Who were the Transcendentalists? What did they believe? What’s their legacy?
Transcendentalism was a 19th-century movement in New England. The Transcendentalists, predominantly philosophers and writers, believed in the goodness of humans and nature and promoted the idea that following your intuition enables you to find meaning in your life.
Read more to learn about the Transcendentalists and their ideas.
Who Were the Transcendentalists?
The land where Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond stood belonged to his mentor, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. During his time at Walden, Thoreau experimented with the idea that a person could find and even perfect himself by turning to nature. This idea was promoted by Emerson and by the Transcendentalists.
Just who were the Transcendentalists? They were a group of New England intellectuals (Emerson and Thoreau chief among them) who shared ideas about nature, the self, and divinity. The Transcendentalists contended that people should strive for freedom of thought, cultivate their own sense of spirituality, and develop a deep connection to nature rather than conform to the norms of a materialistic society.
In The Transcendentalists and Their World, historian Robert Gross characterizes Emerson and Thoreau’s ideas as responses to a shift in social values from the communal to the individual. As Gross tells it, Transcendentalism sought to make sense of a rapidly changing world—a world that was being remade by industrial capitalism. Gross characterizes Transcendentalism as a philosophy that emerged to enable the individual, as empowered by nature, to control his fate in this modern world. But scholar Sarah Blackwood contends that—though this idea figures less prominently in Gross’s book—the story of Transcendentalism is also one of Emerson and Thoreau’s failure to grapple with the past.
Blackwood explains that, 50 years after the American Revolution, the freedom that the Transcendentalists sought was not available to everyone. According to Blackwood, Emerson and Thoreau didn’t really think about Black and indigenous people’s experiences. She explains that their enthusiasm for individual freedom—for using the individual self to transcend the physical world and access a spiritual world—ignored the harms of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigenous dispossession, and settler violence. These harms were not only woven into the nation’s past but were also ongoing.
Despite the flaws in their philosophy, Emerson, Thoreau, and their peers have had a long-lasting impact on American culture. One critic writes that the ideas of the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and others) are carried onward by writers she calls the “New Transcendentalists,” such as Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver, and Rebecca Solnit. The Transcendentalist concern for resisting structural powers—even if Thoreau and Emerson articulated it only imperfectly—also relates to modern conversations on social justice, climate activism, and the ethical project of making the world better for everyone.
