
                           20050621.01

                  Transcendentalism as theology

     As philosophy, American transcendententalism is implausible.
At least since Descartes, the primary concern of philosophy has
been epistemological, the quest for answers to questions such as:
What is knowledge, what do I know, what can I know, "Wie ist
Wissenschaft moeglich," (Kant), how is science possible.  To the
transcendentalists, these questions were of no interest.

     Transcendentalism was a revolt within the established
Unitarian Church. Strictly speaking, it was not reformation,
but counter-reformation.  With the help of John Locke, those
vestiges of the divine which the Scholastics had purported
to find in the soul as innate ideas had been erased by a prior
generation as it asserted itself against Puritanism and
Congregationalism. Its rhetoric was now no longer compelling. 
A new generation of Divines, discomfited with the barrenness
of the Lockean soul, demanded its own voice, demanded that its
own values, its sensitivities, its passions, be acknowledged
by the church. It was an ecclesiastical counter-revolution,
but because the stakes were not high, the results were not
spectacular, and it proved of little import.

     Transcendentalism tried to find its focus by replacing the
tabula rasa epistemology of Locke with Kant's "Anschauung",
(intuition). Locke had undertaken to erase the purportedly divine
lettering which the Scholastics identified in the human soul; he
presumed to wipe it away like graffitti, leaving the soul clean
and clear; a transparent lens or an undistorting mirror, through
which, or in which, the empirical world could be discerned.  The
transcendentalists based their revolt on the claim that human
experience was more than a mere reflection of secular objects,
that in the soul, something of value was added to mere sensation,
and the added value they called the divine, which, even while he
paid lip service to it, Locke had denied, but for which the
transcendentalists purported to find corroboration in otherwise
inscrutable German philosophy. Obviously there was much that
could not be made clear in words or sentences, and this they
strove to express in the prose-poetry that was their rhetoric, in
which Emerson excelled.

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