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

[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.