Transcendentalism Then—And Now

By Lawrence Buell, Guest Contributor. Edited by Russell Powell

I discovered Transcendentalism as a discontented adolescent, when struggling to countervail an overdose of internalized dutifulness that included redundant Bible-based Sunday school classes into my early teens. Emerson’s core vision of Self-Reliance rang true: “the infinitude of the private man,” as he once summed it up.[1] The valuation both Emerson and Thoreau, whom I encountered at the same time,  attached to immersion in nature as a solace and impetus for self-transformation was another attraction for me, country boy that I was.

Susceptibility is one thing, careful study quite another. For some years, I pretty much just skimmed those writers for luminous aphorisms: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,”  “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” and so forth.[2]  Yet from my late 20s onward, Emerson, Thoreau, and indeed the whole Transcendentalist circle have remained central to my intellectual life and moral compass even as my knowledge of the movement has deepened and become more “critical” as it’s been crystallized in articles and scholarly books.  Often, scholarly analysis is a recipe for disenchantment, but in my case, fortunately not. 

Does that mark me as a case of intellectual arrested development, inability to get past one’s early enthusiasms? Some might contend that I should have outgrown Transcendentalism by age 30, rather than become increasingly fascinated. I would argue the opposite. 

True, Transcendentalism has often been characterized, from its own time to the present, as a gospel geared for youth rather than grown-ups, and least of all the aged.  And with some reason. Emerson’s target audience was avowedly “young men.” Conversely, when he began to take his so-called pragmatic turn at midlife and to distance himself from the movement’s flakier extremes, his targets of satire tended to be callow young males like Antony the fictitious refusenik in his lecture on “The Transcendentalist.”[3] After the Civil War, the surviving members of the original Transcendentalist circle and more conservative New England intellectuals alike tended to look back upon the heyday of the movement as a charmingly naïve effervescence of romantic idealism marking a bygone stage of regional and national history.

Yet Emerson’s advice to the handful of young Harvard Divinity School graduates in his most incendiary address can apply to any stage of life or historical epoch: What another announces as truth, “I must find true in me, or wholly reject.”[4] Indeed, the hazard of bondage to groupthink tends to grow stronger with the years. Many, if not most, mid-lifers and beyond look back to their youth as a time of greater resilience and fast-expanding horizons, a time when they were far more ready than they later became to resist the prudential admonitions of their elders and to work out their own destiny according to their best lights. As we ourselves become the elders, ten to one we become more cautious and set in our ways. Jumping the rails can happen, but it takes far more concerted effort.

That Emerson saw himself as speaking especially to young people was not only because he was well aware that youth would be his most receptive audience, but also for autobiographical reasons. He himself had been a prime case of belated intellectual emergence. He himself had dutifully tried to adapt to the constraints of the Protestant ministry, the family profession for Emerson males stretching six generations back almost to the dawn of Puritan settlement. He himself had been one of those “meek young men” who “grow up in libraries,” as he wryly called them in “The American Scholar.”[5] 

Beyond that, however, he was convinced that his own generation, coming of age at a point in history when the nation’s founding fathers were dying off and the United States seemed to be entering a distinctly post-heroic age marked by an upsurge of new historical societies and commemorative rituals, had been saddled with an unusually crippling case of filiopietism. “Our age is retrospective,” he announces at the start of Nature (1836), the book that made him famous. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.” Against this, he grandly retorts, “Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?—a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history theirs?”[6]

The problem with these ringing assertions is not so much their rhetorical overstatement for the sake of emphasis as the understatement of how the call to extrication from uncritical deference to received wisdom can speak across age brackets and generations. The vehement specificity of our age belies the universality of the underlying point, which can hold for any stage of life or historical era. This includes, for example, both the younger me, restive with the consensus culture of the 1950s, and the older me, appalled at the revanchist dogmatism in today’s public culture that threatens to reduce even principled progressives to glum silence.

