Transcendentalism
1820–1830s US philosophical movement, holding that society corrupts humans’ inherent goodness, favoring intuition over empiricism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, 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.
Transcendentalism was thought to originally have emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.
“Transcendentalism” enters the record as 1820–1830s US philosophical movement, holding that society corrupts humans’ inherent goodness, favoring intuition over empiricism. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Transcendentalism, 1830s and philosophical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q331563. The Library of Congress control number is sh85136885. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Transcendentalism” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.