The Voltairean Streak

Transgressive Transcendentalism has a pronounced Voltairean streak. Hear Emerson:

There is a certain secular progress of opinion, which, in civil countries, reaches everybody. One service which this age has rendered is, to make the life and wisdom of every past man accessible and available to all. Socrates and Marcus Aurelius are allowed to be saints; Mahomet is no longer accursed; Voltaire is no longer a scarecrow; Spinoza has come to be revered. "The time will come," says Varnhagen von Ense, "when we shall treat the jokes and sallies against the myths and church-rituals of Christianity--say the sarcasms of Voltaire, Frederic the Great, and D'Alembert--good-naturedly and without offence: since, at bottom, those men mean honestly, their polemics proceed out of religious striving, and what Christ meant and willed is in essence more with them than with their opponents, who only wear and misrepresent the name of Christ...Voltaire was an apostle of Christian ideas; only the names were hostile to him, and he never knew it otherwise. He was like the son of the vine-dresser in the Gospel, who said No, and went; the other said Yea, and went not. These men preached the true God,--Him whom men serve by justice and uprightness; but they called themselves atheists."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Character.

The Voltairean streak in Transgressive Transcendentalism is, likewise, a Malamatiyyan mode.

The Transgressive Transcendentalist Maieutic

The Transgressive Transcendentalist is committed to the Heideggerian project of "overcoming the world"--the "found" world, the "given" world--the world into which we are socialized (or, as Heidegger would say, "thrown").

Why? Because this world falls short of our utopian ideals. The sources of those ideals will vary among different peoples at different times and places and the cultivation of capacious consciousness (through a deep and wide reading of the "Transcendentalist canon") will enable us to recognize the pluralistic nature of our ideal universe.

The Transgressive Transcendentalist manhaj or maieutic consists in measuring the distance between the found world of socialization and the utopia we hold in our hearts.

The goal of our praxis is disturbance: the induction of cognitive dissonance. Bewilderment is the beginning of wisdom. A-gnosis producing ek-stacy.

The faith of the Transgressive Transcendentalist has nothing to do with belief. It is, rather, a commitment to another beginning; the commencement of an untried path.

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists...I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome...I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

But I also had private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests...[such as the] 40 species of wild orchids [that] occur in [the] mountains [of north-west New Jersey]...Wild orchids are uncommon, and rather hard to spot. I prided myself enormously on being the only person around who knew where they grew, their Latin names and their blooming times. When in New York, I would go to the 42nd Street public library to reread a nineteenth-century volume on the botany of the orchids of the eastern U.S....

At fifteen I [entered] Hutchins College of the University of Chicago...Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me--in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats--"hold reality and justice in a single vision." By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which, in the woods around Flatbrookville (and especially in the presence of certain coralroot orchids, and of the smaller yellow lady slipper), I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant...the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity--a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.

[After about 40 years of trying], I decided that the hope of getting a single vision [that would combine both justice and reality as I had defined them was futile]...So I decided to write a book [Contingency, Irony and Solidarity which] argues that there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together...."

~ Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 6-8, 13.

In Praise Of [Rortian] Irony

From Eduardo Mendieta's "Introduction" to Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself:

Irony reflects the power that we all have to reinscribe and redescribe. In this way, ironism is active, activist, critical, forward-looking. It is the power of irony that turns our confessed ethnocentrism into the imperative to create ever more critical pictures of what we have turned into and what we have failed to become. Irony, which is often seen as a form of cruelty, disdain, and derogation, is really linked to solidarity. Irony liberates us to a greater humanity. Irony grants us the power to abandon narrow, cruel, exclusivist, versions of our old and inherited "we." It grants us the power to create a larger "we," whose outer perimeter is drawn and redrawn from the perspective of marginalized people, from the perspective of those we have been socialized to think of as "they" rather than "us."

~p. xxii.

Where The Last God Is Hidden

"Transgressive Transcendentalism" is the acknowledgment of a debt (to Ralph Waldo Emerson, et. al.) and, at the same time, it is the cancellation of that debt insofar as it moves forward in ways that--though inconceivable in the 19th century--were implicit in the Transcendentalist heritage.

"In the essential occurrence of the truth of beyng, in the event and as the event, the last god is hidden." ~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions, 21.



At this historical moment, the Transgressive Transcendentalist speaks a language that very few can understand.

