Several of my friends have pointed out that a number of the frequently-used terms on the Existential Cosmopolite are a bit mysterious, and I agree with them. I believe many so-called philosophers of our day are really little naked emperors walking around, flaunting their newly-acquired expensive garments. In order to protect authentic children, I will periodically check in with some definitions or explanations of the notions I work with in my writings, throwing on a pair of socks here, an undergarment there. Our instructor today will be Bernard Lonergan, my own master teacher, in order to make explicit my own primary understanding of the notion of transcendence:
"Question: Why do you use the word 'transcendence'?
Response (Lonergan): In general, transcendence means going beyond, going across and beyond. It is opposed to immanence. There have been philosophies of immanence, particularly since Kant: the impossibility of knowing anything besides your thoughts. You can know what pleases you, what satisfies you, what you like, what you dislike, but you can't know what is good objectively. That is the doctrine of immanence: a relativism with regard to morals, a relativism with regard to value, a relativism with regard to knowledge; not simply a relativism, but there is no such thing as arriving at what is independent of the self, of the subject.
That is the doctrine of immanence; the opposite to it is the doctrine of transcendence, when you assert the possibility of getting beyond yourself. Your horizon is not simply what you can imagine. In other words, you think of persons as being out of their minds if all they can know is what they can imagine. To account for getting beyond oneself is, of course, quite a tricky problem in cognitional theory. But the phrase ['transcendence,' 'self-transcendence'] is meant to reject any doctrine of immanence. A doctrine of immanence says all I know is what seems to me, all I know is phenomena, what appears to be good, what appears to be true. To deny that is to say that we know what really is independent of us, what is so whether we say so or not. That is a doctrine of transcendence.
And I divide transcendence into two types: the intentional self-transcendence, namely, knowing what is real, knowing what is so; and real self-transcendence, getting beyond oneself, attending to what is good, not merely what is good for me but to what is good in itself. If you love a person you do what is good for him or her, not what is good for yourself....
Question: You mention self-transcendence and somehow equated it with authenticity, and I'm associating authenticity with really being oneself, so I'm getting muggy when I put it next to self-transcendence.
Response (Lonergan): Well, your real self, in that sense of really being oneself, is the self-transcending self. Your real self is not backing into childhood narcissism but going beyond yourself, apprehending a world not of fantasy but as it is, apprehending what is worth while objectively, and living according to those apprehensions."
[From Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan Volume 17: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980. "Horizons." UTP: 2004, 23-24.]
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