Transcendence: So What?

[koganbot]

byebyepride and tarigwaemir and Anonymous have comments on my Heidegger thread that still merit responses from me, but I'm going to put off responding for the time being. In my Heidegger post I was asking a question of Nietzsche and Heidegger that I've been asking of myself as well, and I've decided that the question will be clearer if I simply ask it of myself, and leave Nietzsche and Heidegger out of it for the time being.

The question is, "What is the importance of the idea of transcendence?" By "transcendence" here I don't simply mean "rising above circumstances" (e.g., "he transcended his militaristic upbringing to become one of the great humanitarians of the age") but rather the demand that - to mix metaphors - one's grounds, causes, or reasons must be absolutely transcendent. That is, one's grounds, causes, or reasons must be so independent of what they ground, cause, or justify that if the latter were to cease existing, the grounds, causes, and reasons would nonetheless remain unchanged. So, by this standard, if my theories are to be grounded in fact, the facts must in no way be dependent on the theories. Get rid of the theories and all that accompany them - including their premises, assumptions, vocabulary - and the facts remain identical to what they were before. (If the standards for transcendence aren't stated so explicitly, nonetheless the feeling is that all the strength or solidity or authority or capacity to shape comes from the grounds-causes-reasons, and none from what is being grounded or caused or justified.)

What I mean by "importance" is the impact that the idea had or has on the world. I ask my question, "What impact does or did the idea of transcendence have on the world?" because I don't know the answer. But the reason I want to know the answer is that I think the idea of transcendence is something of a red herring or a filibuster or a substitute, that it can't be taken at face value. But the filibuster goes into effect whenever people talk "theory" - well, not whenever, but a big hunk of the time - and so the filibuster itself is something I want to understand. "Red herring" and "filibuster" don't mean "unimportant" (red herrings and filibusters play a role in the world), and anyway I'm far from settled in my mind as to how much of a red herring or filibuster the idea is. This is a subject for research. And of course, my question about the idea's importance is preliminary, since I doubt that there's a general answer. The idea's importance will vary with time and place, and what the importance is, what shape it will take, will vary as well. So, though the original question is general, the answers will have to be specific. And really, another task is how to ask the question of specific situations and events in a way that might actually get me some answers. There isn't just one question I need to be asking.

I have what I consider to be strong arguments against the idea of transcendence. The idea of such transcendence doesn't seem intelligible to me, how transcendence could be in effect. But my question about importance isn't about whether the idea is right or comprehensible, since if the idea itself is unimportant, the arguments against it should be just as unimportant. But the word "should" is tricky: that I think something should be unimportant doesn't necessarily mean that it is unimportant. That an argument is aimed at a straw man doesn't prevent the argument from being a force in the world. And as you may have gathered from previous posts, my real concern here is with arguments against transcendence more than with the idea of transcendence itself. It's the importance of the former that I most want to understand, and challenge.

These previous posts include Unexplained Noises and Memedog 1 Pragmatism: So What? and The Death Of The Philosopher and Relativism: So What? (Part Four) (and I'm going to paste the bulk of "Unexplained Noises" into the comments here for easy reference). Key contention is this: As a philosopher I can say "Nothing exists in isolation" and a minute later, forgetting philosophy, say "I grew up in an isolated village" without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences. And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "basis," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. And as I hinted in my previous paragraph, this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy; it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

But am I right? Are the extremes rarely in effect? And even if they are rarely in effect, how significant is it that some people nonetheless believe the extremes to be often in effect?

Comments

[koganbot]

Here's what I wrote a few weeks ago in my "Unexplained Noises" post:

In my pragmatism writeup in March I deliberately buried the following paragraph for reasons that the paragraph itself makes plain.

I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

And I refer back to my Rorty post from last year (which I quite like and recommend you read in its entirety), a particularly relevant portion of it being:

"Nothing exists in isolation" is another way of saying, "I can't conceive of what it would even mean to say that the grounds for a social practice are absolutely independent of the practice that's being grounded, philosophy's standard of independence being that if the thing being grounded ceased to exist, the ground for it would remain unchanged." But I'm adding, in effect, "But that doesn't matter, that such absolute independence is inconceivable, given that villages - unlike philosophy - have never demanded this of grounds, that they be absolutely independent." So not only doesn't foundationalist philosophy have anything to say to the village, neither does the critique of foundationalist philosophy. So pragmatism and relativism don't matter. I read Rorty as urging philosophers to rejoin the village, but it seems to me that they rejoin the village as simple human beings, as no more than villagers, not as philosophers.

Of course, if I want to support what I've just said (I'll post my arguments someday, maybe), I'd have to (1) explain what "Nothing exists in isolation" means in the context of philosophy; (2) say why I think it's correct in the context of philosophy; (3) say why I don't think it's correct in the context of villages; so, for instance, say why I don't think villages make the demands on grounds that philosophy had made; (4) say why I don't think you can take the conversation from philosophy to the village; and (5) explain what's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths, uttering words like "relativism" and "mediated" and so forth.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i began an argument somewhere -- i think -- in the plato threads, relating the seeming continued need for philosophy (in the sense you're suspicious of) to the desire for the survival of the institution of academia itself

(the argument wasn't well-made or completed: it's a hunch, really)

i think there's a good reason why transcendence-as-filibuster might be valued, as a core and foundational element in the institutions of knowledge: and that is that there's always an awareness that you the lowly teacher or slightly-less-lowly administrator within any given institution will always be needing arguments to persuade those who "found" -- ie fund - the institution that your decisions for its content or administration trump theirs...

if the powers-that-fund are enlightened, then yr arguments will prevail: but you are not able to ensure their enlightenedness, which will flicker now and then... and it only needs one anti-enlightened decision to shut the institution down, torch the libraries, draft the scholars, etc etc... this must NEVER happen

you can trust if you are confident to yr argumentative skeez (or those of yr successors) in all situations and all times: in conditions you can't currently even imagine, that is

or you can set up "foundational" arguments that appeal above and beyond all local conditions -- actual, possible, imaginable, other -- to ensure the continued survival of the project, the continity and connectedness of the study of knowledge and the gathering of learning

trust in pragmatic adaptation to the real and the local is a gamble: the successful establishment of "transcendent values" -- which in other words also rule your rulers -- is not (or is anyway a situation you may feel comfy in)

there are always reasons for the rulers or funders to cut the funding; there are always reasons for the rulers or funders to pressure the institution to supplant knowledge with whatever nonsense they contingently need that month -- my suggestion/hunch is that the filibuster is a kind of default end-run to ensure that such pressures never impinge too catastrophically

it's not -- i don't think -- entirely an accident that the terms "academy" and "academic" derive from the actual (local) geographical spot, a grove sacred to athene, where plato set up his school; nor is it accidental that socrates's and plato's and aristotle's pupils were the scions of the rulers of athens and later all greece and macedonia; there's a relationship between content and value and the machineries of intellectual continuity here... you can't deny that these three had a gift for getting their thought and names down on the permanent role of knowledge... my argument is that transcendence-as-(infinite)-filibuster is a key cog in this machinery of intellectual permanence; a device to end-run the hostile contingent interests of ANY later ruler-funder of whatever current institution houses the continuing project...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in case it's not clear, what i'm suggesting is that the commitment to transcendence as a device, a shtick, is animated by a fear (intuited? unspoken?) that to bring the matter to the real, the here and the now -- while no problem the massed scholars can't wheedle their way out of let's say 99% of the time (they are after all scholars) -- will now and then lead to catastrophe for the institution: that the pragmatics of the here and now, for reasons good or dreadful, will result in the destruction the university (the breaking of the thread of knowledge); and this break need only happen once! to guard against it, you need powerful overriding flimflam: "transcendence" is very powerful flimflam

[koganbot]

i began an argument somewhere -- i think -- in the plato threads, relating the seeming continued need for philosophy (in the sense you're suspicious of) to the desire for the survival of the institution of academia itself

Here's the thread (it was in the first "Relativism: So What?" thread).

What you basically said there is that it's been "bred" into a lot of academics that philosophy is foundational, that a lot depends on it, including academia is we know it (or the revival of academia as we once knew it). The attachment to "foundational" philosophy is essentially irrational, but it's there. And you're implying that someone who feels this is also likely to feel that foundations must be "transcendental," or vaguely feel that foundations must be foundational, or something.

I think you're quite right that some people feel this way. I'll add that there's an antitranscendental argument for the importance of philosophy that goes "the idea of transcendence (and a bunch of Platonic either/or binaries) saturates society and everyday life, and we are special people who can demystify all this transcendental baggage, so give us your money."

But so what? Not a rhetorical question. Yes, some people feel this way, but how important is it that they feel this way? Also, how many of these people even know the argument about transcendence? Not that their potentially not knowing the arguments will make their feelings about the matter necessarily important, but just how important are those feelings, and how would we go about finding out?

Also, how much do you feel the issue is important? Do you consider the anti-transcendental position ("nothing exists in isolation"?) to be a big deal?

[koganbot]

nor is it accidental that socrates's and plato's and aristotle's pupils were the scions of the rulers of athens and later all greece and macedonia

This seems to me a crucial sentence, because on its face it seems irrelevant, another red herring. That is, the modern-day argument for academia that plays best (and is hardest for the budget-cutters to counter) is "Equal opportunity is a sham without universal education." And the person who makes it is most-likely to be a liberal-leaning professional who doesn't identify with scions then or now, and the professional's base constituency is middle-class professionals left and right and the upwardly mobile urban poor. And his crucial antagonist is the anti-intellectual entrepreneur or business manager who doesn't want to pay property taxes.

(Also - to go off-topic - my guess is that for the democracy argument in relation to philosophy you're much better off reading Dewey and Veblen rather than Stone, though I've not read the Stone book myself, so I don't know this. But also, my experience reading Plato makes him and Socrates much more committed to inquiry than to transcendence. My reading of people of the past who make "transcendent" arguments is that those arguments can be used by someone who wants change as much as by someone who wants to bolster the status quo.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the democracy-via-transcendence point is well-taken, and i know enough about the currents and crossflow of the english civil war to accept this

the first point is more complicated -- i think the point you're making (about where the money's coming from) has only had heft quite recently, even in america: the last few decades at most... prior to that, certainly up to the 60s, budgetary decisions were the purlieu of a technocratic management elite

certainly in respect of the creation of the modern university -- in the early 19th century -- out of its immediate predecessors, where scholarship that wasn't actually fostered within the church was paid for by the patronage of the aristocracy or small royalty, didn't really veer off from the socrates-plato-aristotle model

so two millennia plus of my model, followed by 150 years of a model ruled (as much as anything) by the manoeuvrings of imperialist superpowers*, then, post-WW2, a half-century maybe of the new model you're talking about

[koganbot]

I'd say more than a half-century (in America); at least 80 years, given that the technocratic-managerial elite was/is hardly overcommitted to the humanities, doesn't particularly identify itself with scions, and is pretty much committed to universal education. But anyway, where I'm confused is that you seem to be making three different arguments that may be complementary but in any event need to separated. Tell me if this is right:

(1) "the successful establishment of 'transcendent values' - which in other words also rule your rulers - is not [a gamble] (or is anyway a situation you may feel comfy in)." So for this reason it's no accident that Socrates-Plato-Aristotle taught the scions of the rulers of Athens and later all Greece and Macedonia... except we need to say this in reverse: given that Socrates-Plato-Aristotle taught the scions of the rulers of Athens and later all Greece and Macedonia, it's no accident that S-P-A would make the transcendent the object of knowledge [am I saying that right?], since in doing so it gave them authority that their rulers didn't have. -But this is just an example from history, and any example from any time and place would do just as well, so long as it includes someone claiming access to something transcendent or at least claiming a method that can get you to the transcendent, and his making this claim to various money people (e.g. rulers). And the sacred grove of Academe would be a bit of staging here, but its linguistic descent isn't particularly relevant.

(2) It's no accident that it was the scions (or their dads) who chose S-P-A as their teachers, given that S-P-A offered transcendent knowledge. Again, any example could do, we just happened to pick S-P-A.

(3) It's no accident that the current word "academy" derives from the grove of Academe, since that's where Plato founded his Academy - so the term is associated with S-P-A, who taught that reasons, causes, etc. had to be transcendent. Such transcendence gives authority to our whole enterprise.

