Transcendentalism, a mid-19th century New England philosophy, emphasized spiritual self-reliance and individualism, influencing movements for racial justice, women's rights and environmental protection in America.
Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It centers around the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition.
Quite simply, transcendentalism is a social movement and idealistic philosophy in which knowledge about ourselves and the world around us "transcends" what we can see, hear, taste, touch, or feel.
Transcendentalism emphasized the importance of individualism, intuition, and a direct connection to the divine, and rejected the materialism and conformity of contemporary society.
Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to mid-nineteenth century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.
In the 1830s, the philosophy of Transcendentalism arose in New England. Some of its most famous adherents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, are still regarded as leading American thinkers today.
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. [1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, [1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their bes...
The 19th-century Transcendentalism movement was inspired by German transcendentalism, Platonism and Neoplatonism, the Indian and Chinese scriptures, and also by the writings of such mystics as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme.