Varieties of Transcendence and Their Consequences for Political Philosophy

Abstract

In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of the transcendental and its Hegelian and Habermasian modifications. In my conclusion I briefly discuss two alternative versions of modern immanent transcendence—cognitive and exemplary—and their consequences for political philosophy.

Notes

1. See Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 148–268, and Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001). On the succession of episodic, mimetic and mythical cultures, see also Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithical to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 117–264.

2. Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Origin and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 1.

3. See Björn Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age,” in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. J. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 66.

4. See Charles Taylor, “What Was the Axial Revolution?” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. R. N. Bellah and H. Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 31–34.

5. Johann Arnason, “The Axial Agenda and Its Interpreters,” in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. J. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 39.

6. See Björn Wittrock, “The Axial Age in Global History,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 115. As Max Weber already noted, “The Confucian desired ‘salvation’ only from the barbaric lack of education. As the reward of virtue he expected only long life, health, and wealth in this world and beyond death the retention of his good name. Like for truly Hellenic man all transcendental anchorage of ethics, all tension between the imperatives of a supra-mundane God and a creatural world, all orientation toward a goal in the beyond, and all conception of radical evil were absent.” Max Weber, The Religion of China, trans. H. H. Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1964), 228.

7. See Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. M. Bullock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 3–4; and Wittrock, “The Axial Age in Global History,” 106–7.

8. See Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age,” 66.

9. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

10. Berman, Law and Revolution, 178.

11. Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940), 163; quoted in Hauke Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives (New York: Continuum, 2014), 94ms.

12. These obligations were: amor iustitiae (love of justice), defensor pauperum (guardian of paupers), propagator pacis (sustainer of peace). See Laurent Mayali, “Recht sprechen. Die Normdurchsetzung und das Selbstverständnis der Kanonisten,” Ratio Juris 14 (1995): 284–308, esp. 299, quoted in Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions, 94ms.

13. Jürgen Habermas, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. E. Mendieta (Cambridge: Polity Press 2002), 108.

14. Brunkhorst, Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions, 237ms (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 245.

15. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 7.

16. See Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in A Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, ed. J. L. Heft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30.

17. On the fate of this notion, see the essays collected in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), and especially Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Before, Around and Beyond the Theological-Political,” 1–88.

18. On the theme of a “leap of faith” as potentially enabling us to break free from the grip of the immanent frame, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 703.

19. This specific version of immanent transcendence is argued by Tong Shijun to be widely represented in Confucian China, past and present. See Tong Shijun, “‘Critique’ immanent in ‘Practice’: New Frankfurt School and American Pragmatism,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 2 (2006): 295–316.

20. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1983), 73.

21. Alessandro Ferrara, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998), and The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. L. G. Crocker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 41; hereafter cited in the text.

23. John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy 77.9 (1980): 88, 519, italics mine.

24. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 28.

25. François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims, Project Gutenberg, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm, n. 70.

26. See Georg W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 148.

27. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 91.

28. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 164.

29. See Georg W. F. Hegel, Begriff der Religion, quoted in Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 100.