In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Brian Wolfel about his article “Thomas Carlyle’s Conception of Transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus and Its Application to Theorizing Postliberalism,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the problems of liberalism that transcendentalism tries to address; the basic characteristics of the transcendentalism that Thomas Carlyle describes in Sartor Resartus; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism embodies a kind of post-liberalism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism can be understood as anti-dogmatic, or as a dogmatic anti-dogmatism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism functions as a practical political philosophy; the relation of Carlyle’s transcendentalism to American transcendentalism and contemporary New Age philosophy; and the perilous status of liberalism in relation to current forms of authoritarianism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
Thomas Carlyle’s Conception of Transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus and Its Application to Theorizing Postliberalism
Brian Wolfel
Sartor Resartus as Fiction and Non-Fiction
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus can be engaged and applied as a work of political philosophy. As satirical fiction, it has been ignored for its serious and normative implications. That Carlyle employs satire as a vehicle to construct and communicate philosophical conclusions should neither obscure nor detract from the practical significance of such conclusions. There is no singular and definitive interpretation of the meaning of Sartor Resartus in its totality, largely due to the question of irony surrounding its plot structure. Janice L. Haney acknowledges that there is a “problem,” which is not clearly resolvable, as to how to read Sartor Resartus‘s “ironic surface,” especially since Carlyle uses multiple levels of fiction and the text has a fragmented style.[1] Gerry H. Brookes argues that irony is a rhetorical device that Carlyle employs to convince the reader of the truth of transcendentalism.[2] Albert J. LaValley maintains that the irony in Sartor Resartus articulates a pessimism with respect to humanity’s philosophical prospects, and thus a lack of affirmation of transcendentalism.[3]
Despite the unresolved and unresolvable debate about its ironic structure, Sartor Resartus has political relevance because a political doctrine can be constructed from its plot and the philosophy of transcendentalism such a plot generates. Although a work of fiction, Sartor Resartus is constructed as a reaction to the composite of history, philosophy, and religion that predates it and seeks to illustrate the inadequacy that universally pervades prior philosophies and religions.[4] Given its highly cryptic and hyperbolic presentation, it is difficult yet not impossible to refine and derive a coherent doctrine from Sartor Resartus. Conclusions can be derived by reading Sartor Resartus literally, and such conclusions can be applied to inform the political climate surrounding liberalism in the twenty-first century.[5] Carlyle’s conception of transcendentalism can be understood as a political doctrine and situated as a new stage of political development after liberalism since it provides a resolution of the deficiencies of liberalism. I argue that the weaknesses associated with liberalism are, most notably, its facilitation of the pursuit of insatiable economic consumption on the part of the collective in the context of liberal political economy and its facilitation of contentious and interminable political conflict on ideological, theological, economic, and identitarian grounds.
These deficiencies suggest that liberalism will increasingly yield diminishing returns—and indications of diminishing returns are indeed becoming more readily apparent. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated that the global liberal political economy is not invulnerable to yielding diminishing returns as a function of the growth of globalization (and the unsustainability of the growth of an interconnected global economy). The growth of both left-wing and right-wing populism and extremism in Western democracies in the 2010s embodies a deepening of political contention on ideological, theological, economic, and identitarian grounds.[6] Such weaknesses associated with liberalism are existential threats to liberalism in that left unchecked they could precipitate the dissolution of liberalism, leaving a vacuum that some form of authoritarianism would fill. Transcendentalism provides a postliberal alternative to authoritarianism that has the potential to enhance and sustain liberalism by offering a means to reform and moderate its deficiencies without simultaneously generating totalitarian and us-versus-them narratives that have plagued illiberal ideologies such as Marxism, fascism, and Islamism.
Carlyle’s own departure from further constructing and promoting transcendentalism after the publication of Sartor Resartus has obscured transcendentalism from being a dominant aspect of his legacy in political philosophy. This is because many of Carlyle’s later writings, such as Latter-Day Pamphlets most notably, take on a reactionary tone and offer inflammatory social criticism that is racist and can be characterized as authoritarian. The fact that Carlyle was a prolific writer over the span of several decades in the midst of evolving political, social, and economic climates in Victorian England should not preclude the prospects of applying his construction of transcendentalism in the contemporary context. It follows that a normative interpretation of Carlyle’s transcendentalism need not include a normative defense of his other political thought that is extraneous to transcendentalism.
Carlyle describes the tenets of what he names the “philosophy of clothes”—a term synonymous with transcendentalism—through the voice of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrӧckh, the protagonist of Sartor Resartus:
“Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole external Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.”[7]
Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes culminates in transcendentalism,[8] which he defines succinctly as the view that matter is spirit and is thus the manifestation of spirit.[9] As such, transcendentalism is a minimalist and nominal philosophical/theological dogma in that it asserts theism rather than atheism but advances neither a positivist nor a particularistic doctrine beyond this. Carlyle concludes that all science seeks to account for what comprises the universe, and thus transcendentalism rests at the apex of all scientific deliberations. The role of a transcendentalist is to ponder the universe in its entirety as a manifestation of spirit.
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1. Janice L. Haney, “‘Shadow-Hunting’: Romantic Irony, ‘Sartor Resartus,’ and Victorian Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 17, no. 3 (1978): 319.
2. Gerry H. Brookes, The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972).
3. Albert J. LaValley, Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 69–120.
4. For a discussion of this, see G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle’s First Major Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 209.
5. By “liberalism” I refer to an ideology that emphasizes the rights of individuals and the priority of such individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good in the context of a free market economy.
6. Deepening contention is especially evident in the context of the United States, which has witnessed a trend of ideological polarization between the left-wing and right-wing that has precipitated both nonviolent and violent mass protests, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and the unprecedented raid on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
7. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 57–58.
8. Ibid., p. 193.
9. Ibid., p. 52. Carlyle expounds, “The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible.”
