KANT BE SO

 

Yes, a cheesy title, but in its way, it hits the point of this posting.  This blog, after rendering a cursory description of how Romanticism got started in Europe, now begins describing its introduction into the US.  And in that, one comes across familiar titles:  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving along with his “Rip Van Winkle.”  There’s James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and the depiction of Puritanical morals in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. 

But of direct interest to this blog are the essays and other non-fiction works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And with these efforts, one can see that many Americans readily took up the themes their European counterparts had been expounding.  That included a high dose of moral judgement, an emphasis on individualism – from a more psychological perspective – and the importance of intuition, more on this in a bit.

They also promoted an almost reverence for nature – especially in the case of Thoreau – in which the message was it was “naturally” good while society was indulgent and corrupt.  Of course, as the last posting described and explained, these themes were recurring in Romantic offerings in Europe as those artists and writers took aim at the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason.  And to underline this divorce from Enlightened thought, American Romantics hit upon a term that they felt emboldened their disdain, that being transcendentalism. 

Why?  That question takes one back to Europe.  There, the origin of this anti-reason strain gets an initial upstart not from an anti-reason argument, but one that placed certain restraints found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  In their works – to use a Lockean term – the mind at birth was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. 

It, then through experience, perhaps resulting from the succession of rewards and costs that one encounters, one “learns” to see those things that one should pursue and what one should avoid among what all those encounters teach a person.  In that one learns, from observing how one’s mind works, to reason since reasoning increases the probability of success.  To that argument, Immanuel Kant sought to qualify it.

He did not argue that reason and the ability to reason were not important aspects of learning and decision-making, but he claimed there was more going on in the mind and those processes of sorts were inborn abilities.  And that needs to be explained.  To begin, yes, at birth one experiences and/or observes isolated things out in one’s surroundings, but that is all a subject can do that relates to his/her reasoning ability. 

That is, each encounter is merely observing a sensation.  At that stage, reason could not do anything with each sensation or, to use the jargon, each thing-in-itself.  As such, each is phenomenal, or datum and one cannot pass any judgement about it.  To this point, there is agreement with David Hume in that Hume’s skepticism questioned the human ability to draw any conclusions even if colliding billiard balls then move away from each other. 

But, Kant adds, that upon that pure information, one has built-in a mental capacity – not based on experience – that allows one to make judgements of what underlies or constitutes those experiences.  And that is what Kant called with the unfortunate term, noumenal (roughly pronounced new-ou-min-al).

This noumenal is a totally different realm of knowledge into which the mind can tap.  It is through this element that the mind can investigate the nature of things or to pass judgement as to its ultimate truthfulness, its functionality, its morality, and other qualities that transcend its physical qualities, i.e., beyond one’s observation of the things-in-themselves.  And here, according to Kant, one does not use reason – reason only deals in the phenomenal.[1]

All of this review reminds this blogger of what he reads concerning contemporary psychological study of these human, mental abilities and processes.  For example, Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, writes:

 

Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common …

[quoting Herbert Simon] “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer.  Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” …

          An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgements and choices than it did in the past.  [An] executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgements and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.[2]

 

All this gets heavier as one plunges into Kant, and the purpose here is not to do so – even if this writer could – but to give the reader a sense of why Romantic Americans adopted the term transcendentalism.  In doing so, they probably extended Kant’s purposes, but it did fit into what they wished to promote.  As with their European counterparts, they had an attitude against reason and Kant’s transcendent argument fit their designs.  Allen Guelzo explains:

 

There were, Kant said, two things which amazed him – the starry heavens above, which were phenomenal, and the moral law within which belonged to the noumenal.  Never the twain would meet, at least methodologically.  Philosophy could not become transcendent.  But, through the gift of the noumenal, it could become transcendental.  Reason, and all of its limitations, half heartedness, and sterility, could retire off the stage and minds could rejoice in knowing the certainty of external phenomena and the intuition of transcendental wonder.[3]

 

And wonder seems to be what many Americans were searching to find in the 1820s and 1830s.

As with the Great Awakening, the first signs of this transcending that is Transcendentalism appears in the Boston area.  It devolved from Unitarianism, a Protestant sect springing from the days of the Great Awakening, on the Harvard campus.  By the early 1800s, it had become the most prominent religion in the Boston area.

Upon the election of Henry Ware as a professor of divinity as early as 1805 and the ascension of John Thornton Kirkland as president of that college in 1810, a certain natural evolution from Unitarian beliefs took hold, an outgrowth or sort of rebellious thinking that promoted free consciousness and initially valued intellectual reasoning. 

But this view moved on and began to question such Unitarian biases of mildness, sobriety, and cool rationalism.  They, the self-anointed Transcendentalists, sought more intensity.   Parallel to otherwise Unitarian beliefs, they went looking for more visceral spirituality in their beliefs and in the religious experiences that they encountered.[4]  These notions took root and led to the eventual founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge in 1836 under the leadership of George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

The club had female members and of note, Thoreau was also a member.  It published a journal, The Dial.  But the club and its movement did not enjoy widespread influence during the 1840s.  As a matter of fact, it did not hit its stride until later in the mid-nineteenth century.  At that time, Transcendentalism influenced a growing movement known as the “Mental Sciences.”  Later, it took on the name “New Thought.”  It considered Emerson its intellectual father as well as depending on a long list of influential British writers of those years.[5]

It turns out that these Americans had little direct exposure to European Romantics and most of what they understood or knew of them came to them through the works of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  It is through their presentation of Romantic ideas that this blog will next look at and report on their influence.

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[1] Henry E. Allison, “Kant, Immanuel,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 435-438.

[2] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 11-12.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 23-24.

[4] Ian Frederick, “The Emergence of Transcendentalism,” American Studies at The University of Virginia, University of Virginia (November 2014), accessed September 13, 2021, Rise of Transcendentalism (virginia.edu) .

[5] “New Thought,” MSN Encarta, Microsoft (November 11, 2002), accessed September 13, 2021, New Thought - MSN Encarta (archive.org) .