When I take my daily constitutional half a mile to a convenience store and back, I am not alone even though I don’t know the names or remember the faces of people I pass. They know who I am: an elderly man with a cane who is getting his exercise, and perhaps returning with a beverage. Nobody is without their roles,some important ones of which are on display. What you see is what I am whether or not I disclose what I think are my deep thoughts. The question here is whether I can ever escape from my roles, is there some relaxation of all those roles, like tinker, would be spy or ex-professor, that cocoon me, everyone exhibiting any number of spikes that, like the coronavirus, allow identities to hang onto our projections and our awards, or ‘beings” as a particular entity. Yes there are, and among them is exhibited in that nearly daily walk, because I get so enmeshed in the walk itself, that it travels in distance, that I forget what my roles are, to the extent that such is possible. Nobody totally leaves hold of their identities, unless in an existentialist fantasy, as in Camus’ “The Stranger” and, in that case, such moments are horrendous rather than liberating.
What I can do is dissociate myself from my roles, put them in abeyance without dissolving my identity, by concentrating on the distances. I look forward to the progress to the convenience store and the distance back, dividing it so that I have done a block, which is a sixth of my round trip, and then a third and then half, where I rest on a bench in front of the distance consumed, satisfied with what has been done and what is left, then two thirds of the way done, and then just a few lots left before I just have to go up the walkway to my house, not even including that as the distance to be covered. I also look up and down and not just forward and back because the Salt Lake City sky shows good light from above as well as the still snow colored mountains not very distant, and I also look at my steps as I cross the concrete steps that move me along. I feel the sense of dimension rather than just it being a nice day and this experience is very different, in its impersonality and in its very basic reality, than are the things that are familiar to you as part of social life. Dimension is, in that sense, alien, in that it has nothing to do with me even as I am immersed in it-- or more precisely ambient within it, whatever is that quality of distance may be. I loved geometry in high school.
Noticing the qualities of distance is a way to distinguish the social from the transcendental. The first refers to the roles and structures and processes that are part of social life. They provide familiarity and orderliness in social relations even if the two of those qualities are regarded as deeply intertwined with one another, order coming from familiarity, as when Durkheim invokes the idea of norm, social order created so as to make life familiar amd ordinary. Or else when familiarity is the result of order, so that might makes right, anyone or maybe just elite people intimidated by order so as to allow themselves to become comfortable with whatever their lives are given. The opposite of the social is the transcendental, which refers to ideas and feelings what seem to be permanent and inevitable and so part of existence itself, whatever is the ebb and flow of social life, and so constituting the meaning of life rather than the behaviors of life, those of which are contingent on social life. Art, love, and the purpose of life, along with so many topics considered in philosophy before it was reconstructed by Pragmatism, were part of the transcendental, also including matters that Pragmatism came to regard as obsolete, such as issues having to do with free will, an idea that was thought to be either promulgated by God or discarded as irreconcilable with natural cause, when free will is grounded in its social forces, having to do with the relative ability to control their circumstances rather than something that is categorically either in every person or outside any person. I want to consider how those two transcendental matters, art and love, liberate people from society.
Art is a part of culture, the part generally to be regarded as the best of it, and culture is often treated as essentially social because it is made up of the customs and habits which people usually engaged. What people eat is customary but haute cuisine is regarded as an art, if not one of the highest kinds of it. And indeed art is the product of a highly developed social structure and state of intellectual advancement. Books require writing and the copying of manuscripts. Even theater, which may be derived from liturgical and choral activities, requires a high degree of social structural invention so that it is recognized as art rather than something else. Audiences are schooled as people who assemble in an auditorium for a non religious proceeding whereby they attend to people feigning events so as to create a fictitious story that people find emotionally and intellectually edifying or frightening for the pleasure and the intellectual stimulation that occurs. Unless you satisfy the demands of the role of audience, largely passive iof attentive, unless you get what all these intersecting events are up to, noting what is off the scene and what is to be attended as the performance, it will not make much sense, much less accomplish art. People were frightened about first seeing the railroad train approaching while looking at early films, and only becoming accustomed to the pretense and the reality of the film did they find it to be art, responding to romance and thrills, and the transition tok ten years or so for a new art to be developed.
