ENG 210 Class - Question on Individualist Transcendence [Archive]

Dean

26th February 2010, 16:32

Full Text of my essay, modified for forum usage. I'm interested primarily in responses on the first section (that is, up to the "5 examples" portion) because that is the direct critique of these philosophical tendencies.

Comments on Transcendentalism

Individual human beings exist within the context of their material surroundings, and the total summation of their activities as human beings can be understood by these conditions. Among the works we have studied so far, there are examples of characters intimately involved in their surroundings, as well as characters which seem to transcend and fundamentally contradict those surroundings. This apparent duality is really an illusion: even the harshest critics and rejectionists of society have constructed their reality around society, and in fact heavily rely on input from society for the development of their own worldviews.

For this to be true, however, ‘material surroundings’ must describe all variables which go into the development of a human being. For our purposes, material surroundings are not only external inputs for the human creature, but the total sum of all energy sources which the human being subsumes, everything from their founding sex cells to the matter that is breathed, consumed and sensed. Transcendence can only be a mental activity, and subsequently it is only the theoretical mind that can be seen as transcending.

Insofar as we consider Transcendentalism as a philosophical movement, we are limited by obscure conceptualizations of our mental faculties. That is to say, we cannot honestly look at any given individual and ask if he or she has or can transcend their environment, since this kind of transcendentalism is a distinct metaphysical argument, at least in the case of the Germans. In regards to American Transcendentalism, I think the movement is hopelessly vague; political and sociological issues aside, the mystical practice of transcendentalism provides merely a reproduction of the old Christian mythos, branded in a pagan ideology, in an attempt to gain integrity where the Christian philosophy was clearly wanting.

Take Kant’s example. If we were to judge any specific individual in regards to this kind of transcendentalism, we would be to ask “is this person able to externally critique his or her sensuous input for its use-value to understand physical properties?” or something similar. I don’t think these are serious questions, that is, I don’t think they pose any serious argument insofar as the individual-in-society is concerned. We might be able to ask if he or she is aware of their own interpretation of physical movement, but this bears little practical application, and can only be seen as an anecdotal or novel concept in the pursuit of something like a broad theory of human cognition.

American Transcendentalism may provide a more promising vehicle for the individual-in-society example. However, this is only a consequence of the mystical character of this tendency. One can experience a fairly coherent ideology of religious mysticism in Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which tackles some of the same questions as the transcendental movement. However, it would seem that, in contrast to the direct, materialist logic of Feuerbach, the mystical propensities of Thoreau and Walden were confused and indirect. In the face of such a voluminous body of philosophical and materialist works, any serious inquiry into the philosophical essence of man can only come across as so widely ignorant and narrow insofar as they were seeking a nationalistic ghetto of literary tradition, as expressed in Walden’s speech at Cambridge. One of the more ironic consequences of this orientation is the inability to understand their own philosophical and literary context. I don’t believe that “literary independence” or such similar arguments can really help a society in its progress; rather, a wide-ranging sample of honest material inquiry is bound to offer the best potential for philosophical development.

The qualities of transcendence, in terms of the American tradition, are a mystical relationship with a divine truth, a general rejection of the political and scientific society, and a “deep” return or relationship with nature. After having read of, and read works by adherents to this tendency for years, I must admit that I was never clear on any direct or distinct body of ideas, merely a confused alliance of various liberal ideas; indeed, Gura points out that the so-called ‘Transcendental Club’ agreed only on ‘liberalism.’1

5 Literary Examples

Perhaps the most distinct expression of this brand of transcendentalism can be found in Gertrude Bonnin’s Why I Am a Pagan. While there is little substantial argument to discuss in the context of this piece, nonetheless the ideology put forward by Bonnin can be seen as parallel: she exhibits a fundamental admiration for nature, as well as a mystical sense of god which correlates with, but rejects the Christian mythos. Bonnin both talks of ‘Infinite Love’ and God as if they were objective realities: “…God's creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love.”2 Bonnin is clearly struggling with, or attempting to make a point about race, though the argument is not clear.

Chickamauga provides a distinct example of the inability to separate the material from the psychic. The child is forced to go through the acts of the horror of war, that is, the nationalistic fervor, the terror of death, the insane ambition, and the personal loss, all without possession of any external analysis or personal epiphany. He is fully absorbed into the entire narrative, and I do not believe that at any point in the story he achieves “transcendence.” In fact, one of the final paragraphs of this piece actually makes the use-value of the protagonist as an internal character unable to see the whole story very explicit:

“The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries--something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey--a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.”3

This seems to illustrate how utterly disassociated the soldier is from the whole system of war, on the one hand. On the other, we could analyze the character and his place in the story, which would reveal that he is nothing more than an actor in Bierce’s piece, a placeholder for him to use to make his own point. There is no epiphany, no catharsis, to reward the boy or at least provide a distinct, stated moral. He is inescapably tied to his world.

The War Prayer by Mark Twain provides an interesting candidate for this discussion. In reading the story, one could consider transcendence to be dependent on the presence of theism. This brings up an interesting issue: who is to decide what is transcendent? While I, as an atheist, would obviously think that the lack of religious sentiment is a “more real” mode of understanding, another person would take the religious sentiment (and supposedly more Christian stance) of the second speaker as a more transcendent position then if he had also denounced theism.

This piece provides a particular problem for the concept of transcendence, however: the speaker is by his very nature a “godly” presence, clearly meant to invoke the prophet archetype, and furthermore, there is no character development that would give us an understanding as what context he could transcend from. It is clear at least that he takes on a different, contrary tone: while the others are grave and violent, he is sarcastic and ironic, marking the end of his explicit monologue with the words, “We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love.”4 However, this cannot really qualify as transcendence, at least in any human sense, because there is no point from which the speaker could transcend.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an incredibly eerie piece, and it would be difficult to know where to begin to ask about transcendence. In fact, there are two widely-accepted criticisms of the piece which would lead us in two distinct directions. The first is the feminist approach, which clearly sees the protagonist as transcending (that is, if conquering one’s oppressor can be seen as a transcendental act). This analysis often focuses directly on the final scene:

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!5

While I appreciate the large body of feminist analysis, works, and the movement as a whole, I would disagree that this symbol is very important to a feminist perspective. In terms of feminism, I would say that the story is more valuable in that it describes the orientation of medical practice wherein the patient clearly understands how she would be better served in her recovery, but is ignored.

If we look at the story in terms of mental health, it is at first apparent that she descends into a schizophrenic episode, experiencing vivid hallucinations. She is so reliant on the imagery in her bedroom, that we could say that she does the opposite of transcendence. At the beginning of the narrative, she is optimistic and outward-looking; increasingly, however, she obsesses over her wallpaper, to the point that it could be said that she is dominated by her surroundings. Her escape is really hollow, since she is in a vulnerable psychological state at the end, increasingly alienated from all positive societal relationships, and ultimately far detached from a heightened understanding of the world.

Incident by Countee Cullen contains within it a powerful anecdote, which I think nearly any black American can relate to. The utterance of the term “Nigger” is an expression of elitism; to be a nigger is to be part of a lower caste, and first and foremost this caste distinction is an economic one. In this way, when the speaker is accosted by this language, he is hardly transcending his social existence, rather, he is experiencing a stark association with the caste system, and this incident in fact preoccupies him for his entire visit to Baltimore: “Of all the things that happened there / That's all that I remember.”6 The poem can actually be read as an argument that we cannot escape the reality of our social existence.

I do not think that to transcend society or our environment is a very meaningful concept. In applying these concepts to the different situations in which our characters find themselves, we have seen that transcendentalism can be an obtuse, irrelevant concept (as in the prophet who speaks for god) or a core ethic, as in Why I Am a Pagan. What is most striking to me is that disassociative qualities seem to make up the fundamental values of American Transcendentalism. If transcendentalism is a positive experience, then it should be aggressively focused on society and inwardly analytical; instead, we see an ideology akin to Buddhism which seeks an immaterial, mystical paradigm. Ultimately, human capacity and freedom must be understood in the context of their social and economic existence; insofar as we ignore these and other systems, we will fail to free or empower ourselves.

1Gura, Philip F. “American Transcendentalism: A History.” New York: Hill and Wang Via Wikipedia
2 Bonnin, Gertrude. “Why I am a Pagan”
3Bierce, Ambrose. “Chickamauga”
4Twain, Mark. “The War Prayer”
5Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper”
6Cullen, Countee. “Incident”