Romanticism in America
American Transcendentalism by Philip F. Gura
The Transcendentalists’ principal concern was the power of the individual human mind (and spirit) to shape both personal life and the world. This stood in sharp contrast to the Enlightenment and in particular the Empiricists, such as John Locke, who emphasized facts, external circumstances, and objective science as the prime movers of change. The “inner light” of the mind and soul, the Transcendentalists believed, existed independently from material concerns and even evidence from the senses, as a kind of divine inspiration that should stand against the forces of nationalism, the crowd mentality, even economic progress. In many ways, this was the American version of the German Romantics. The movement involved New England intellectuals associated with the Unitarians and with a predilection for Hegelian idealism.
According to Gura, the original impetus for the movement came from a theological dispute. In Harvard Divinity School, a debate was raging about biblical texts: should the detailed discussion of the precise meaning of scripture, with the philological tools under refinement at that time, dominate religious life? The literalness and rigidity of this approach made many New England intellectuals and theologians uneasy. For their part, the Unitarians were seeking to advance a “rational religion” in the spirit of the Enlightenment, a theological analogue to the elegant formulation of universal physical laws of Newtonian physics. On the opposite side, the Trinitarians – the leaders of the Second Great Awakening – argued in favor of a more “affective faith”, which concentrated on the spiritual experience, the poetry of faith and religious vision. Skepticism, and even questioning, they reasoned, undermined faith, a vital force that existed even when unsupported by reason or observation. Empirical science, in this view, would only get one so far.
The particular conundrum that both Unitarians and Trinitarians faced was an unresolved theological conflict: how could God, they asked, have set up an orderly universe and yet be required to step in with supernatural miracles when necessary? Even worse, miracles were taken as proof that a rationally comprehensible God existed. Was this not a fundamental and irresolvable contradiction?
At Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson blew up the debate by advocating for a break from organized Christianity. Faith, he said, should speak directly from the soul, from a need for faith and spirituality that all men were born with, that was innate – it wasn’t to be taught under someone else’s auspices and from the study of Bible texts, but from the subjective experience of the individual. The theological implications were as radical as they were immense: nature and man did not necessarily exist in a “fallen state”, indeed an appreciation of nature’s perfection could bring man to “experience the paradisiacal state of Man before the Fall”, as Gura writes. To resolve the dilemma of miracles within a clockwork universe, Emerson preached, Christ believed that life itself and nature were the “miracles” to which the Bible referred.
With Emerson as the inspiration, a Transcendentalist movement began to coalesce around the Brattle Street Book Shop, which functioned as a kind of informal salon run by owner Elizabeth Peabody. It attracted a number of remarkable paticipants. The early feminist Margaret Fuller held “conversations” in the space, where she refined her ideas and won followers. Bronson Alcott, the father of the author Louisa May Alcott, also participated. Soon, they had a publication, The Dial, that was staffed by social reformers, such as Orestes Brownson, who wished to go beyond Emerson’s call for individual spiritual growth and attempt to influence American institutions. Abolition, a particularly divisive subject, was their obsession. Even John Brown sought to raise funds for his military action at Harpers Ferry with the group.
Certain precepts emerged for which the Transcendentalists would be remembered. Most importantly, they preached radical individualism, according to which the mind could change the world, perhaps even ushering a kind of Hegelian paradise of enlightened spirit. However, Emerson argued that people could change things only after a personal epiphany had enlightened their minds. Individuals were also supposed to be self-reliant in the sense that they followed their consciences rather than communal dictates as conceived by someone else. Their values, of course, would include personal freedom, dignity, virtue, and responsibility. The Transcendentalists also tended to despise the materialistic culture of capitalism and its love of money. They opposed intemperance. Finally, they viewed slavery as the “blight of the nation”, a kind of original sin.
One of their most important social experiments was Brook Farm, a utopian socialist community based on the principles of François Charles Fourier and founded by George Ripley in 1840. It was designed to put their ideals into practice, to “establish…life on the basis of wisdom and purity; to apply the principles of justice & love to our social organization in accordance with the laws of Divine Providence; to substitute a system of brotherly cooperation for one of selfish competition”, as Ripley wrote. Members paid to live and work there, Shareholders included Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though it was subsidized by a large grant, much of the finance came from loans. Some members wanted to practice free love, others did not participate in the work force, and women (including Mrs. Alcott) complained that the men preached cooperation and yet left them to do most of the daily work. Emerson, a reluctant social reformer, was disturbed at the radicalism of the members. Within a year, many members returned to life outside and the experiments ended in 1846. Ripley was left with a debt of $17,445 to pay off.
After the failure of Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist movement began to fragment. Emerson continued his lectures as did the others, but their philosophical unity was lost as the members joined other groups, disillusioned. One of Emerson’s most important acolytes, Henry David Thoreau, stood out. Thoreau argued that man’s conscience represented the highest law, beyond legality and accepted custom. He further posited that, to be worthy of the allegiance of its citizens, the state must recognize this; if it didn’t, citizens were within their rights to resist state law, as many were beginning to do regarding slavery. It was for this reason that many of the Transcendentalists openly admired John Brown as a “superior being”, though they chose not to participate in his actions. Others gravitated to pantheism, universalism, and theism, that is, vague dreams of some common philosophy that would work for all men and somehow bring peace to all men.
Decades later, when the Transcendentalist movement was regarded as a relic, George Santayana offered an interesting critique, according to Gura. He described Transcendentalism as a kind of naïve, cosmic optimism that preferred to ignore persistent evidence of evil, that pretended to see the world as “new” every day, aping or aspiring to a child’s sincerity. This led, Santayana argued, to a “problematic egotism” and solipsism. Moreover, the Transcendentalist method was also an attempt at “systematic subjectivism”, which was a contradiction in terms. Another prominent Harvard philosopher, William James, felt that he refined the Transcendentalist doctrine. Reality, James stated, did not come, or exist separately from the human mind, but rather from the mind’s interaction with the world and life. The individual, he concluded, makes truth from what works for him or her in the context of their lives. This was pragmatism, the next dominant American philosophical school. It relativizes truths to a certain extent, but accepts the constraint of necessity while preserving human will.
Gura’s book is a very fun tour of an important philosophical movement. It is well written and largely descriptive rather than a philosophical proof, which limited its scope to intellectual history. I would have liked much more on how it fit into, reflected, or transformed European Romanticism, i.e., the book essentially presents Transcendentalism as another example of American exceptionalism when I see it as largely derivative.
Related reviews:
