The word transcendental is becoming increasingly important to me. I just did a search for the term “transcendental” and there are surprisingly few returns. But those few packed some interesting insights, if only autobiographically so. One in particular is incredibly relevant to my current (postneoplatonic?) project:
…subjectivity can be thematized in two radically different ways, namely in a natural or psychological reflection on the one hand, and in a pure or transcendental reflection on the other. When I perform a psychological reflection, I am interpreting the act reflected upon as a psychical process, that is, a process occurring in a psycho-physical entity that exists in the world. This type of self-consciousness — which Husserl occasionally calls a mundane self-consciousness — is just as worldly an experience as, say, the experience of physical objects, and if one asks whether it can provide us with an adequate understanding of subjectivity, the answer is no. Natural reflection presents us with a constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject, but it does not provide us with an access to the constituting, transcendental dimension of subjectivity.
It is here that the pure or transcendental reflection is introduced, since its specific task is to thematize a subjectivity stripped from all contingent and transcendent relations and interpretations.
This excerpt is from Dan Zahavi’s Husserl’s Phenomenology.
It makes a technically precise distinction between the “lower” two selves of the Kabbalah. Nefesh (soul) is the “constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject”, and Ruach is the transcendental subject. Back when I was into poetically claiming that souls are universe-sized — or that a soul comprises the fullest pragmatic consequence of what we (each of us) can mean when we say “everything” — or when I’d say that “everythings vary in size” and that “some everythings are bigger than others” — or when I wanted to write a book called Ten-Thousand Everythings — and so on — what I was talking about was Ruach, in the plural: spirits, transcendental subjects.
The principle animates one of my favorite provocations: a personal subject and an academic subject are both subjects in the same sense. And that same sense is that both are essentially transcendental subjects. And, as happens with all transcendental subjects, the transcendental subject gets reduced to the objective subject matter, or rather the content, since much of the content is not material at all, though it is frequently materialized in application and examples.
I assess mystics and philosophers by how aware and alive they are to the peculiarities of transcendental being, which is always participatory, and never directly accessible to the comprehension of the objective mind. This knowing is far more performative than epistemic.
What interests me at this moment is one particular word: intersubjective.
When philosophers use it, the subject in question is a transcendental subject.
But if we are not careful, we easily vulgarize intersubjectivity into interactions between objectified subjects, and thematize it into interpersonal psychology, politics or the like. It turns into explorations of differing feelings, values, “lived experiences” and so on, and, even if “priors” are ritually listed, the transcendental “a-priors” are naively, innocently but often aggressively smuggled in as “objectively” true and inarguable. This type of intersubjectivity almost always imposes a transcendental subject upon participants in any “dialogue” it conducts, and it renders authentic dialogue impossible.
Because dialogue constrained and refereed by one transcendental subject, when precisely that transcendental subject is what is in question, is not authentic dialogue at all. It is conversation between two objectified subjects dominated by one transcendental subject.
Authentic dialogue is intertranscendental. Dialogue is a meeting of two transcendental subjects who answer to something beyond either, whose truth transcends the objective given truth of each transcendental subject, and which is neither objective, nor transcendental, but determinative of transcendental possibility and all objective validity.
It is to this source of appeal that rabbis refer when they speak of machloket l’shem shamayim (argument for the sake of Heaven) as a kind of disagreement with a truth of its own that is truer than either side of the dispute.
In order to engage in intertranscendental dialogue we must maintain loyalty to something higher than our own transcendental subject and whatever objective reality and truth are given by it.
This appeal is made to a transcendent being — transcendent vis-a-vis any transcendental subject — a transcendent superpersonal “self” called Neshamah.
And this is what my postneoplatonic framework is indicating — for those with enceptions to conceive what is given.
Note: In case it is not obvious, “postneoplatonic” is meant to be funny.
I removed a distracting political aside from this piece, but it is worth preserving:
‘This is the reason why right-conservatives in the 80s and 90s rolled their eyes at left-liberals’ incessant overtures “to dialogue”. The liberals invariably imposed their own ideological transcendental subject on the proceedings, not only on what content was indisputable, but on the form and regulation of the forum itself. But because it was their own transcendental subject being imposed, liberals were constitutionally oblivious to what struck conservatives as ludicrously tilted. Because, to themselves, they were self-evidently smarter, more radical, more self-aware, better intentioned and less naive realist than their interlocutors, they resorted to theories explaining the psycho-ethical deficiencies behind all the balking. All without a trace of that vaunted “liberal irony”. So the left gave up entirely on dialogue, which was the same as giving up on liberalism. Ironically, they knew about the dynamics, but refused to apply them universally and reflexively, and were unable to “practice what they preach” to a degree sufficiently radical to diagnose and treat their own profound and systemically-enforced injustice. “The work” they’ve done to date is superficial and not only leaves their self-ignorance and vices unaddressed, it is now used to justify their unrestrained exercise.’
This same dynamic, by the way — transcendental subjectivity imposed on discourse, both substantively and procedurally — is what can make dialogue between designers and corporate managerials an exercise in futility. The managerial subject cannot operate outside its own horizon, which it assumes, with that confidence obliviousness alone affords, is absolute and comprehensive.