Transcendence and History
eBook - ePub

Transcendence and History

The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity

Glenn Hughes

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Transcendence and History

The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity

Glenn Hughes

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Transcendence and History is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as "the decisive problem of philosophy": the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The world's major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of "transcendence" and "immanence." But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and "postmodern" interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence. In Transcendence and History, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it, assisting in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes's main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical existence. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage. Transcendence and History will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how "the decisive problem of philosophy" both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Transcendence and History an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Transcendence and History by Glenn Hughes in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophie & Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

1

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSCENDENCE

It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind: that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good.
—SIMONE WEIL, “SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOVE OF GOD”
FOR SOME TIME now contemporary culture has been described as postmodern, and our age as that of postmodernity. The prevailing outlook of postmodern culture has been summed up by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern,” he states, “as incredulity toward metanarratives.”1 That is, the most striking characteristic of contemporary life in the West is the suspicion, in some cases hostile suspicion, of accounts of history or human experience that claim to speak from a transcendent point of view, from a position that transcends individual or culture-specific perspectives. Any convincing account of the universal human drama, of course, must have the character of a metanarrative, because it must represent all humans of all times as a single community, participating in a reality that, transcending all specific places and times, binds the meaning of each to the meaning of all. Any such account presupposes some dimension of shared human experience that transcends biological, psychological, and cultural circumstance—a dimension of reality, humanly experienced, that is not intrinsically conditioned by the contingencies of space and time. Only human participation in a dimension of meaning that is nonparticular, nonfinite—a realm of transcendent meaning—justifies any metanarratives about humanity. The contemporary incredulity toward metanarratives, then, manifests a rejection of the notion of transcendent meaning. Indeed, if we consider intellectual antecedents of the postmodern outlook, we can see that historically it culminates a centuries-long attack waged against notions of transcendent reality. A skeptical attitude toward transcendence is at the heart of postmodern self-interpretation.
The contemporary suspicion of transcendent reality has many causes. As noted in the Introduction, the major general causes include, first, the frustration and revulsion provoked by centuries of religious warfare on the part of claimants to privileged possession of truths about transcendent divine being and transcendent human destiny. A second, and crucial, cause has been the understanding of nature introduced with the modern mathematical sciences, which inspired hopes, initially among the few and then among the many, that all of reality might one day be explained within a system of rational science. During the eighteenth century, growing confidence in the modern scientific method of reason as exclusive arbiter of what is true and real led to an assault by Enlightenment thinkers on what they considered to be the harmful and retrograde forces of unreason in society, focused in particular on the institutional voices of religion that demanded that reason be set aside when faced with Church authority and the mysteries of faith. That assault gradually broadened into a widespread intolerance of any purportedly mysterious truth, or any truth declared to be beyond the grasp of scientific reason. Third, in a parallel development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the growth of historical consciousness resulted in increased sensitivity to the culture-bound character of human understanding, to the limitations of personal perspective and social horizon, a sensitivity that gradually undermined religious and philosophical declarations of access to unchanging, transcendent truths. Together these developments have cooperated to cast suspicion on any claims to human knowledge of a transcendent reality. Though they are only three of the sources of such suspicion, they are three of the most important, and mentioning them serves to indicate some of the problems faced by any critical effort to recover the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence.
