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transcendentalism
Sign in to saveTranscendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. They thought of physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than as discrete entities.
Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that emerged in 1830s New England, centered on the belief that people and nature are inherently good and that individuals flourish best when they are self-reliant and independent from society's corrupting institutions. The movement matters because it offered a distinctive American vision of spirituality—one that saw the divine present in everyday life and nature rather than confined to organized religion, influencing American thought, literature, and culture.
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- philosophical movement
- Said to be same as
- transcendental idealism
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Encyclopedic overview
19 sectionsContents
- Origin
- Transcendental Club
- Second wave of transcendentalists
- Beliefs
- Transcendental knowledge
- Individualism
- Indian religions
- Idealism
- Importance of nature
- Influence on other movements
- Major figures
- Criticism
- See also
- References
- Notes
- Citations
- Sources
- Further reading
- External links
Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. They thought of physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than as discrete entities.
Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States; it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past transcendentalists. Its rise was a protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “transcendentalism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.