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art: Julian Bell at the National Gallery

Religion For Grown-Ups

When it comes to "religion," I take more interest these days in disciplining what I do than what I believe. With points of doctrine, I could run in circles forever, but it's so boring, and all the twisting and flipping with abstract theology only happens inside my head and stays there. I have become concerned not with how a faith conviction might inform my outer behavior but the opposite: the ways that mindfully eating like the Prophet ate, or sitting as he sat, could inform and transform my insides. Many people fail to get this, because religion is only about faith for them. I am sometimes asked how I reconcile various things to my "faith," and I have nothing to say. Faith is not always what brings me to the Prophet.

My love offers a more reliable technology than my faith. Whether faith goes or stays, I hold on to my love. I love the Prophet. Actualizing my love through adherence to his sunna, performing my love through imitation of him, has become my equipment for self-constitution. I wash as the Prophet washed; it makes me think about him and his character, which then colors my interactions with Allah's other created things, as I try to treat them with his manners. Doing little sunna things here and there slows me down in a good way, and also feels like it slows down the world around me...

~ Michael Muhammad Knight, Tripping With Allah, pp. 261-262.

Richard Rorty's Transgressive Transcendentalism

In the Winter 2004 issue of CrossCurrents magazine, Scott Holland, presently Slabaugh Professor of Theology and Culture at Bethany Theological Seminary in Richmond, Indiana, published a very perceptive essay on Richard Rorty's "secular eschatology" entitled, "The Coming Only Is Sacred." The title is taken from Emerson's famous essay "Circles," but it could have come just as easily from Heidegger's Contributions To Philosophy.

Taking a cue from Rorty's wide body of work, literary-philosophical and political, Holland rightly connected Rorty to Emerson and Whitman and, in so doing, emphasized Rorty's centrality for what I am calling "Transgressive Transcendentalism."

Transgressive Transcendentalism eschews metaphysical speculation in favor of the task Heidegger set us in his work post-Being and Time. That task is to play the language game of the "other beginning" for building-dwelling-thinking and to embody a form of life consonant with that "other beginning."

Among Holland's many insightful observations about Rortian Transgressive Transcendentalism are these:

Rorty is not a communitarian. He is impatient with the excessive trend in the contemporary academy and society that celebrates group identity and identity politics. He is more interested in the politics of individuality. He thinks we would do better to celebrate “Emersonian type stories.” These stories provide accounts of how people walked away from identification with this group or that community. Emersonian stories use individual models to carve out a personal identity rather than turn to group mores to ask how the individual might find his plot and place in some collective identity. Rorty argues that too many spend too much time worrying about the wrong things: “What culture do we come from? What is our relation to that culture?” He fears that often these questions shield one from freely entering the risk and adventure of Emersonian stories of self-creation. Like Emerson, Rorty seems to suspect that “the coming only is sacred.”

One may argue, of course, that there was a pronounced communitarian streak in the later Heidegger and this is something with which all those who would choose to invoke him must eventually come to terms. I would not dispute that assertion, but neither would I claim that Transgressive Transcendentalism harbors any ambition to be slavishly Heideggerian.

Rorty was selectively Heideggerian and that selectivity (or one might say "eclecticism") is one of the great virtues of his thought.

To be a "slavish" Heideggerian (or Rortian or Emersonian or anything, for that matter), is a betrayal of the freedom that is the core Transgressive Transcendentalist value.

Emersonian self-creation is nothing if not eclectic; the Emersonian self is always already a bricoleur. The bricoleur is, in turn, a faylasuf. A Mazeppist. A Transgressive Transcendentalist.

Erich Auerbach

A life lived in books.

Fated To Falsafa

When one is fated to falsafa, she knows that the words of Socrates to Simmias in the Phaedo are addressed, likewise, to her:



"Then it is a fact, Simmias, that true philosophers make dying their profession, and that to them of all men death is least alarming."

We are but strangers in a strange land. Our bags are at the ready, for we are intensely aware that the day of departure is always arriving--if not this moment at hand...

To Paraphrase Nietzsche...

Without beauty, life would be a mistake.

Our Imam

"As for you, if you will take my advice, you will think very little of Socrates, and much more of the truth. If you think that anything I say is true, you must agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument that you have. You must not allow me, in my enthusiasm, to deceive both myself and you, and leave my sting behind when I fly away."

[Socrates instructing Simmias and Cebes in Plato's Phaedo, tr. Tredennick].

Hermitages

Abu Bakr ash-Shibli (d. 946)

A man stood before Shibli (God's compassion upon him) and said to him: 'Which act of patience is hardest for one who is patient?'

Shibli said: 'Patience in God.'

'No,' the man said.

Shibli said: 'Patience for God.'

The man said: 'No.'

Shibli said: 'The patience with God.'

'No,' he said.

Shibli grew angry and said: 'Damn you, what then?'

The man said: 'Patience without God Most High.'

Shibli let out a scream that nearly tore apart his spirit.