A Small Look at Transcendentalism

Epistemology was moving from the right reason and natural law of deistic Rationalism to a becoming one with the pantheistic oversoul of Romanticism.

In the States Romanticism nudged the Christian-Rationalist conglomerate off center stage and yet not without being changed slightly by the interaction with the Christian-Rationalist conglomerate worldview. This resulted in Transcendentalism here in the States. Epistemologically, the Transcendentalists released man from his slavery to right reason and natural law as well as any idea of supernatural revelation and replaced all that with a mystical and intuitive epistemology where man knows because he becomes one with the oversoul. Ontologically, the Transcendentalists reinterpreted the Rationalist-Christian conglomerate view of nature from a Deistic mechanistic and static view of nature which operates on the Newtonian like basis of immutable and indestructible reality to a pantheistic view of nature that insists that nature is a living organic thing wherein union is to be pursued so that a oneness with the cosmic mind is to be attained. Man, nature, and any idea of god are the same.

In Christianity there is a move from the mindset of Old School Presbyterianism to the second great awakening revivalism. In the University setting there is a swing from logic to poetry. In the field of politics there is a swing from each man finding his proper place in the natural order of things to each man being together one with the cosmos and as such a new drive toward the brotherhood of all men. This, ideologically speaking at least, in turn, set the stage for the mad dash at all costs to free the slaves since Transcendentalism taught that the slave and the non-slave were alike one and as one were together God. The Civil war is thus seen as a worldview conflict where the North is animated by the worldview fire of Transcendentalism seeking to crush the older Christian-Rationalist conglomerate world and life view of the antebellum South.

If the watchword of the 18th century colonies was Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness,” the watchword of the 19th century in the states was freedom. However, this freedom was defined not in the context of a Christian worldview but in the context of an absent God, with freedom thus being absolutized and achieved by the god-State filling the absent God vacuum. If freedom is needed it will be the state that provides the freedom. As such the 19th century in the States is an era of incredible “reform.” from the reform resulting in the death of 700K Americans to “free the slave,” to the reform of the eventual banning of alcohol, and the pursuit of women’s suffrage to reform brought into the realm of education — all these reforms were pursued in the name of the sovereign individual securing freedom.

The ironic thing about freedom absolutized as under the rubric of Transcendentalism is that the more people were “freed” the more they were brought into chains. The freeing of the black man is an example of this. What is called “the Civil War,” did not free the black man so much as it enslaved the white man along with the black man to the tyranny of the God-State. The black man did not lose his Plantation master. The black man along with the white man became slaves to their Plantation Master in Washington DC. Slavery thus was not eliminated. Slavery was expanded. The same is true of the liberated woman. Feminism did not free women. It brought them into greater bondage to the state. The state became the new and more oppressive husband to women. Eventually, the oppressive god-state would even rip children from liberated women’s wombs. But it all started in taking authority away from the husband in the home by giving women the vote.