Transcendental Moments

From Mevlana

Let this be my epitaph: We are shadows in love with the Sun.

A Prophet For Every Season

The simplicity of Springtime calls to mind Jesus, the Prince of ascetics.

Summer's refulgence is mirrored by the legendary beauty of Joseph in Egypt.

Autumn winds whisper of Abraham's intimacy with the divine.

Winter's pristine austerity echoes Job's dignified demand that his god be held accountable to those who suffer.

The Four Seasons Of Contemplation

Transgressive Transcendentalists embrace an ethico-aesthetic quadrivium of ideals that corresponds to the four seasons of the year: each season becomes a season of contemplation along the path.

The insistent simplicity of Spring.

The generous beauty of Summer.

Autumn leaves of intimacy.

Wintry dignity.

And, in each season, an unflagging literacy.

The Good, The True, The Beautiful

Santayana's "vital philosophy" (which sees religion as "poetry intervening in life") shifts the discussion about religion from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics and aesthetics. That vital philosophy and the transgressive transcendentalism to which it gives birth is yet another manifestation of what Carlos Fraenkel has named "philosophical religion" except that, now, the True (which has dominated philosophical religion since Plato) collapses into the Good and the Beautiful. Moreover, these three topoi are merely that--topics of conversation, the ongoing conversation of humanity about what it means to be human.

It is for this reason that we turn, initially, to Wittgenstein and, increasingly, to Heidegger, as we stroll along the Path--in silence and fitful speech...

Transgressive Transcendentalism maintains a broad, transnational, trans-historical, and eclectic canon--a strong legacy from Original (or "First Wave") Transcendentalism (the Transcendental Club).

Transgressive Transcendentalism

Though rarely (if ever) recognized as an heir to Emerson, George Santayana was indeed one--but his relation to the Sage of Concord was that of a transitional figure from "old" or "original" Transcendentalism to "new" or "second wave" or (perhaps best of all) "transgressive" Transcendentalism.

Here, from Santayana's wonderful late-life memoir My Host The World (p. 4), is a fine description of the "philosophical religion" or "vital philosophy" that is Transgressive Transcendentalism:

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. A philosopher may perfectly well cultivate more than one Weltanschauung, if he has a vital philosophy of his own to qualify his adoption of each, so as to render them complementary and not contradictory. I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy could be expressed in each of them. My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, but only correcting such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function. So in 1900 I published the result of the gradual transformation of my religious sentiments. Religion was poetry intervening in life.

When Religion Had A Mind

Philosophical religion.

A Transcendentalist Education

A Transcendentalist education commences with a thorough purge of immature thinking; credulity and ethnocentric presumption must go.

This purge is accomplished by means of a ruthless katastrophe: seizing that rare freedom that is available only to human beings by "turning against" inherited expectations of life and thought. See Peter Trawny, Freedom To Fail, 58.

The New Transcendentalist finds in Wittgenstein and Heidegger what Original Transcendentalists like Emerson found in Goethe and Kant. In their resistance to positivism and materialism, Original Transcendentalists embraced various forms of Romantic idealism. The New Transcendentalist resists all of those superannuated modes.

New Transcendentalist Itinerancy

Various abodes of thought: Greco-Roman, Perso-Arabic, Sino-Indic, Germanic, Slavic, North Atlantic, etc. These are but topoi to which and from which we may travel and, from time to time and for periods brief and extended, within which we may learn to dwell...

In my father's house there are many mansions.

Nevertheless, "the seeking is itself the goal. And that means 'goals' are still too much in the forefront and are still placing themselves before beyng--and covering over what is necessary." ~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, p. 16.

The New Transcendentalist is ibn as-sabillah--the "son of the road"--an inquirer in perpetual motion.

New Transcendentalist Method

Yet how does the thinker shelter the truth of beyng, if not in the ponderous slowness of the course of questioning steps and their attendant consequences? How otherwise than inconspicuously, the way the sower, in an isolated field, under the vast heaven, paces off the furrows with a heavy, halting, ever-hesitant step while measuring and configuring, with the scattering gesture of the arm, the hidden space of all growing and ripening? Who can still carry this out in thinking, as what is most inceptual of the power of thinking and also as its highest future?

~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions, tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu, pp. 17-18.

Old Transcendentalist Admonition

We love nature--to individuate ourselves in her wildest moods; to partake of her extension, & glow with her colors and & fly on her winds; but we better love to cast her off and rely on that only which is imperishable.

~ Mary Moody Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, January 18, 1821.

A New Transcendentalist Fable

Having outrun the wolves, Mazeppa's horse limped into a Tartar village. The townsmen, upon seeing the exhausted animal and its unconscious rider, gentled the horse and cut loose its burden. He was carried like a sack of sticks into a hut and, over the course of several weeks, nursed back to health. Unable to explain who he was or from whence he had come, Mazeppa lived among the Tartars and, over time, learned their ways--conforming to them as best he could. But, despite their ungrudging hospitality, he knew--and they knew--that he would never be more than a stranger in their midst. There could be no returning to the life from which he had been exiled, but neither could his assimilation to the new ways of his adoptive people ever be complete. This troubled the Tartars who could not help but feel that, somehow, they had failed him. "No one has failed me," he tried to assure them. "On the contrary, you saved me."

"But you don't belong to us," his Tartar wife complained. "How can you possibly be happy with us--with me--if you do not belong here?"

"I didn't belong to the ones who tried to kill me, either," he replied. "I may have been born to them and raised among them, but their rejection of me could not have been more forceful or more clear." And then some voice, some echo of songs sung to him--perhaps in his childhood, or even in a dream--crept into his consciousness. Without further thought, he repeated with calm deliberation what he heard the voice say. "But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

New Transcendentalist "Transcendence"

New (or "Second Wave") Transcendentalist "transcendence" is achieved through the cultivation of a capacious consciousness that alone allows one to resist das Man through acts of self-composure and re-vision. Such acts inevitably entail forms of radical immanence: embodied humanism, a "close reading" of history and being-in-the-world. As Peter Trawny argues in his study of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks," radically immanent "transcendence" includes the anarchical "freedom to fail."

New Transcendentalist Poetics

To be seeker, preserver, steward--that is what is meant by care as the fundamental trait of Dasein. These names for care gather together the [attunement] of humans as grasped in terms of their ground, i.e., in terms of Da-sein. Da-sein, in turning, is appropriated to the event as the essence of beyng...By fitting into the juncture of beyng we are at the disposal of the gods.

~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), tr. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu (slightly emended), 16.

New Transcendentalist Falsafa

What it looks like: