Transcendentalism Without Escape

Abstract

This essay-review asks what transcendentalism can contribute to our sense of the present moment and our capacity to imagine more just and livable futures. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to the view that transcendentalism embraces escapism and isolating individualism. I focus on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, presuming that the present value of an idea of transcendentalism is to be discovered in their writings or nowhere. The two are centrally concerned with describing the conditions under which experience is acquired; their writing, then, evinces a wish to get closer to the world, not to escape it. What they do seek to transcend is not the world but our illusions about it, particularly those that feed egotism. The irony of calling Emerson in particular an escapist is that his writing makes escape so difficult to achieve. The process of reading Emerson—of finding a sentence suddenly captivating, just where it had been hopelessly dull—models and perhaps prompts a process of similar discovery about the mundane world. I conclude by linking transcendentalism to ideas of critical humility and naïveté suggested by Stanley Cavell, Toril Moi, Jane Bennett, and Theodor Adorno. Some form of naïveté, I speculate, might help us confront our inability to change in the midst of anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction.