Retrieving Transcendentalism amid the Crisis of Attention

By Russell C. Powell, CSWR Research Associate | Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

Why Transcendentalism?  And why now? 

The inauguration of our new research initiative on Transcendentalism at the Center for the Study of World Religions is an opportunity to reflect on the value of recovering the past to benefit the present. For such efforts are never neutral exercises in historical curiosity. They emerge, at least in part, from our discontent with where we find ourselves.  

It's common to look to history for a way forward in fraught times. Alasdair MacIntyre famously called on the wisdom of St. Benedict to sustain the virtues through cultural decline. Hannah Arendt turned to the ancient Greek polis as a better model of freedom and public action than bureaucratic modernity. Charles Taylor finds in medieval Christianity elements of moral imagination that resist secular disenchantment.

All recovery projects, however, should aim to retrieve the past—as opposed to seeking to restore it. This distinction is the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, which is instructive for our new research initiative’s aims. 

Amid the many grounds for feeling discontented in our own time, one that makes retrieving Transcendentalism—that mid-nineteenth-century American movement that arose among the circle of friends who gathered at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home in Concord, Massachusetts—especially urgent is the current crisis of attention. 

Because of the superabundance of information today, attention is the engine of the new economic order. Yet that order fundamentally misunderstands what attention is, according to Chris Hayes (otherwise known as a primetime host on MSNBC), who examines the “attention economy” in his recent book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Rather than being reducible to its quantitative exchange value (as in something priceable as a commodity), attention, Hayes argues, is rather an “ineffable subjective experience” that is only valuable qualitatively.[1]

Technologies that capture and monetize our attention are like those mythical Sirens whose call seizes us against our wills, as in the case of Odysseus. As competition for our attention has increased, Hayes explains, competitors have been driven “toward ever more insidious means of extracting [our] attention,” which exploit our faculties involuntarily.[2] The historian Graham Burnett uses the metaphor of “human fracking” to describe how digital platforms wrest our attention.[3] For Hayes, the metaphor of the Sirens’ call similarly signals the loss of autonomy in the information age. 

Transcendentalism might be defined as a literary style, a philosophical movement, a religious experiment, but the throughline most pertinent to the crisis of attention is the priority Transcendentalism gives the self. Crucially, the self that Transcendentalism prioritizes isn’t an atomized unit sealed off from the world, but the seat of discernment.  Call it the locus of attention. 

Emerson’s clearest formulation of this idea is, of course, found in “Self-Reliance.” Too often dismissed as a paean to individualism, Emerson’s essay is in fact a defense of the importance of maintaining sovereignty over our attention. “Nothing,” he insists, “is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”[4] In another essay, “Spiritual Laws,” Emerson eerily augurs the crisis Hayes describes: “A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection for what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe.”[5] 

Henry David Thoreau took Emerson’s witness to attention’s qualitative significance to heart by withdrawing to Walden Pond to test what could be seen, heard, and thought when life was pared to its essentials. Other Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Bronson Alcott also committed themselves to the sovereignty of their attention, so determined the character of their respective universes. 

What makes research on Transcendentalism exciting today is that it comes after a long period of initiating the twilight, if not the end, of the autonomous self. Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives have shown the modern subject to be interpellated by contingent systems of ideology and symbolic regulation. Ecocriticism has revealed the modern subject to be built on the erasure of ecological interdependence. 

These critiques have been indispensable for illuminating the troublesome biases inflected in modern subjectivity. Yet the fluid, entangled subject emerging from them is vulnerable to the buffeting winds of distraction in the attention economy.

“What is life but what a man is thinking all day?” Emerson asks in a late lecture. “This is his fate and his employer.”[6] To retrieve Transcendentalism is, coincidentally, to consider what it might require to be possessed of a freedom that issues from the discipline of what we—and we alone—choose to attend to; what we allow to claim us. This isn’t the restoration of the modern subject, but a resistance to the lack of mental integrity we’re learning spells our helplessness to pursue a fate, and indeed a world, we devise.

[1] Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (New York: Random House, 2025), 195. 

[2] Ibid. 

[3] See D. Graham Burnett and Justin Smith, “Introduction: Thinking Attention,” in Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, eds. D. Graham Burnett and Justin Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 7. 

[4] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 261. 

[5] Ibid., 311. 

[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Natural History of Intellect,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 12 (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1904), 10.