Jeff Zhang

Period 3
The transcendentalist movement was as close as it came to a Renaissance
Enlightenment in the United States. Pioneered by the essays and lectures given by Ralph Waldo
Emerson and his close friend Henry David Thoreau around the country, transcendentalism is a
philosophy that demands that the individual seek truth through inward thought and meditation,
rather than submit to being taught truths from a textbook or having information fed to from a
teacher. The transcendentalists believed in the purity of the individual; that is, they believed that
the individual was the most powerful and most correct, that the self was the omnipotent
(though apparently under God, they clarified) in a relativistic way. This conviction was none
the more evident for the founders of transcendentalism than when Thoreau judiciously declared,
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different
drummer. Let him step to the music that he hears, however measured or far away. Have pride in
being an individual, revel in nonconformity! Strive to be yourself, and not merely someone elses
shadow. These were the central themes of the transcendentalist movement.
Unlike the histories of many of civilizations greatest thinkers, the backgrounds of Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are surprisingly well-documented. Henry David
Thoreau was born David Henry in 1817 to Cynthia and John Thoreau, owners of a pencil
company. A well-read young man, Thoreau found interest in books and writings about the
natural world, some of which included Charles Darwins Voyage of the Beagle and the journals
of William Bartram. He later was accepted into Harvard University, but left without much
professional training. The common professions of the time for college graduates (a businessman,
a lawyer, a priest, a doctor, etc) didnt interest him; he spent most of his college years reading
about nature. After college, he returned to Concord, Massachusetts, and spent his time working
in his fathers pencil factory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson came from a significantly different background. He was the son of
a prominent Unitarian minister and grew up in a prestigious Boston family. Incredibly bright and
well-read, he was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 14 and kept well-written
journals of notes, which were carefully preserved and are on display today at his home. After
college, he started a school with his younger brother William, but had to relinquish charge of the
school as Emersons bad health forced him to constantly be moving to warmer climates. In 1827
he married Ellen Louisa Tucker but she died two years later of tuberculosis. Greatly affected by
his loss, Emerson became distraught and a wanderer. After serving on and off as a minister for
a year, Emerson decided to tour Europe. It was there that he developed his love of nature and
discovered the interconnectedness of things, ideas that he would take back to the United States
and would later influence his works like Nature and his lectures about a new way of thought,
transcendentalism. When he returned to the United States, he was committed to sharing his
experiences, giving the first of his lectures, The Uses of Natural History in Boston in 1833.
Emerson gave some 1,500 lectures over the course of his lifetime around the country. He also
started the Transcendental Club and the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity to share his ideas. It was
during one of his meetings in 1837 that he met Henry David Thoreau. The two would be lifelong
friends, though Thoreau is reportedly to have said that he considered Ralph Waldo Emerson
paternal at times. Emerson introduced Thoreau into his circle of acquaintances, some of the
most prominent thinkers of the time, and helped publish some of his works in The Dial, a
transcendentalist periodical. It was later in 1845 that Emerson advised Thoreau take time to
himself, to meditate on his thoughts. He loaned Thoreau a 14 acre piece of land near Walden
Pond. Here Thoreau stayed for two years, living as simply as possible in a self-built house.
During this time, Thoreau worked on his two most influential writings, essays titled Walden
and Civil Disobedience. Central tenets of Transcendentalism, they continued to inspire writers
and social activists for years. Civil Disobedience is famously to have inspired the ideas of
nonviolent protest that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. practiced and to have
influenced the writings of William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Ernest
Hemingway among others.
Transcendentalism, as developed by Emerson and expanded on by Thoreau, is a
celebration of individualism. The individual must transcend understanding and embrace
reason; the individual must themselves define the world. Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of your own mind. Emerson declared. Though the initial idea was a product of
Emersons experiences in Europe, Thoreaus works are the best known on the philosophy,
especially his two works Civil Disobedience and Walden.
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau is an essay that was written in response to
the Mexican-American War. In July 1846, Thoreau was arrested and jailed for refusing to pay
six years worth of poll taxes, which he claimed were funding an illegitimate war. Though he
only spent a single night in jail, the experience left Thoreau bitter with the government, leaving
him to sharply criticize how an institution created by men could turn around and oppress its very
own creators. In this essay Thoreau famously declares that that The government is best which
governs least, and, sometimes controversially, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once
a better government. Thoreau criticizes the morality of having a government, which inherently
decides right and wrong through the issuing of policies and setting of laws. This ideology is
flawed, says the transcendentalist, because the ideas of the majority are not always morally the
most correct. Thoreau urged people in this instance to reject the Mexican-American war by
refusing to pay their taxes, a kind of passive, nonviolent civil disobedience. He argued that the
individual had to determine their own morality, and that hindering evil was just as morally
imperative as assisting good.
Walden, or as its formally called, Walden or Life in the Woods, was also written by
Thoreau and recounted his two year stay in the woods by Walden Pond. Thoreau wrote about
how he built the house, how he grew his own food, and how he found wood and made a fire.
Thoreau wrote about the beauty of the woods and even how a thunderstorm is deep and majestic
and moving. Walden represents another side of transcendentalism, the knowledge of the place
that humans occupy in nature and how our species must learn to appreciate and live with the
trees and the animals peacefully. Thoreau also stressed that the most fulfilling life was one in
which the individual had nothing but themselves, thus no distractions to focus on the beauty of
the world. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive
life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
Transcendentalism is like any other philosophy as it is a way of explaining the world
through thought. It is fundamentally different, however, in that it rejects the method of using
solid facts and proven conjectures to validate its tenets. Transcendentalism is an individuals
interpretation; the individual must seek reason for him or herself. This mode of thinking was
enlightening, as it encouraged the importance of individualism and innovation that pushed the
United States out of the 19
th
century and onto the world stage of industry and globalization.