1.4.1 Transcendentalists believe in a higher reality than that found in the sense experience and that higher knowledge is achieved by human reason. The philosophical concepts of transcendentalism are indebted to Plato, who affirmed the existence of absolute goodness, something beyond description and knowable only through intuition. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant used the term transcendental to signify innate principles with which the mind gives form to its perceptions and makes experience intelligible. (Audi, 1995. pg. 399)

1.4.2. For the purpose of this thesis, it is important to note that the Transcendentalists integrated Eastern mysticism into their discourse of spirituality. Transcendentalists, located in New England (the future birthplace of the computer revolution), could easily be seen as the predecessors of the hippie movement which started in San Francisco in the early 1960's. In Chapter 4, I will discuss the influence and relevance of Eastern philosophies on the conception and development of computer technologies in Silicon Valley.

1.4.3 The literary and philosophical movement of transcendentalism in the United States began in 1936 when the "Transcendental Club" was established by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. Although they all agreed on the primacy of reason, on all other ideas they had differing opinions and influences in their philosophies. For instance, Emerson was an idealist, while Parker was a natural realist. Emerson was influenced by the Platonic tradition, German Romanticism, Eastern Religions, and nature poets, while Parker was influenced by modern science, the Scottish realism of Reid and Cousin, and the German Higher Critics. (Audi, pg. 809)

1.4.4 In her most famed work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller advanced a theory of human androgyny and wrote that all men had some measure of the feminine and all women a measure of the masculine. But she believed the human qualities that mattered most had a feminine heritage. Although rarely addressing women's roles in his futuristic visions, it may be significant that his last, most critical work, Grunch of the Giants: Gross Universal Cash Heist (1983), was dedicated to three women: his great aunt, Margaret Fuller, Marilyn Ferguson, author of Aquarian Conspiracy (1987) and to Barbara Marx-Hubbard, founder of the "World Future Society," and co-founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. Without articulating it, he left the future to women, including his own, entrusting his entire "Guinea Pig B" [4] archive to his daughter, Allegra.

1.4.5 Transcendentalism, through Fuller's admiration of his great aunt, is ever present in his work, and it is important to keep this presence in mind when trying to comprehend his work. It is this spiritual thread that connects Fuller to some of the most relevant personalities included in this dissertation such as John Cage, who he met at Black Mountain College in the early fifties. [top]