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.