CONCEPT
Transcendentalism
The mid-nineteenth-century American intellectual movement — centered on Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Concord circle — that insisted on individual moral intuition as the foundation of knowledge and provided the philosophical framework within which Thoreau's experiment at Walden became intelligible.
Transcendentalism was the American intellectual movement that flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, centered in Concord, Massachusetts, and organized around the conviction that individual moral and spiritual intuition could reach truths unavailable to institutional authority or empirical observation alone. The movement took its name from the German philosophical tradition — Kant's 'transcendental' method and its Romantic inheritors — but adapted the tradition to American conditions. Its leading figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1836 essay 'Nature' served as founding manifesto; Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 Woman in the Nineteenth Century extended the philosophy to questions of gender; and Thoreau, whose Walden experiment was transcendentalism made material. The movement's central claim — that the individual, properly attentive to her own experience, could access truths that no external authority could supply — provided the philosophical architecture within which Thoreau's cost accounting, his deliberate living, and his civil disobedience all became coherent.