The other common misimpression of Emersonian Self-Reliance, both then and now, is that it canonizes spontaneous impulse. “I would write on the lintels of the door-post Whim.” Hmm. How easy to read past the hook in the breezy qualifier that follows: “I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.”[7] To read Emerson aright, particularly his early work in Essays, First Series (1841), you need to perceive how his key concepts operate on two levels, often overlapping: self-reliance and Self-Reliance, instinct and Instinct, spontaneity and Spontaneity, nature and Nature, poetry and Poetry. To read Emerson and other Transcendentalists aright requires a kind of critical doublethink: awareness of an ideal or Platonic sense always lurking within or opposing itself to the commonsense level of the assertion. To perceive at once the chasm and the connection between what Emerson, recycling Kant, called the language of the Reason and the language of the Understanding. Upper vs. lowercase Whim vs. whim.  Hence the logic of Emerson’s denial that “your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standards” when you fall back on the “law of consciousness” to absolve yourself to yourself of fulfilment of conventional responsibilities. This applies only if you think Higher Consciousness or Conscience with a capital “C” rather than the stream of workaday consciousness. In other words, only if you hold yourself to the highest moral standards. And so the passage concludes: “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandments one day.”[8]

Emerson deliberately challenges his reader by refraining from supplying reading instructions as specific as I have just done. He proclaims rather than spells out the inner discipline required to rise to the heights of illumination, of self-transcendence, to which he accords such supreme value. One rare moment when he comes close to doing so, however, is this luminous passage from “Intellect,” another of the essays from his First Series, on the interrelation of discipline and spontaneity needed to propel a person to a higher state of perception:

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth.  We say, I will walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in, and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we had laid siege to the throne.[9]

Effort may count for nothing; inspiration always counts for everything. But inspiration is more than lowercase whim. It hinges on prior concentrated effort, even though there’s no guarantee that the severest discipline will deliver transformative results. 

Such being the case, we do well, contends Emerson, to prize those moments where the mind rises above itself, or more precisely becomes suffused by epiphany, by what feels like a supernormal power of perception, by the sense of rising to a higher, more expansive aliveness. It may happen in the woods—as in the notorious “transparent eyeball” passage in Nature—or it may happen in the study.[10] Choose your preferred venue. Either way, from an Emersonian standpoint, these are the peak experiences during which one is most alive, not only from the epiphanic rush itself but, beyond that, because of their confirmation of the higher powers usually lying latent in humankind, their confirmation of what humanity can be.

This is an exciting way to think and be, but potentially a daunting one as well. If there is such a thing as a Transcendentalist tragedy, it’s the tragedy of not being able to live in the All most of the time. All leading Romantic thinkers expressed versions of this.  One of Emerson’s go-to passages from the poet William Wordsworth was “’tis . . . the most difficult of tasks to keep /Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”[11]  Hence, in part, Emerson’s great essay on “Experience,” the melancholy riposte to “Self-Reliance” and “The Oversoul.” So, in years after, the pragmatic Emerson moved to a less heady, more wary formulation of mental and moral life as an alternation between power and fate. And even from the first, a kind of stoic resignation is inherent in the “iron string” metaphor that Emerson uses to describe the inner call to Self-Reliance,  as his next sentence makes clear: “Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events.”[12] 

To reduce Emerson to stoic resignation, however, is even more reductive than to reduce him to lower case whim. Transcendentalism was well-named, even though the rubric was basically stuck on the movement by its detractors as a synonym for foreign nonsense. Transcendence, personal and social, was always the key project—to rise above the constraining level of the ordinary, which holds for any stage of life or history. “Without vision, the people perish,” Emerson’s “Method of Nature” warns, quoting Proverbs 29:18 and thereby exposing the tribalism of his movement’s origins, but in no way undermining its claim of universal pertinence, for individual souls and for societies both.[13]

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His books include Literary Transcendentalism (1973), The Environmental Imagination (1995), Emerson (2003), and Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (2023). He has lectured worldwide on American Transcendentalism. Among other prizes and awards, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature studies.

[1]Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al, 16 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 7: 342.  I discuss Emerson’s vision of human infinitude/Self-Reliance and its significance for Transcendentalism in more detail—and in some respects differently—in Chapter 2 of  Emerson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) (“Emersonian Self-Reliance in Theory and Practice,” pp. 59-106).  For my overview definitions of what Transcendentalism was in historical context, see the editorial Introduction to The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2006), and Chapter 3 of Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) (“Contexts: Antebellum America, Transcendentalism, Emerson,” pp. 34-51). The best full-length account of the Transcendentalist movement is Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007) (orig. 1995). The best biography of Emerson is Robert Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

[2] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays, First Series, ed. Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 28; Thoreau, Walden, ed. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 8, 23.

[3]“The Transcendentalist,” Nature, Addresses, and  Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 215; Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 16: 21-22.

[4]Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 80.

[5]Ibid., p. 56.

[6]Ibid., p. 7.

[7]Essays, First Series, p. 30.

[8]Ibid., p. 42.

[9]Ibid., 196-197.

[10]Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 10.

[11] Wordsworth, The Excursion, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 2: 124.

[12]Essays, First Series, 28.

[13]Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 120.