Along with the suspicions spread by religious fanaticism and warfare, scientism, and historicism, a fourth obstacle to such a recovery is the language traditionally associated with transcendence. The primary Western symbols used to express and communicate human intimations of transcendence have lost much of their power to convince or to console. They have become devitalized, stale, opaque. Nietzsche was an accurate barometer of language when he announced that “God is dead.” The words spirit and spirituality in popular speech and writing have become imprecise to the point of irrelevance. As the philosopher Eric Voegelin would say, symbols regarding transcendence tend, in the course of their use and diffusion, to become cut off from the experiences of transcendence that originally engendered them, from personal acts of insight that reveal transcendent meaning, and so increasingly lose the power to communicate, or to evoke, such experiences and insights. What is most crucial, Voegelin argues, in the contemporary effort to recover the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence is an analysis that effectively delves beneath the language-symbols pertaining to transcendence to the fundamental experiences of human desire and insight that have given rise to those symbols.2
Voegelin’s approach is not unique. The desire to “return to experience” to grasp the living truths buried beneath the stale phrases and propositional dogmas of philosophical or religious orthodoxies has motivated more than a few major twentieth-century thinkers concerned with the truth of transcendence. Perhaps the most influential recovery efforts have been those undertaken by comparative religionists and historians of religion, such as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, through their examinations of elements basic to the sense of the sacred and their comparisons of wide varieties of religious experience, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western.3 A handful of twentieth-century philosophers, too, have made critical recognition or rehabilitation of experiences of transcendent meaning a principal focus of their work, among them Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. In the following pages I will mainly be relying, however, on the writings of two less widely known twentieth-century philosophers, Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, as guides in my investigation into problems concerning transcendence.
Voegelin, best known as a political philosopher and as author of The New Science of Politics (1952) and the five-volume Order and History (1956–1987), the latter a philosophical study of human existence in society from ancient to modern times, has treated the problem of transcendence with rare breadth and sophistication, in accordance with his conviction that it constitutes “the decisive problem of philosophy.”4 Bernard Lonergan is a philosopher and Catholic theologian whose achievement rests on an analysis of both the structure of human cognition and the explanatory power of an accurate philosophical exposition of that structure, an analysis presented most fully in his two major works, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1956) and Method in Theology (1972). Though Lonergan devotes fewer pages than does Voegelin to the topic of transcendence, he approaches and illuminates it from a similar perspective. Both philosophers, emphasizing that a human being is first and foremost a questioner, analyze and develop the implications of the human capacity to out-question the finite and the knowable and thereby to encounter transcendent meaning. Lonergan’s detailed explanatory account of the scope and structure of human thinking nicely complements Voegelin’s historically oriented “meditative exegeses” of the experiences that gave rise, across the world, to religious and philosophical symbols of transcendence. Their combined insights on these matters will, together, provide much of the thematic and philosophical guidance in this and subsequent chapters.
Experiences of Transcendence
For the notion of transcendence to be examined on the basis of experience, one feature of human experience in general must first be clarified. The basic dynamic principle of human consciousness, Lonergan and Voegelin agree, is the desire to understand. In his analysis of cognition, Lonergan takes pains to emphasize that human consciousness is a process: it has an intrinsically dynamic character, because its essential nature is to search for meaning. Questioning—as wonder, as curiosity, as concern—is what prompts our engagement with experience and propels human development through all types of discovery, assimilation, affirmation, evaluation, and decision. Lonergan asserts that there is a primordial urge to inquire into our experiences, an urge that precedes and gives rise to all specific questions, an urge that may be described as “the root question, the fundamental question,” “the pure question” that carries us from sense experience through the play of imagination to understanding and all the uses of understanding.5 It is the phenomenon famously referred to by Aristotle in the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All human beings, by nature, desire to know.”
The human desire to know is, as the phrase itself indicates, a disposition both emotional and intellectual. As desire it is affective, an attraction, a longing. As a longing for insight, for the illumination provided by understanding, it is an intellectual phenomenon. Its goals are cognitive, for it seeks to perceive and to know that which it perceives. Its goals are also intrinsically moral or value-related, because with time it unfolds into considerations of what to do, of how to act, in light of what is thought to be useful or good or valuable. Finally, the root question, as the underlying desire for understanding, is only and ever partially appeasable—for from questioning comes knowledge, but knowledge is always the source of yet further questions. In fact, Lonergan explains, the scope of human questioning is unrestricted, both in a practical and in a formal sense. Practically, no matter how much we have learned, there are always further questions inviting further discoveries. Formally, the root question is unlimited in the range of its concern: it seeks to know whatever might be known, which is to say, everything. The innate, ultimate objective of the “pure” question is nothing less than knowledge of being, of all that is, with nothing left over. Thus, it is an unrestricted questioning, oriented cognitively to the goal of unrestricted knowledge and morally to the goal of an unrestricted good—goals that, needless to say, are unrealizable within the temporal and finite structure of human existence, but that nevertheless continually draw us, however vaguely apprehended (and however frequently ignored or resisted), as the fulfillment of human intending and longing.
