koganbot | Transcendence: So What? (Reply)

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?