Theory must rule practice, and yet it cannot. Thinking is called to assume and to represent Being, but thinking is always preceded and exceeded by Being. This very excess of Being with respect to thinking – transcendence — reason necessarily configures along two axes of significance or of free signifying that we may call “vertical” and “horizontal.”
The vertical axis is determined by the self-affirmation of the thinking agent himself or herself: the affirmation of the rule of reason, general and impersonal, merges with the concrete affirmation of the goodness of the thinker’s own concrete being, of his soul. Vertical transcendence enjoys itself and would be satisfied in its superiority over mere necessity and instrumentality; it is good in itself, it is noble. The freedom of this transcendence is the proud rule of reason, its positive affirmation of its own nobility. This freedom is pagan.
The horizontal axis of transcendence emerges from reason’s awareness that it is called by something or someone other than itself, that thinking is responsible to what is irreducibly other. This awareness opens thinking to the claims of all other human beings and to non-representable possibilities or to the possibility of what is non-representable, what cannot be grasped by reason. Horizontal transcendence hungers and thirsts for justice, a justice it does not possess, and therefore does not grasp or represent, a possible unlimited and universal justice projected upon a possible future. The freedom of this transcendence is humble openness to the possibility of a justice it does not claim to possess or represent, and thus its negation of present, concrete, prideful representations and affirmations of nobility. This freedom is biblical.
Neither of these axes of transcendence, vertical and horizontal, can signify without the other; there is no place for meaning in either line but only in some surface opened up by the tension between them. The freedom of self-affirmation would collapse into mute sameness or self-identity without some openness to a possibility it does not already represent, and the freedom of openness to otherness and possibility would be no one’s freedom and have no meaning in any actual world if it were not affirmed by an actual human agent who possessed some sense of his own concrete goodness or nobility as representable within some actual world.
Reason’s responsibility is therefore to hold open some such surface of meaning within the space defined by these axes. Alexis de Tocqueville came to understand this responsibility by reflecting on the threat to meaningful, humane transcendence posed by the modern attempt to synthesize reason’s pride with its openness to universal possibility, to collapse the tension between the two axes of transcendence. He named this threat the abolition of “the laws of moral analogy.”
July 7th, 2009 | 5:41 pm
Pagan freedom in this rendering would appear very much the type of freedom advocated by libertarians or, perhaps, should they be called libertinarians?
There is a constant tension here between that which takes pride and that which is humble. Pride is pagan, humility is biblical.
“Humans” as “humans” (and nothing more) really are only capable through their own struggle to achieve pagan freedom. It only through faith in something beyond (and not ascertainable by reason alone or unaided by revelation) that “humans” can find biblical freedom.
Should this tension always exist? There is no other way, otherwise we cease to be “humans.” What we become then is a matter a faith.
July 8th, 2009 | 6:26 am
Dr. Hancock this is an interesting blog.
I’d thought that existence in reality was defined as consciousness existing within the tension of existence between immanence and transcendence, yet you’ve described the phenomenon of a vertical-horizontal ‘transcendence’…which is confusing me along with the second sentence below, that plays over and over in my head. Might I request definitions for “Being” (God?,man?) in the sentence? If the def. refers to man, isn’t there a question of the quid, mode, and the unfolding (Enfaltung) of being.
“This very excess of Being with respect to thinking – transcendence — reason necessarily configures along two axes of significance or of free signifying that we may call “vertical” and “horizontal.”
Also, if there’s source material here, I’d love to see it. If on the other hand this is your stuff, is it in a book of yours and, if so, what’s the title?
I hope I’m not being a nuisance, I do find this interesting and need to comprehend it better.
July 8th, 2009 | 9:26 am
It’s hard to imagine someone saying THAT on the ol’ Porch. Logos is irreducibly personal; it is present only in persons. But it also points beyond what you know and do as merely a relational being. So a purely trans-erotic transcendence would actually destroy the foundation of knowing anything at all. But so would the loss of personal identity and personal transcendence in some communal articulation of who we are. The person is somehow both a whole and not a whole, certainly not merely a part.
July 10th, 2009 | 9:17 am
Isn’t the “horizontal” transcendence you describe also a pagan transcendence–but an Eastern paganism, instead of a Western one?
It seems to me that biblical transcendence would be precisely the infinite space beyond the axes–a transcendence that transcends all other transcendences. In which case it’s the space that ultimately defines the axes, and not vice versa.
But these are preliminary thoughts, and I may really be thinking outside the terms of the analogy you’ve set up.
July 10th, 2009 | 10:55 am
Thanks, Tracy — you raise a good question. First, let me say that I am writing philosophically and not theologically. It seems to me that as soon as we presume to talk about “the infinite,” we must link it with some figure of transcendence that engages our human world in some way. This might appear reductionist, but not if we believe that our human world truly opens upon, or is in some way continuous with what is divine (there I suppose is my “theological” element, though perhapsnot orthodox). So, for me, the axes have to go all the way down, and all the way up — if there’s anything to talk about. But maybe it makes sense to think of God as the synthesis of these axes, as in this line I wrote, which may be the last line in a book I’m finishing: Practical wisdom today must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the aporia defined by the alternatives of, on the one hand, a horizon of knowable goodness above ordinary human concerns and, on the other, by the Christian and revolutionary promise of the regeneration of all humanity. Whether such an attunement is possible without respect for or perhaps even faith in the idea of a personal Divinity in whose love vertical and horizontal transcendence are thought to achieve their only true synthesis – this is the question I must leave to the reader.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact