The Physical Origins and Limitations of Transcendence

Transcendentalism, the nineteenth century American intellectual movement, is most noted for its impact on American culture and arts, specifically, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau among others. Generally speaking, the prolific essays and lectures produced by the aforementioned are considered the basis for American Transcendentalism, a doctrine comprised of almost as many definitions as it has subscribers. In the article “Sense and Transcendence in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman,” Larry Reynolds and Tibbie Lynch describe the movement as “inspired by dissatisfaction with the emotional and spiritual sterility of Unitarianism, a sterility attributed to the Unitarian acceptance of Lockean ‘sensationalism.’” However, commenting on the works of these authors, Reynolds and Lynch point out that the transcendental experiences described in their writings originate with a sensory experience. They contend that:

the act of intuitive perception resulted in a mystical spiritual union between the material world, which included the finite self, and the infinite ideal world; between, in Emerson's terms, the NOT ME and the ME, NATURE and SOUL. This mystical union formed the center of the Transcendentalisms of all three writers, for the ecstasy accompanying it provided experiential confirmation of the validity of their views of man and nature. For each writer the mystical union and the act of intuitive perception initiating it were unique. (148)


For Emerson, an admirer of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idealism—or an application of intuitive reasoning—Transcendentalism refutes the sensory empiricism argued by John Locke—wherein all of our knowledge and ideas arise from experience. Emerson writes in “The Transcendentalist,” that “there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired . . . these were intuitions of the mind itself” (246). Transcendentalism, therefore, is a reawakening of spiritual and mental activity not proscribed by any particular faith but found within the individual. He likens this process, in the essay “Nature,” as one wherein he becomes “a transparent eyeball” that sees all though nonexistent and is “part and parcel of God” (39). However, Emerson realizes the physical restraints to the individual’s mental activity. Again utilizing vision as a metaphor, Emerson claims in “Experience” that “people forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint” (305). In other words, Emersonian transcendentalism seems to inextricably conjoin the empiricism and idealism of Locke and Kant—neither can be independent of the other and a productive life results from the proper application of both.

By comparison, Emerson also warns of the hazards involved in life. For example, in “Fate,” ostensibly a refutation of the spirit of free will espoused in his more famous essay, “Nature,” Emerson claims that what men have labeled destiny is actually limitation. “Whatever limits us,” he writes, “we call fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer” (372). In other words, as man progresses—deeper into unknown parts of the continent or recesses of his self-awareness—his only limitation is that which he imposes upon himself. Emerson seems to be warning his reader that complacency begets comfort which begets stagnation and, ultimately, a belief that Fate is at work. Emerson argues that Fate can be superseded. “The water drowns ship and sailor,” he writes, “but learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it will be cloven by it and carry it like its own foam” (379). This is, decidedly, not the predestination preached by the Calvinist and Puritan settlers of America. In “Nature,” he exhorts his reader to accept “that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect . . . Build therefore your own world” (80-1). This sentiment is repeated in “Fate.” Emerson, again, ascribes godliness to man describing him as containing “side by side, god and devil, mind and matter . . . riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man” (374). This metaphysical aspect of Emerson is thoroughly balanced with the physical. Emerson writes that “there are objections to every course of life and action . . . Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question . . . We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them” (294).

It is this school of thought Henry David Thoreau subscribed to prior to his sojourn in the woods by Walden Pond. In Walden and other works, he becomes the “lover of nature” proposed by Emerson, “whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other” (Nature, 38). Unlike Emerson’s reliance on vision as the primary sensation and analogous to a mode of thought, Thoreau fully engages all the senses in his writings. For example, opening his 1843 essay “A Winter Walk” Thoreau writes, “the wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along the livelong night” (211), thereby achieving a synesthesia wherein the reader is invited to feel the wind by reading the description of the sounds and motions generated by it. “A Winter Walk” concludes with a similar effect:

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and merry, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skilful [sic] physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an oriental, but a boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fire-places, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams. (225)

Similarly, in the essay “Wild Apples” Thoreau zestfully expresses the taste of his favorite fruit. “There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town,” he writes, “which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it” (522). In passages such as this, Thoreau demonstrates his mastery over the written word and ability to articulate empirical data as a sublime experience.

