Dualism in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus: Descendentalism and Transcendentalism

Pointing out the reality of criticism done mostly on Carlyle s original structure and rhetoric in his Sartor Resartus, this research paper focuses on Carlyle s dualistic philosophy revealed in the work, limiting its focus mostly to the dualistic theme of descendentalism and transcendentalism. The essence of Caryle s descendentalism is his irony and satire on human civilization, not for criticism itself, like other satirists, but rather out of his deep, secret humanism behind his mask. Roughly the two objects of his social criticism in the contemporary, descendentalisitc world, are mechanism and materialism in a variety of new ideologies. To diagnose the Zeitgeist and disillusion man living in contemporary civilization, Carlyle in this work uses a very original metaphor, the clothes-symbol. According to Carlyle, human history and progress can be said to be originated from man s adventitious invention of clothes that was not for biological need or social decency, but for decoration, the instinct of which implies man s innate vanity and desire. Interestingly enough here, however, Carlyle uses the same metaphor of clothes for his vision of transcendence, the world of Everlasting Yea. Man is also God s apparel and Matter is that of Spirit. Carlyle s Everlasting Yea world stresses especially the two attitudes, belief in God and love of man, which have been recently jeopardized in the socalled descendentalistic world. But Carlyle s transcendental and religious vision in Sartor Resartus is, as critics also have agreed, a unique and mysterious vision as something different from orthodox Christianity or other Victorian ideologies, as more like an amalgamation among Calvinism, Romanticism, Platonism and German Idealism. All in all, reading Sartor Resartus is still a valuable experience of an idiosyncratically original vision along with his warning against dehumanizing forces lurking in the name of civilization and with his ultimate eulogy on man, proving descendentalism as just part of transcendentalism, although the reader from time to time can be embarrassed by his male-centered, politically conservative, and individual-oriented dynamism.