Transcendentalism Without Escape

Two recent books invite reflection on the value of transcendentalism by considering what it becomes after its heyday. Bruce Ronda's The Fate of Transcendentalism (2017) takes up writers from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth in "an effort to discern the lineage of transcendentalism in the years after its historical moment" (2). Christopher Hanlon's Emerson's Memory Loss (2018) focuses on transcendentalism's central figure, urging us to read Ralph Waldo Emerson's earlier and best-known works "through the lens offered by [his] later writings in order to disrupt their more familiar patterns of resonance" (4). I wish to emphasize the sense, shared by Ronda and Hanlon, that in certain moments transcendentalist writings can come alive, while at other times they will have gone dead. For Hanlon, Emerson's later works are valuable because they enable us "to activate something in him that would otherwise remain dormant" (8). And Ronda asks us to see transcendentalism as less "a coherent movement or tradition" than "a set of people, texts, episodes, and memories that come bracingly alive in distinctive, quirky, and sometimes disputatious ways" in the years after its emergence (202). Both offer historically minded accounts of transcendentalism, although the term is central only to Ronda's book. But in tilting toward later times, the books suggest what is to my mind the most pressing question about transcendentalism: What can it contribute to our sense of the present moment and our capacity to imagine more just and livable futures? How might it come bracingly alive for us?

Taken as a movement, transcendentalism should not be considered apart from the contributions of Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Orestes Brownson, and several others. But what follows will attend primarily to Emerson, secondarily to Henry David Thoreau. The present value of an idea of transcendentalism, it seems to me, is to be discovered in their writings or nowhere. Introducing a collection on Emerson, Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe refer to what is "'transcendental' in the worst possible sense," by which they mean "escapist" and "isolationist" (xvii). For many of us, this sense has been the primary one. Escapism and isolating individualism are, of course, related. According to a widely shared view, what transcendentalists seek to escape are social responsibilities, the claims others make on our attention, energies, voices, and wealth. Thus construed, transcendentalism is politically deplorable. As John Carlos Rowe's influential account has it, "More often than not, transcendentalism works to rationalize present wrongs rather than bring about actual social change" (40).

Condemnations of transcendentalism are easier to find in books published a generation ago than in more recent work. Today transcendentalism seems less vulnerable to hostility than to indifference. Perhaps many of us have been convinced by Rowe's argument that it is politically useless, or worse.¹ Then again, diminishing attention to transcendentalism in period-oriented scholarship may have been less a turn away from it than a plainly necessary turn toward other nineteenth-century writing, especially the works of people of color and white women. In any case, what we think of transcendentalism matters, if only because so many of us teach it.

"Defining Transcendentalism," Joel Myerson observes, "is a lot like grasping mercury" (xxv). My definitional gesture is simply to suggest that "transcendentalism" does not in every case signify a wish to escape reality. As Emerson and many others point out, US transcendentalism owes its name to Immanuel Kant's usage, where it suggests a wish to get closer to knowing how our world is constituted. For Kant, escapism is the province of the transcendent, not the transcendental. "Transcendent" things cannot be objects of experience; such things include "God, freedom, and immortality," along with, generally, things in themselves (Kant 31). Kant warns that it is misguided and dangerous to claim to know, rather than believe, that anything transcendent exists. So it was under the aegis of the transcendental...