Critique of Transcendentalism

The transcendentalist movement of the 19th century can be understood as the last gasp of a dying romanticism which had characterized the rebellion against the Enlightenment and with it, the industrial revolution. It was, to put it in poetic terms, the last breath of a dying God; it wished to return to an era when men and spirits lived side by side, and confronted each other face to face. Unfortunately, the world we have built around us is no longer capable of sustaining such a connection to what one might call the other side. All such connections have faded away, and we have been left to inherit a world that is entirely alien to us, a world mutilated beyond recognition. 

How can one find peace in a world that produces nothing but alienation, and reduces people to machines? How can one find peace in knowing that our one connection to the Primordial is being killed? It is true that nature never sleeps, and that, as Thoreau says, “the repose is never complete…” and that “the wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey… the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear,” but how can one find peace when the foxes, skunks and rabbits are on the daily being slaughtered and driven from the forests in order to make room for crops and livestock? This, then, is the first objection to transcendentalism that will be put forward; it is too passive, and is incapable of arming those who would wish to defend nature with the adequate ideological weapons. It is hard to imagine Thoreau being able to gather a small army and take up arms to kill for what they believe in.

Transcendentalism was born as a reaction to the Enlightenment, in a time when all in existence was being conquered for the glory of reason and science, and in our vain desire to do the impossible and see the unseen, we lost ourselves in dreams of what we could do, without ever stopping to ask ourselves whether or not we should do it. This was the chief cause of transcendentalism. And it is also why transcendentalism cannot solve the problems of the modern age. 

Transcendentalism as a philosophy is inadequate precisely because it, in a way, is incapable of providing a solution to the predicament we find ourselves in, that predicament being the collapse of the current social order and massive, apocalyptic climate catastrophe. It is incapable of addressing these problems because transcendentalism operates under the assumption that there is, in fact, a deeper meaning to the world that can be found, a driving force behind all things that works dexterously to fulfill some divine plan, when in reality, there is no such predetermined force; we have been abandoned by God, and are all alone, with no one but ourselves and each other. 

Transcendentalism attempts to pave the path to salvation for the solitary individual, and the solitary individual alone. A solitary individual who still has a chance to save the world that currently exists, to banish the mechanical and seemingly alien forces that have come down upon this world from the ivory towers of academia. It attempts to create artificial categories into which we can place different phenomena; as Emerson writes in Nature, “...the universe is composed of nature and soul… all that is separate from us, all which philosophy distinguishes as not me… must be ranked under this name, Nature.”

Unfortunately, it is becoming harder and harder to make the distinction between subject and object, actor and acted-upon; as capitalism begins to bring all that exists beneath its rule, it dissolves all that distinguishes and differentiates, and reduces all people and populations to mere market demographics.

In Nature, Emerson asks the reader why “we should grope among the dry bones of the past…” for “...there are new lands, new men, new thoughts.” And for him and the people of his time this may have been true. But it isn’t true for the modern age. We in the modern age have exhausted all possible sources of divinity, drained every lake and mined every mountain, levelled every forest and sailed every sea. We live off of old stories recycled to fit our new age. In a world where god did not die, but rather, withdrew, what solace can be found in hoping for a future that we know will not come? What comfort can be found in knowing that God has abandoned us, and the future has been cancelled?

The winds of time chip away at the monuments built long ago to honor long lost glories. The spirits of the dead haunt the minds of the living, spirits that cannot be banished, for to banish them is to banish our only sense of what it means to be. Abandoned by all that had formerly guided us, will we manage to find God in this present moment, in love amongst our fellow downtrodden creatures, and in doing so spark the final revolution, the war to bring about the thousand year Kingdom? Or will we abandon all hope and look inward, relinquishing all ties to the world in which we dwell?

When we retire into nature in search of the “new, universal, more liberal laws” that Thoreau speaks of, and find that they are nowhere to be found, what will we do? Certainly the only dignified thing to do would be to disregard all earthly laws, and patiently await the coming of the eschaton. Certainly we will disregard this vulgar idea put forward by Emerson in Self Reliance that it is only in solitude that we can hear truth, and that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” For without others, the individual is nothing. It is not necessary to withdraw from society and reject all societies, but rather, to reject established societies and form counter-societies. To deprive people of communal living is to deprive them of growth, and without growth, all hope of a better world is lost.