But once its occasions and technology are established, what art does, even of a relatively superficial one, is to create transcendence, something that is separated from its social and mechanical production. An image, like a portrait, or a performance, like that of “Hamlet”, or a ballet or a novel, “live forever”, though not really, just for millenia in that the thing itself becomes part of memory, for themselves and for others, for perhaps thousands of years, as if “Hamlet” had been created by God on Mt. Sinai, because it is such an essential part of individual and collective experience. These worlds once made supplant the conditions of their creations to become more real and resonant than life, and there are even more abundant works of creation whereby there is a line or image that rings for its clarity of insight, as when Michael, in “The Godfather”, recalls his father saying that to an associate “he made an offer he couldn’t refuse”. As much as these works imitate life, or make it either less or more grand than life, it is dissociated from life, operating in its own ways, and therefore no longer plebian or real.
Hee is another matter alien to social life. Existential philosophers and writers treat death as an existential rather than a social condition, which means the same thing as transcendental in that it is a fact that is an inevitable and eternal aspect of human existence that impacts on every other aspect of human existence. Existentialists regard death, one of these essential constraints of the social, as absurd because death has no meaning and in fact abolishes meaning, death being incommensurable with other features of existence, such as dimension or social life itself, because people cannot contemplate what it would be like to be without consciousness because you would need consciousness s as to experience the lack of consciousness. Death is not the end of life; it is the eternity forward of being without consciousness. Moreover, religious existentialists regard death also as the abolition of morality in that people will not be able tro control the awful things they can do if there is no afterlife which constrains worldly behaviors. So death is an ever present standard or lack of standard for life and so is invisible, even if people from “Gilgamesh” on recognize how people can leave their lives, because it is the measure of all things, moral and otherwise, a Sword of Damocles as it can be visualized but is in itself a part of the existential or transcendental facts, along with distance and art and, some might say, mora;ity.
Some people would like to dismiss death by treating it as a part of the social world. People often say that death is a part of life, which means a stage in life as inevitable as becoming an adult or a retiree and so just the next thing that happens to people. But that is a platitude in that it is very different from one’s other roles in that biological existence ceases and so sustains no other roles. Sociologists and anthropologists avoid that issue by pointing to funeral ceremonies as noting and ritualizing moving on from one stage of life to the next, as happens in confirmations or weddings. But, strictly speaking, people are not moving into other roles where people cn be invoked through ghosts or memories. They can’t really speak from the dead. These are just metaphors about deceased people rather than real interchanges, as happens when I say that I speak to my now dead wife and have her respond to me in that I fashion from my imagination what my wife would very likely have fashioned as a response to a quandary. Death involves a lot of dealing with what if a dead person were somehow still alive because it is so daunting to contemplate the existence of a dead person much less to think of myself as dead. How can you possibly do that?
Possibly the most successful attempt to make sense out of death is fashioned by Emile durkheim, a theme that preoccupies both “Suicide” and “The Fundamental Forms of Religious Experience”. “Suicide” contemplates why people can abolish their own deaths, so extreme is it in nature. His answer is that people when shorn of social life are anchorless and so will resort to suicide rather than face the coldness and fear and loneliness of being part of social life. That is a proof, so it could be said, that social life is essential and itself, as a whole, transcendental. “The Fundamental Forms” go further and suggest that religious ritual is a way to acknowledge society itself because social life is invisible and eternal nd so the equivalent of religion, though it is a difficult argument in that saying two things--society and religion-- sharing a few attributes re not therefore identical, though that's the kind of argument that philosophers regularly invoke, as when St. Anselm argues, quite convincingly, that god exists because he combines the attributes of being and best, and nothing else does, even though being is not like other attributes, and best can be applied to any list in a group if you care to use that comparative.Be that as it may, death sticks with us, mostly disturbs us, Christianity took hold, I suspect, because jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The miracles mattered.