Conversely, Thoreau is also able to arrive at truly transcendental moments, that he describes in his text, due to a lack of sensory information. In “The Village” chapter of Walden, he writes of walking in the woods at night not being able to see his way but only knowing where to go “dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until . . . aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch” and unable to recall how he arrived home as if his “body would find its way home if its master should forsake it”(216). However, these episodes of sensory deprivation are infrequent and, much like Emerson’s horizon creating eye, serve to demonstrate the marriage of instinct with sensation. “Every man,” Thoreau claims, “has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are ad the infinite extent of our relations” (217).

Overall, Thoreau celebrates the sensory experience in Walden. He fully delights in all of his senses as seen in “The Bean-Field,” where he describes working the soil with his hoe, planting beans, and even tasting them, for he “was determined to know beans” (206). He also personifies the beans as viewing him as “coming to their rescue armed with a hoe” in order to defeat their enemies, the weeds, and watching as they “fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust” (207). Within this chapter, Thoreau also observes hawks, pigeons, and a salamander—“these sounds and sights,” he claims as “a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers” (205).

Overall, however, sound was his primary means of communing with the world around him and vehicle for transcendence. Birdsongs, raindrops, the buzz and chirp of insects, and the strains of martial music carried on the air from Concord all stimulated Thoreau’s inward senses as much as they pricked up his ears. According to Emerson, in his eulogy of Thoreau, “his eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire” (408). The other senses were more limiting, as explained by Sherman Paul in “The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau:”
Sight required attention and could become too particular and limited. Taste and feeling required immediate objects. Smell more nearly approximated the vagueness and unheralded approach of sound, but it did not have an equivalent like silence to make it significant. For sound and silence were Thoreau's grand analogy: silence was a celestial sea of eternity, the general, spiritual and immutable; sound was the particular and momentary bubble on its surface. Sound was important to Thoreau for the intimations of silence that it brought him. (513)

The inverse of Paul’s axiom is also true. Silent contemplation is required for the proper formulation and expression of one’s thoughts prior to the use of language—the medium through which personal observations are conveyed into the public sphere.
Following Emersonian semiotics—the belief that words signified, and had their basis in, natural facts and led to spiritual truths—Thoreau more highly valued the relationship between language and nature. According to Phillip Gura in “Language and Meaning: An American Tradition,” Thoreau “discovered that language . . . offered the unique key to nature's well-kept secrets. In essence, he came to believe that only through using words as precisely as possible could an artist approach the very nature of the things he wished to describe. The experiential reference points of language provided a magical power which enabled men to evoke the empirical truth each word contained.” Gura argues that for Thoreau, the relationship between things and the words that signify them “did not so much raise man to a higher level of truth as serve to alert him to the wonder of his sensuous existence. To Thoreau, both words and things delighted the man open to their symbiotic, if often neglected, original relationship” (7-9). This “sensuous existence” of Thoreau’s is seen in various places throughout Walden. Whether he is describing the colors of Walden Pond ice in “The Pond in Winter” or of the sand along the railroad bank in “Spring,” Thoreau carefully crafts his description to capture the essence of each phenomenon.

Thoreau is not the only one subjected to limitations. Joseph Kronick, in “The Death of Theory and the Example of Socrates,” argues that Thoreau’s sensual restrictions are self-imposed. Kronick writes:

The philosopher's singular vision has meaning only in relation to the public realm. This is the significance of . . . Thoreau's life in the woods . . . just as Thoreau says he “would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account,” so he is saying each person is singular or unique, if he follows his example and, like him, “lives deliberately.” Thoreau's paradox, which he copied from Emerson, is that to be an example is to be at once singular and imitable. (455)

Furthermore, Thoreau makes the claim in Walden’s “Conclusion” that “it is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you . Neither men nor toadstools grow so” (372). This is yet another call for the individual to seek his own understanding of the world. Thoreau tells us that he left Walden woods upon the realization that he “had several more lives to live . . . if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” (371), thereby reiterating his belief that all men should “live deliberately” (135) using his experience as an example.

The transcendence sought by Emerson and Thoreau has its origins in empirical data gained through sensory phenomenon. More to the point, their communication of this is also limited by these same phenomenon in so much as they are limited by language which has empirical data has its basis regardless of the degree of abstract thought conveyed. Insights are derived by both writers about the world they inhabit and the people in it only when they allow themselves to be open to sensorial experiences. It is only through the union—hinted at by Emerson and more fully realized by Thoreau—of Lockean empiricism with Kant’s idealism that this is achieved.