To live on terms with reality is to live on terms with transcendence.
What separates transcendent reality from immanent truth is conceivability.
If we can conceive what we encounter, we do conceive it, automatically and unconsciously. We spontaneously perceive what we encounter as something; we recognize it as something; we understand it by incorporating it into the conceptual system we use use to relate present experience to remembered and anticipated experiences. This conceptual system that interprets, interconnects and responds to experience is our philosophy. Using whatever philosophy we’ve developed or passively absorbed, we encounter transcendent reality and transform it into immanent truth.
With all useful things, the better it works, the less we notice it. To us, the world seems intrinsically intelligible, until something important comes along that isn’t intelligible.
When we encounter something real and important but unintelligible, it seems uncanny. It feels otherworldly, and often, dreadful. We feel apprehensive, because while we can apprehend our experience with the tips of our minds’ fingers, we cannot hold a form in our minds and comprehend it.
We must either comprehend it as intrinsically incomprehensible, and dismiss it as a literally otherworldly, as a mystery not for human minds to grasp, as something to which we non-relate as a purely transcendent otherness — or we must find some new way to conceive it, to enable us to relate to it in our human, knowing way.
To allow something (usually someone), transcendent (to us) to be become immanent (to us), we must extend philosophical hospitality, and invite the inconceivable into our midst.
But when we do this, when we acquire new conceptions for the sake of understanding some new particular thing, we frequently experience what religious people call transfiguration — the world as a whole is reconceived to accommodate this new understanding, and miraculously transforms in ways that are, in the most literal sense, inconceivable until it happens.
After it happens, radically new thoughts and perceptions irrupt into the world, half spontaneously, half actively.
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This is why commitment to radical novelty and commitment to transcendence are identical.
Suddenly
“This is why commitment to radical novelty and commitment to transcendence are identical.”
Beautiful.
Novelty is simply transcendence shorn of any connotation of direction or progress. Perpetual novelty is perpetual transcendence, perpetual transfiguration.
“But when we do this, when we acquire new conceptions for the sake of understanding some new particular thing, we frequently experience what religious people call transfiguration — the world as a whole is reconceived to accommodate this new understanding, and miraculously transforms in ways that are, in the most literal sense, inconceivable until it happens.”
When we transcend our current conceptions, we don’t leave behind conceptions tout cour and enter conceptionless interaction with the world (except perhaps momentarily when we a sense of oneness, limitlessness, vertigo in the midst of our transfiguration). Instead, we form a transfigured conceptual framework–one so novel that we could not have conceived it prior to our conversion.
As it is now, so it shall always be, novelty/transcendence forever and ever. Amen.