Transcendentalism was an American philosophical, political and literary movement that flourished roughly between 1836 and 1860. It began as a reform movement within the Unitarian Church that sought to extend the application of William Ellery Channing's thought on the inner God and the significance of intuitive thought.
For the Transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. They labored with the sense that the advent of a new age was at hand, were critical of their contemporary society for its reflexive nonconformity, and urged that each individual seek, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "an original relation to the universe."
The American transcendentalism proposed by Emerson is based on the transcendental foundation laid out by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. This foundation is that objects are not cognizable in themselves, but only through the spatial, temporal and categorical structure that the subject projects on the world. Based on this idea, Johann Gottlieb Fichte defined his metaphysics of the I and the Not-I as transcendental idealism. Friedrich Schelling elaborated the system of transcendental idealism and Arthur Schopenhauer called transcendental the reflection directed not to things but to the consciousness of them as mere representations.
The main figures of the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott. Also associated with transcendentalism is Emerson's friend and member of the "Transcendental Club," Walt Whitman.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803-Concord, Massachusetts, April 27, 1882) was an American writer, philosopher and poet. A leader of the Transcendentalism movement in the early 19th century, on November 5, 1833 he gave a lecture in Boston in which he laid the foundation of his most important beliefs and ideas, later developed in his first published essay on Nature: "Nature is a language, and every new fact learned is a new word; but this is not a language taken apart and dead in a dictionary, but a language put together in a meaningful and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not in order to know a new grammar, but in order to be able to read the great book written in that language."
Emerson's philosophy is typically liberal: it enhances the values of the individual and the self, it is affirmative, vitalistic and optimistic. Hence the praise he deserved from Friedrich Nietzsche. He was staunchly anti-slavery. Towards the end of his life he sometimes forgot his name and when someone asked him how he felt, he answered: "quite well; I lost my mental faculties, but I am perfect".
Henry David Thoreau
His friend Henry David Thoreau (Concord, July 12, 1817-Concord, May 6, 1862) was an American writer, poet and philosopher, of Puritan origin, author of "Walden" and "On Civil Disobedience". Thoreau was a surveyor, naturalist, lecturer and pencil maker. One of the founding fathers of American literature, he is also the conceptualizer of civil disobedience practices.
In his work Walden he writes: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live alone, deliberately, to face the essential facts of life and see if I could learn what I had to teach and not discover, at the hour of death, that I had not lived. He did not want to live what was not life, nor did he want to practice renunciation, unless it was necessary. I wanted to live deeply and to extract all the marrow from life, to live in such an intense and spartan way that I could do without everything that was not life...".
On July 24 or 25, 1846, Thoreau met with the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of back taxes. Thoreau refused to pay because of his opposition to the U.S. Intervention in Mexico and slavery, and spent a night in jail for this refusal. The next day, Thoreau was released against his will when someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.
The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau, and he would write: "under a government that unjustly imprisons anyone, the home of an honest man is prison"; "any man who is more right than his fellow man is already a majority of one"; "kindness is the only investment that never fails"; "make your life a brake to stop the machine". His essay on civil disobedience had a powerful influence on Lev Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.
Walt Whitman
Finally, Walter "Walt" Whitman (West Hills, New York; May 31, 1819-Camden, New Jersey; March 26, 1892) was an American poet, volunteer nurse, essayist, journalist and humanist. His work falls within the transition between transcendentalism and philosophical realism, incorporating both movements into his work. He is considered among the most influential writers in the American canon and has been called the father of free verse. He was a deist and believed in the immortality of the soul.
Considered the father of modern American poetry, his influence has been extensive outside the United States as well. Among the writers who have been influenced by his work are Rubén Darío, Wallace Stevens, León Felipe, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo de Rokha, Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, among others.
In 1855 he published his most famous book, "Leaves of Grass", where his most famous poem appears:
Oh, my self! oh, life! of your returning questions,
From the endless parade of the disloyal, from the
cities full of fools,
Of myself, which I always reproach myself (as,
Who is more foolish than I, nor more disloyal),
Of the eyes that in vain yearn for light, of the objects
of the ever-renewed struggle,
Of the bad results of everything, of the crowds
and sordid that surround me,
From the empty and useless years of others, I
intertwined with the others,
The question, Oh, my self, the sad question that
back - what good is in the midst of all this?
things, Oh, my self, Oh, life?
Reply
That you are here - that there is life and identity,
That the mighty drama continues, and that
You can contribute with a verse.
In 1865 he wrote the famous poem "O Captain, My Captain!" in tribute to Abraham Lincoln after his assassination.