Love is another of these transcendental matters that people have for ages tried to confront or explain but where most manage only to be awestruck at this phenomenon because of its strange paradoxical nature,s which is that people are in some way blended in that the interests of the other become the interest of the other so that a person can get caught up in carrying out a love for another by sacrificing one’s own love for the other if that would better serve the person beloved. Love is therefore both selfish and selfless. How could that be? The answer, I think, is that love, as opposed to deep friendship or familial love, love strictly speaking, is always associated with sexualit. Lust makes people seem engaging and yet a different object, often put metaphorically as a way to possess someone strangely different and unreachable, however intimate they may become. It is a mistake to think of agape as a higher form of love, shed of its lust, when the lust is what makes the bond possible and so different from the other kinds of love.
Love is different from other emotions like the aforesaid friendship or loyalty, also akin to love, or other unrelated emotions like courage or preciseness of thought, in that it is so urgent and universal and enveloping that people think love to transcend other emotions, and so have a special status even without the Biblical Injunction of making love the most special of attributes. Love may be on a low burner, but it can anywhere or with anyone arise, and when it does, it is so inflamed as to be transformed, not at all what happens with other emotions associated, let us say, with physical exertion ir a painful ache that can be debilitating and, over time, change a mood but not like love, which changes mood in a moment and so is overwhelming.That may just be the result of the physiological process by which people become aroused but it is important because it is so distinctive an emotion, as if there were some other similar one, such as people are emotionally aroused by their obedience or sagacity. Satisfaction of being well received by colleagues is a rush similar to sexuial excitation only as an exaggeration.
Dante gets love right even if he gets his valence wrong. People in love are dissociated from social life to the extent that they are willing to cling with one another and be wafted about by the winds. They are not anchored in their social circumstances and that is what makes the interaction transcendental. People will move from one continent to another so as to be with a loved one, or will break sexual taboos so as to cling with someone who is forbidden. People stay together, even if they stay close to home and lead conventional lives, in that people age together through their common lives and so reverberate with one another as they mature, a singular history that is itself an adventure even if also a burden. So we say that family life is a peculiar institution, more significant than law or religion or even work because that is often enough the single most important emotional focus, treating other social relations as external or contingencies,
Social structures and processes are invisible and universal in that they can be found everywhere, have no geographical or historical designation. Warriors in Ukraine use camouflage uniforms, while Achilles wore a toga, but they are equally much warriors in that their purpose is to kill warriors allied to another cause and to be distinguished from civilians. Even the rules of war, whereby Achilles defiled the corpse of Hector, is forbidden in both the Greeks and in American military law. Whether a Zulu or a Brit, there are political structures and customary practices. Indeed, one might conclude that social structures and processes should be regarded as transcendental, but that is a mistake because the ideas of social structure and processes were thought to be substitutes from the transcendental, a replacement for the transcendental. Rather than conditions of existence or eternal ideas, sociology was a science because it was a description of what actually happened. Durkheim reduced transcendental ideas to behavior while Marx reduced history to economic processes and Parsons reduced society to its social necessities, these structures necessary so that they could survive, even if it is true that Marx and Parsons do invoke an aura of inevitability: that the working class will triumph and that social structures will have to remain the same, with their complements of culture and legal institutions and the other practices that are familiar. Nothing much will change, albeit totalitarianism was a threat to the natural order, but the specter was alive and well in the Fifties. Sociology was a description of what happened rather than an ideology of what had to happen.
Rather, the truly transcendental is made up of such startling matters as those mentioned, art, love, death and even distance, because all of them are outside the social. Curiously, though, that which is transcendental is located in space. Let us call them the fields of transcendence, like a field of clover, so as to indicate geographical placement. The transcendental entities are placed within their field and differentially distributed on the fields. Art is centered in schools and in museums and other establishments of art and in cities like Los Angeles, New York and London, and regional theaters and operas have limited repertoires and less challenging works. Death is everywhere a final arbiter, but we are all aware of how longevity is shorter among poorer people or in less economically developed regions and nations. Even love is differentially distributed in that poorer people will be satisfied with less and that, I suppose, there are clusters of people, whether culturally or biologically constrained, who are more sexually active. But that is no more than to say that the transcendent is produced rather than given, however much for many millennia it was thought to be otherwise.