I find (2) the most problematic, since if the idea of transcendence really did endow that much power and authority, you could substitute pretty much any group for "scions" - rabble, wives, slaves - and that group would have exactly the same motive for attending as scions do. (Nietzsche: "Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the 'noble,' with a look that said clearly enough: 'Don't dissemble in front of me! Here - we are equal.'" N's idea here is that Socrates is counteracting the spirit of the age, the conservatives of Athens letting themselves go - towards happiness.)

Your impulse and mine is to think that when "transcendence" is being claimed or denied, then "authority" is likely to be in question, somewhere (in more than one meaning of the word "question"). But my uncertainty about the subject - my distrust - is over just how much is the issue of "transcendence" in play, and how many people even notice it.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Yes I hink I make a much-too-quick claim of continuity re the scions-of-the-powerful in plato's athens on one hand and in the renaissance on the other: actually -- though there was minimal continuity in the sense that books and certain teaching survived across the milllennium-plus, there was a vast social discontinuity (huge empires rose and fall)

rethinking a bit, i would argue that the scions-of-etc in the renaissance era were consciously modelling themselves on their (idealised) athenian predecessors: to re-animate the glory that was greece-and-rome, you educated yourself along the same lines... so elements that were (arguably) accidental in the relationship between plato's thought and the aristocracies that studied became, by conscious renaissance self-selection, non-accidental

relatedly but distinct, there's the whole story of the skewing of platonism towards a christian reading -- in terms of firming up of xtian theological argument, and of the politics of princes, church and state in the medieval era... in lots of ways the renaissance was about shaking this legacy off, but elements remained unshaken off: the role of centres-of-learning in reproducing and affirming the extant political settlement is, notoriously, one that pressures said centres away from Pure Disenterested Research towards the routinisng of positions that the authorities of the day like to here, and will approve rather than attack

in both cases, i think the call on transcendence -- as resistance to the powers-that-be and as acquiescence to the powers-that-be -- gets embedded as a value to take seriously (or perhaps said better: not to devalue trivially...)

the consequence of this is i think a little like the consequence of it being possible to get a doctorate at oxbridge prior to the mid-19th-century only if you were articled (religiously qualified, where religious basically meant anglican...): many scientific fields were greatly expanded by amateurs who were loosely (and sometimes cynically) religiously learned, becaue you needed to be get get the respect and the distributed resources of shared information; hence elements of anglican thinking were embedded within the various disciplines, at an administrative level as much as anything, and (despite proving largely irrelevant contentwise) were often quite hard to dispel, because they were germane to the smooth running of departments and so on

[koganbot]

Now, what I'd like you to do next is to rephrase all this as a hypothesis, or perhaps as a question, in any event as something that we could pose to a researcher, someone with the time, inclination, and financing. Let's say we have the financing, and we offer to pay him to undertake this investigation. The question is about the use and impact of the idea of transcendence in institutions of learning, with a focus on how much the idea is still in use today, and its continued relationship (or lack of relationship) to the institutions. You could probably phrase it better than that. But what I crucially want you to do is to pose the question in a way that delivers the full force of my question. That is, the transcendence we're talking about is this one: "philosophy's standard of independence [i.e., transcendence] is that if the thing being grounded ceased to exist, the ground for it would remain unchanged." E.g., if God created time, then if there were no time there would nonetheless be the same God. Otherwise, God would react to time and wouldn't be 100% time's master. My contention is that people don't generally require that God or grounds or foundations - or transcendence, for that matter - meet this standard. God, grounds, foundations, etc. don't need to reach this level of transcendence to be gods or grounds or foundations. So claims that a god or a ground or a foundation falls short of this transcendence don't undermine the god's or ground's or foundation's status as a god or ground or foundation.* So it's this transcendence - supertranscendence! - whose institutional history our investigator is being paid to uncover. We're not interested in mere dieties or in merely unassailable reasons here.

You're making a thing of who might care about transcendence, e.g. scions. This isn't necessarily a wrong emphasis, though I think "scions" may be a misdirection. The intelligentsia or some equivalent would be more crucial; scions may be counted on to provide the funding when they grow up, but the intelligentsia provide the expertise.

