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