He can’t… 
_
That ^^^ will be interesting…
Okay, pick one of them and, pertaining to a particular situation most here are likely to be familiar with, let’s explore it given the point I raise here:
Instead, from your frame of mind, a thread like this is hijacked when someone like me wants to explore secularity and transcendence other than up in the intellectual and spiritual clouds. It’s not changing the topic it’s bringing it down to Earth. As though historically, culturally and experientially there have not been many, many, many conflicting moral narratives and political agendas when the discussion actually did get around to particular moral and political conflagrations. Either in a God or a No God universe.
Why do you suppose that is?
While, indeed, those like you and Bob are very much committed to steering clear of all that complex, convoluted and often very, very confusing human reality stuff. You won’t even bring your value judgments themselves down to earth so as to explore why you steer clear of the world that unfolds in newspaper headlines day in and day out. As though general description intellectual and spiritual contraptions sustained by “serious philosophers” here might be just what the world needs to make those conflagrations go away.
If I do say so myself.
Though, sure, stay up in the clouds if that is more consoling.
What will be interesting?
Please bring your own assessment of secular existence and transcendence down to Earth and, pertaining to a value judgment that is of great importance to you, explore it in terms of identity, conflicting goods and political economy. Or note the components of your own moral, political and spiritual philosophy.
Okay. So far you haven’t made a single proposition or argument for or against my opening post regarding secularity and transcendence except dismiss it because they are somehow “in the clouds” whatever that means. So say something regarding secularity and or transcendence that isn’t merely dismissive of the concepts as contraptions. Then we’ll talk about it.
What I did was to give you the opportunity to note a particular context in which you and I can explore the components of our respective moral philosophies.
As that pertains to the existential parameters of human social, political and economic interactions given the assumptions rooted in a secular, Humanist philosophy as opposed to the more essentialist parameters that one derives from a religious, transcendental perspective rooted in God or Buddha or Vishnu or kami or any of the other names that people around the globe use to encompass the Gods they worship and adore: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God
How about this then: homosexuality.
There are all of the many conflicting things that people believe about it, such that they come to conclude that morally it is able to be described as either good behavior or bad behavior. Some insist that their conclusions here are entirely secular…obtainable without the need for a transcending, essential, religious or spiritual font. Others, however, insist that their own value judgments here are in fact derived from one or another Holy Scripture.
Me? Well, I suggest that each of us as individuals come to acquire a subjective/subjunctive point of view about homosexuality based largely on 1] the particular historical and cultural and experiential context in which we are “thrown” at birth, 2] the manner in which we are indoctrinated as children to think this instead of that about it and 3] the particular aggregation of personal experiences we have that predispose us to one frame of mind rather than another.
Understanding in turn that in a world awash in contingency, chance and change we never know when a new experience, relationship, idea etc., might prompt us to change our mind.
Also, that there does not appear to be a deontological assessment of homosexuality that philosophers can think up so as to establish the most rational and virtuous point of view.
Iambiguous–
You state that you are giving me an opportunity to note the particular context in which to explore the components of our respective moral philosophies. Did you read my opening post? I said nothing about moral philosophy there. And you didn’t respond to any of the questions I asked in that post.
It really seems almost as if you didn’t read my opening post. Or perhaps you read it and forgot it. Because your response doesn’t really connect with it.
You speak of a religious transcendental perspective rooted in God or Buddha or Vishnu or kami or any of the other names that people use to encompass the gods they worship in adore. Whereas I included the romantic notion of the sublime, the scientists experience of awe, the experiences of meditation and psychedelics and other experiences as possible sources of transcendence. Perhaps you don’t understand my language. There seems to be a disconnect between us.
I noticed you mentioned humanist philosophy as if there were one such animal. Actually there are many humanist philosophies, some with their own definitions of transcendence. I’m certainly willing to explore those on this thread.
Then you suggest homosexuality as a topic. How is that related to the opening post? Can someone who identifies as a homosexual experience transcendence? Can a homosexual be self-assured or alienated? Can a homosexual be secular or religious? Can a homosexual be open or closed? My answer to all those questions is yes, and there’s plenty of empirical evidence to support that. Do you really think that’s controversial?
At the risk of getting off topic, I am curious why you chose deontological ethics over other kinds like consequentialism or pragmatic ethics, etc
I think that many people I know are busy preoccupying themselves so that they can forget that they have no concept of life and in the end, find no meaning. This is particularly so when you’re spending time on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic, amidst holiday-goers who are filling themselves with alcohol whilst attempting to get an optimal tan, reading the news rag from back home from back to front over the course of a day, although it’s content would usually only fill a thin pamphlet. Others recover from the party of the previous evening and prepare for the next.
What I am saying is that there is a great desire to ignore the questions that we find pressing, and to overlook the enquiry into the nature of existence. This is also visible when people are back home. We in the West have whole industries attracting attention and preoccupying people with subcultural content, not least of all the consumption of goods, which is the measure of success in a commercial society. When you are asked what you are reading, an expression of surprise comes across the face of the enquirer when you tell them that it is a textbook, even more so when it is about the philosophical questions of consciousness, existence, and transcendence.
If understood in everyday language, that “transcendence” means “going beyond”, and “self-transcendence” means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself, the question of honest enquirers is, why? The need is foreign to many, and existential crises are met with a sad resignation by many, others become depressed, and the reason is already well known. The problems of Western societies are down to material problems, not attitudes, behaviours, or perceptions. If we can solve a material problem, develop a new technology, find a new energy source, we will solve all questions, despite the fact that science is looking for ways to abandon the planet when it has become uninhabitable. The young feel this inconsequence but have nothing to offer in reaction to it. The older generation has left them with few alternatives.
The simple fact that our brains are interpreting our experience of existence is reason for me to ask myself whether I am missing something. The fact that I often fail to appreciate the complexity and the wonder of biological life on this planet; the fact of consciousness and its differing degrees in plants, animals, and human beings; the value we find in immaterial beauty and abstract thought, all suggest that human beings may be able to access an understanding of reality by overcoming their own restrictions. We have all heard of or experienced the value of meditation in its various forms. We already have the experience of ancient sages, who were able to transcend their rather frugal reality, or perhaps it was because of it, that they were able to see through the illusions we fall foul to.
We experience religion in our times as something fanatical, hysterical, extreme, and militant in many cases. The meditative direction is overlooked for it simply being silent and thoughtful, rather than being loud and overbearing. The fact that we have to overcome the many influences that are attempting to attract our attention, by worrying us or trying to suggest that introspection is selfish belly-button observation, suggesting that physical engagement is better than introspection and pursual of transcendent goals. These hurdles were always known to spiritual people throughout history and the more thoughtful they were, especially when disagreeing with the powers that be, has led to death in incredibly cruel ways. Mankind has always been its worse enemy and it has often hasn’t the transcendent a chance.
Today, concepts of God, or the Ground of Being, are quickly criticised without the attempt to enquire in a manner that is honest and humble, and methods of spirituality are seen as too time consuming, requiring levels of self-discipline that people are not prepared to accept. The problems are manifold. The Bible gives multiple examples of how the loud and dramatic makes us unable to hear the whisper of spiritual enlightenment. There are many other examples in other sources. Perhaps we could listen instead of just hearing.
Transcendence as noted by those who meditate, take drugs or simply are in awe of the beauty and complexity of life and Nature may indicate specific awareness of qualities known by the average mind. Either these experiences are normal or they are esoteric, known only to a few fortunate human beings.
Our pasts are steps on the stairway to heaven; we do not rise without them. Perhaps transcendence is actually growth and development, available to all.
I live in a secular society and am forced by need of necessities to cope with past and present realities. My result of being spiritually minded in a secular world is depression. That may not be true for everyone who is in my situation. I just find it problematic to believe in a form of transcendence which is available only to a few mystics and seers. A mind cannot transcend itself.
I think that this has been the lot of many people, myself included, and I believe that the mystics and seers have always pointed the way but lacked the support. The realities I have to cope with are, however, on close inspection, just variations on past tendencies to ignore the transcendence of life, and I think you will agree, further examples for the reduction of life to enjoyment in any form you can get it. Of course, many people struggling to get through life don’t even have that, and so it is reduce to the reduction of suffering on a materialistic level. The search for meaningful life, in which I can find a direction for me that will take me out of the hole I find myself, so that I can be in awe of the beauty and complexity of life, is not achieved on the wide road, but on the narrow and winding path, and few are they that find the entrance - although I don’t believe it has to be that way.
Thanks for that post. I am not alone.
Direction is the key word. If you can offer direction to yourself and others, direction to a more spiritual existence, you will have done your part to preserve what is good about Life.
Bob said “If understood in everyday language, that “transcendence” means “going beyond”, and “self-transcendence” means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself, the question of honest enquirers is, why?”
So “Transcendence” is a spatial metaphor “going beyond” or climbing. Beyond what? You already answered–“beyond the self”.
Then you ask “Why”?
I think it’s motivated by despair with life on the negative side. On the positive side it’s the desire for something more. I think it’s the existential motive for philosophy in the first place.
At first glance, it seems that the mind cannot transcend itself because it’s a container. That’s the image-- the metaphor.
But as such, it can expand itself by taking in new experiences, new information, and thereby enlarging one’s point of view. Thus in time the mind, the “container” of all our cognitions transcends what it was in the past.
Although I can see that it wasn’t clear that I was relating a conversation with people who ask me why I would want to go beyond myself, I appreciate the answer.
I agree with you and yet I feel with Ierellus and assume that it has been the way of many deep thinkers to become frustrated with experiences of life, seeing that we have a mystery of unfathomable depth in front of us, which we can only tentatively investigate, knowing that people around us consider it a waste of time. I even had a conversation with once close friends who, on asking what I was thinking about, and hearing that I was using a fast to assist my enquiry, asked me whether I thought I was better than they. I said that I was just an inquisitive spirit and decided not to be so open again.
Many evangelical Christians I know have had an unusual tendency towards alcohol lately, which has been cause for concern. They avoid conversations about faith, and philosophy is, as you know, a no-go. Even talking about what constitutes the reality we experience or what makes us find something beautiful is met with suspicion. I have found that they sometimes express fear of being trapped in some unwanted discussion, and that they want their world to remain as they see it, and not endanger that by going beyond in thought.
It is strange to see how people react when they see my meditation cushion or hear that my son also meditates. My bookshelf provokes the question whether I read anything just for fun, despite there being books from Tolkien, GRR Martin, Somerset Maughm, Conan Doyle, George Orwell, and many other German authors there to see as well. These are unprovoked comments, or answers to questions put to me. People are uninquisitive it seems, but worse, they seem to question the right of others to be inquisitive.
Bob–
So it seems those friends are not willing to step back and look at why they look at things the way they do. They prefer to live unexamined the lives. To examine your life is to look at it ‘as if’ from the outside, that is, ‘as if’ from a transcendent point of view.
In any case there are this worldly experiences of transcendence for secular people. The 20th century produced a public sphere that transcends topical spaces. Think of the Olympics watched on the internet throughout the world. We are fused more or less as a common agent with other anonymous individuals. Such were the times of collective evanescence that founded society and the sacred. They occur with or without the conceptual vessel of a God or other symbol of Transcendence e.g. satori or Nirvana. But without a common symbol in which to invest them, it’s like pouring wine out on the floor to evaporate in the dust.
Nevertheless, I’m not here to persuade anybody into anything. As I said I think philosophy itself is fundamentally motivated by the existential need and desire for transcendence. The variations on that theme gives us the whole of philosophy
Did you read my post in which I merely invited those who do make a distinction between secular existence and transcendence to then take this distinction to the part I note time and again is my own main interest in these things: “how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with both conflicting goods and contingency, chance and change?”
Not interested in taking it there? Fine, take it where you want to go instead.
I read your OP and zeroed in on that further distinction you made: between the “self assured and the anxious/alienated”. Though again my focus here revolves around connecting the dots existentially between “morality here and now” and “immortality there and then”. And the extent to which some are inclined here to embrace either a God or a No God world.
Some see this as me hijacking the thread, I see it instead as me taking what I construe to be an interesting “general description spiritual assessment” of meaning and purpose in our lives, down out of the realm of psychologisms and out into the lives that we actually live…interactions such that how we construe our value judgments as anchored either more or less to existentialism or essentialism can make all the difference in the world regarding whether we do feel “self assured” or “anxious/alienated”.
After all, it is difficult for me to imagine how someone might feel more anxious and alienated than if they construe their own “self” here as “fractured and fragmented”.
Yes, in regard to religion, I focused in on particular historical and cultural denominations that provide the faithful with an actual Script for differentiating things said to be more or less sublime and awesome and transcending. And even those who make use of meditation and drugs to reach these states sooner or later are going to find themselves in contexts in which assessments of the secular and the transcendental collide out in the world of human social, political and economic interaction. My main interest in these things.
Thus the invitation on my part to those who wish to explore that aspect of the existential/essential divide.
Yes, just as there are conflicting ecclesiastical assessments of meaning and purpose in our lives, there are conflicting secular – ideological, deontological – assessments as well.
But what I wish to explore in terms of what can be a fundamental difference regarding the existential/essential divide “out in the world” is less what people claim to believe is true and more how they came to believe this instead of that given the arguments I make in my signature threads.
My main interest here revolves around secularity and transcendence as any particular individual might come to bring his or her own “general description spiritual assessment” down to Earth and explore the “for all practical purposes” implications of that assessment in regard to the very real conflicting goods that do revolve around things like homosexuality. Is there either a secular or a transcending frame of mind that is able to bring all rational and virtuous people together…or is my own assessment of human identity rooted in dasein more reasonable?
Again, choose one or the other. Only then focus in on a particular set of circumstances and explore the extent to which your own value judgments can be pinned down using the tools of philosophy or science or theology or spirituality.
As opposed to the manner in which “I” construe a fractured and fragmented “self” here to be a reasonable frame of mind in a No God world.
“As opposed to”? Whose self isn’t fractured and fragmented? Is somebody claiming that theirs isn’t?
I’m not sure how you see that you are taking anything out of the realm of psychologism, since where has Felix applied psychological conceptions to the interpretation of historical events or logical thought? Rather he spoke about the experience of existence having further dimensions than most people apply to their lives. There are numerous people who fall into one of those categories, and several who are blissfully ignorant of anything that could make them anxious, not having had to take on responsibility as yet. I find that it is then that people have to decide where they stand and how able they are to cope. It is then that you find that the self-assured retain to a certain degree their ignorance wilfully, avoiding moral complexity, regardless of where they stand and what doctrines they hold to (I am certain that they all have some doctrine they uphold). These people have often had an early advantage of identifying with other self-assured people and being welcomed by those people as one of their own.
Others are daunted by the task before them, become anxious and often indecisive, feigning perhaps membership to a group, but still insecure, having never had the advantage of belonging fully or finding acceptance. They have also not found a doctrine that could sustain them over a longer period, finding themselves in doubt of the self-assured, seeking to become streetwise in their coping with day-to-day life, developing hands-on skills and remaining pragmatic in their attitude. They survive with their anxiety, but there are many dark days and nights.
The alienated are those who I see their selves “fractured and fragmented”, seeing how society is guided by forces they have no influence on and finding no point of refuge except in their own company. This is often a state between adolescence and adulthood that can be overcome - and is by most. It is also a place where people who become victims of society find themselves, returned as it were back at the beginning of adult life, all experience wiped out and questioned. There are increasingly more people finding themselves at this point in their lives, whether they belonged to the self-assured or the anxious previously.
I am sure that the forces that be in our commercial societies are oblivious to the fate of the last group, being often made up of the first group, who are often singularly focused, and disregard collateral damage outright. They see themselves confirmed by their apparent success, measured as it is only on abstract figures and statistics, and they see the alienation of the last group as self-inflicted. I see this as a daily experience in our society, not as psychologism, or pure theory.
Rather than colliding with the world of human social, political and economic interaction, I see that many “assessments of the secular and the transcendental” provide a realistic picture of the reality in which we find ourselves. So realistic that many traditions have existed over thousands of years. The difference that has come about in our time is the solely materialistic orientation, which disregards aspects of experience that have non-materialistic explanations. We are suggested by an overbearing media, that this has no stock and that it is illusory, but the fact remains that many of us are illusory about our perception of reality, often assuming that the senses are presenting us with a true picture of reality, not taking into account the role that our brain has in sorting the sensory input.
People have been explaining to others over millennia that our perception is illusory, and modern science, if it be heard, confirms this. What I do see is the collision of materialistic interpretations of allegorical texts, as well as taking literally descriptions of experiences that are difficult to contain without metaphorical references. The transcendent experiences of people throughout history have come into disrepute despite the fact that many have a questionable grasp of reality, wrapped up as we are in our concrete jungles and artificial experience of life. The stability of our immediate environment often encourages us to believe that we have a grasp of what life is, but a night under the stars away from our towns opens up a new dimension of experience.
The loss of the experience of transcendence in secular life is the subject of this topic and this is chiefly down to the artificial environment we have created for ourselves in which life is so very complex, but leads people to either ignore the complexity, or shrink away from it, and few are those who cope well enough to guide others. The secret of survival in such a situation is humility and compassion, introspection and the building of community.
An excellent post Bob. And Iambiguous made some good points too. He’s right that no amount of possible transcendent experience in this life will free a person from existential conflict. Jesus, who according to the Gospels described his own transcendent experience in terms of the judaistic theology of his time, got caught in the middle of social political religious conflict between the Romans and the Jews in the first century Middle East. It got him killed. Threading the moral needle of life is the trickiest of businesses.
But that was 1500 years before the emergence of Western secular society. Now theism is one option among many. Most are Christians in the US. But they live in the context of a secular society. And they are significantly divided amongst themselves.