Translate, Transform and Transcend: The Magic of Michael Jackson

Transcendentalism represented a complex answer to the democratization of American life, the growth of science and technology, and a new kind of industrialism--to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of the relationship between man and nature and other men that was being demanded by the course of history.

Alluding to the Platonic triad, Emerson spoke of the oversoul , eternal source of beauty, truth, and good, and exhorted men to search for that spirit or fundamental principle that rules nature and of which men partake. The quest for this spiritual state that "transcends" the physical and empirical world is only possible through intuition and the subordination of men to the eloquence of nature, and not through established religious doctrines or through reason or sensory experience alone . 

According to Emerson, even though all human beings are called to a profound communion with nature in their search for the oversoul, the artists are the ones to fulfill this search by giving new forms to beauty in nature, beauty being "the herald" of the triad . Thus, art is the "result or expression of nature, in miniature, a nature passed through the alembic of man" . Then, the more artists submit and lend themselves to be interpreters of this superior principle manifest in nature, the closer they are to truth, good, and beauty combined in the work of art. In a search which is strictly personal, artists pursue independence, faith in themselves, and self reliance, and endeavor to achieve the best version of the self in communion with the superior and transcendental Being, the divinity that lies in every natural fact and in every individual, believing in the need of establishing an intimate relationship between the self and the universe in terms of a search both for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world.

Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis,
 (2010)

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