folly. As a philosophy, Transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematical. Ti exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraint of law and custom. Yet Transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age, and the ideas it represented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Hawthorne and Whitman to the present.
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