In harmony with what we might call this Socratic principle, then, Lonergan asserts, as does Voegelin, that fidelity to the spirit of inquiry is the elementary normative standard for gauging human genuineness or authenticity. If to be human is to be a questioner, one is authentically human to the degree that one remains open to further questions, where one’s accumulation of understanding functions constantly as a springboard for renewed inquiry with an open mind and open heart. Voegelin encapsulates this principle by stating that every human being is, most essentially, what may be called “the Question”: an open-ended search for meaning that aims finally at understanding the ground or ultimate meaning of reality.6 One of the consequences of being faithful to this spirit of inquiry, both philosophers agree, is that in the long run notions of transcendent reality—and the insight that there must be such a reality—inevitably arise. The main features of their agreement on this point may be summarized as follows.
As human beings, we desire to know. Especially, though, we want to know about ourselves, and about our situation in reality: who we are, where we came from, what we are involved in, what we are intended for, what we may and may not aspire to, what we might become, create, arrive at. We are concerned, in short, about the meaning of our existences, our parts in the human drama. However, the purpose of one’s own participation in the human drama could be known fully only by knowing the meaning of the drama as a whole—through comprehending the ultimate truths pertaining to the whys and wherefores of human existence and history. For each of us, then, our questioning is, whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not, a desire to understand the ultimate meanings that would explain for each of us the significance of our participation in the cosmic process.
A person’s search for ultimates, however, when pursued with sufficient honesty and discernment, leads to the realization that human curiosity about the whys and wherefores of existence could never be adequately answered on the basis of knowledge about the finite universe. This is because the entire universe of objects and relations in space and time is not a complete or sufficient explanation of its own existence. All finite reality is contingent, or dependent, reality, that is, its existence presupposes prior causes, and contingent reality in its entirety ultimately presupposes a nondependent—a necessary—reality as the intelligible basis or ground of its existence. Why is this so? Because an infinite series of dependent causes does not answer the question, “Why does the universe exist?” It instead extends the question indefinitely without hope of rational resolution. The universe is not rationally complete, is not graspable as fully intelligible, unless the series of dependent causes comes to rest in a cause that itself does not rationally require a prior cause. To be fully intelligible, then, the finite universe must finally rest upon an ultimate cause or “ground” that is not dependent but self-sufficient, not contingent but necessary. To state the matter summarily: if reality as a whole, including our participation in it, is to be fully intelligible—and our unrestricted desire to understand the meaning of our own questioning operates on that assumption— then the contingent, finite universe that is not self-sufficient must have its ultimate origin in, be somehow “emergent” from, a necessary, nonfinite reality that is self-sufficient and self-explanatory.
Human consciousness, then, is an unrestricted seeking of its own intelligibility as a component of reality; in the course of its search, it discovers the rational requirement of a nonfinite and self-sufficient ground of reality; and if this ground did not exist, then its own structure and direction—as a questioning that seeks a completeness of intelligibility—would be pointless, meaningless.
The search of human reason for ultimates has led repeatedly, therefore, to the affirmation of a nonfinite, noncontingent ground of reality. However, if questioning brings us to such an affirmation, it also brings us to the recognition that we are incapable of direct or substantive insight into this ground of reality. For while the reality under consideration is nonfinite and unconditioned, or “absolute,” our imagination and understanding are, we are well aware, finite and limited. Therefore, the finite reality of the universe that we experience and understand leads us, if we remain true to the intrinsic implications and demands of rational inquiry—if we remain true, that is, to the Question that we are—to the apprehension of an ultimate reality that we understand to lie beyond our direct or complete understanding. This reality is transcendent reality, or transcendence in the strict sense, because it transcends the conditions of space and time (as nonfinite and necessary), and also transcends our direct or substantive understanding. We do understand that it must exist if the finite universe is to be completely intelligible, but in itself, in its content, it is a mystery to us, the mystery of ultimate origins and final meanings, the mystery of the ground of being.7
The idea of transcendent being or meaning has frequently been objected to on the basis of the assumption that only sense data, or data conditioned by space and time, can be affirmed to be real. This is an objection that Lonergan, in particular, has addressed and disarmed with impressive clarity. We should note the essential features of his argument.
The assumption that only sense d...

Table of contents