Borachio, thou art read
In nature and her large philosophy.
Observ'st thou not the very self-same course
Of revolution, both in man and beast?
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The Atheist’s Tragedy
What is the state of transcendence today?
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One of Derrida’s
favorite gambits was to open an article with a totally queer or off kilter
sentence: Que vais-je pouvoir inventer encore? For instance. This seems a
phrase broken off from a first draft, or an interior monologue, or something
eavesdropped upon. Some event to which one was not privy. It sets us, if we are
not so irritated that we do not read further, on the path of estrangement,
which means hopping, skipping and jumping to an unfamiliar rhythm.
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“They are like
unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and
saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you,
and ye have not wept.”
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So: what is the
state of transcendence today – as opposed to, say, one hundred or two hundred
years ago. The thought came to me as I was lying in bed here on vacation. But
what does it mean to approach the state of transcendence now, if transcendence
is an intemporal relationship of, say, experience to, say, the world, and plunk
it immediately in history? Or more specifically, its state. Because one could
say transcendence for the Cro-Magnon man, or for that matter the passenger
pigeon, and transcendence for me, lying in bed and feeling the air of the fan
on my bare feet, is the same matter.
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“Transcendence.”
It does seem to have migrated from a central concern of philosophy to a central
concern of new age self-help books. A keen philosophy student wanting to write
about “transcendence” is almost surely going to start with old texts,
transcendence in Kant say, and do a little hermeneutic massage to figure out
what that was about, perhaps relating it to the latest in the analytic theory
of consciousness. His own experience of transcendence is not going to be part
of this story, most usually.
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For instance, re
the later, the kiss.
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Why the kiss? Why
kiss? What is the state of transcendence vis-à-vis a passionate kiss?
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In the stream of
analytic philosophy, not only has transcendence been booted out – an
intolerably pre-scientific relic – but experience itself is treated almost
wholly as an epistemological question. Experience is consciousness, or fills up
that space. And this generates questions like: is consciousness a product of
the brain, denoting a cerebral mechanism like “fish” denotes certain creatures
that swim in the sea? Or does it have a different ontological status?
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In this way, the
kiss dissolves into a business having to do with intentions.
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The starting point
for the pragmatists, however, has to be experience, not consciousness, or
knowing. This is their debt to Emerson, which has been underlined by James,
Dewey, Cavell, West, Rorty, etc. Experience, say of a kiss, or of time and
space in general, is “nagged” by transcendence – by the contained having
something in it that is more than the container.
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Wittgenstein, the
story goes, was discussing his sense of the propositional structure of the
world with the Italian economist Sraffa. He “insisted that a proposition had
the same internal structure as the state of affairs it describes. Sraffa
responded with a certain Neapolitan hand gesture… and said: “what is the
logical form of that?”
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Another version of
the story is that Sraffa responded by kissing Wittgenstein passionately on the
mouth.
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No. I made that
up.
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In the tv series,
Locke and Key, the uncle looks at his childhood home, the House of Keys, and
gives it the finger. Bodie, his nephew, sees him, and the uncle smiles
sheepishly and explains that the finger means many things. Like aloha, says
Bodie, and the uncle agrees. So Bodie goes around, giving the finger and saying
aloha. Has Bodie misunderstood the finger, or aloha?
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There’s the
handshake. There’s the embrace. There’s the kiss. Our transcendent gestures? Or
is it all… projection?
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