A hypothesis here could be that even if the Augustine types who actually care about God being transcendent are an infinitesimal part of Christianity, once the world gets Augustine types, Christianity can't afford to lose them. Even if the non-Augustine types can't make heads or tails of what Augustine and crew are going on about, if the Augustine types as a class aren't with you, your creed eventually loses some of its glue. (I'm not saying I believe this, but it's worth exploring. But it isn't a given that Augustine types must care about transcendence, even though Augustine did. By "Augustine types" I mean a class likely to raise and understand that caliber of question but not necessarily those who spend time on that particular question.)

*Actually, if I had a moment where I wanted to believe in God, my disbelief in transcendence would scotch my belief in God as well. But my disbelief wouldn't touch the beliefs of most people who believe. And of course I don't require that grounds or foundations be transcendent.

[koganbot]

if the powers-that-fund are enlightened, then yr arguments will prevail: but you are not able to ensure their enlightenedness, which will flicker now and then... and it only needs one anti-enlightened decision to shut the institution down, torch the libraries, draft the scholars, etc etc... this must NEVER happen

Well, you're saying that transcendental arguments would have more power than pragmatic arguments, but those aren't the only two choices. I'm assuming that most powers-that-fund won't even know or care about "transcendental" arguments, and wouldn't be into them well enough to be persuaded by them anyway. But note that I'm not considering, "Fund me or you will go to hell" to be a transcendental argument, nor "Fund me or else Truth will die." What would a transcendental argument be, and why would a power-that-funds be more persuaded by it than by some other? "Fund me because, if God created time, God would still exist as the same God even if there were no time"? "You can't have 'two' being created both by dividing a stick in half to create two sticks or adding one stick to another so that you have two sticks, it being impossible for 'two' to be created both by addition and by division; rather, two is what it is by virtue of its participation in absolute duality. Therefore, fund me." (But in contrast, note that "The God via the oracle instructed me to raise the question as to what is virtue and whether you and I even know how to behave in a virtuous manner, and to raise similar such questions" is not claiming to root itself in transcendence, since it's not showing that God and the oracle are transcendent, it's just citing them as authorities.)

[koganbot]

Krugman just posted this paragraph from Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue:

Professor O'Brien speaks the language and is qualified to liaise. She's also completed her certification in combat epistemology and can operate as your staff philosopher, should circumstances require it.

[koganbot]

Also find what I wrote in (3) problematic, since I don't think "taught that reasons, causes etc. had to be transcendent" represents Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle very well.

And to wander off-topic a bit, I don't really know who those guys taught, but even if all three taught "scions," they probably didn't teach the same type of scion. E.g., if you think of Socrates as a cross between Father Brown and Johnny Rotten (just trying to stretch your mind here, since I suggested in my last email to you that he Socrates was something like John Wayne in The Searchers or Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry or Steven Seagal or any number of detective-story or action-adventure (anti)heroes), then his students - who are self-chosen, and Socrates finessed the issue of funding by living in poverty and taking no money for his gabbing - are a cross between Peter Wimsey and Siouxsie Sioux. Whereas Aristotle's students'll just be a bunch of privileged indie boys on the Web (not to say that one of them won't go on to conquer the world).

[koganbot]

But anyway, my reading of Plato, which is no doubt skewed by my considering "Platonism" a dead issue and my looking, therefore, for what else is going on in Plato - but I really really really don't think that "Platonism" is the main thing that Plato does... my reading of how Plato is "foundational" in relation to modern academia - "foundational" not meaning "transcendent" but more like "what sets the pattern" - is Socrates' asking e.g. "what is virtue? what is holiness?" etc. and then not giving a definitive answer but rather tearing down all the available answers and giving some suggestions of where to explore the issue next. So Socrates is in effect saying, "You supposedly wise men don't know what virtue is any more than I do, and what I do that you don't is I at least show people - these youngsters whom I'm accused of corrupting - how not to accept the answers that are given to them, but how to ask the questions for real, and what tools to use in seeking answers." His "The unexamined life is not worth living" reads in context very much like "the unchallenged idea is not worth having." So Plato's Socrates gives people something to do, rather than giving them a set of truths. And in this way Plato provides academics with a model for what they can do. -Not that I'm claiming that this is Plato's impact on intellectual life, since my knowledge of the history of intellectual life and academia is pitifully small, and anyway he'll have different impacts on different people, depending on how they want to use him. And anyway, foundations - not "transcendent" foundations, but actual ones - will be multiple and varied.