The Loss of Transcendence
On the beautiful impossibility of being human
As I sat in the library the other day — spring just about to arrive, the first blossoms on the cherry tree outside — I stumbled upon a recent Substack post by my former boss Jason Zhao titled “The Böckenförde Dilemma — A Case for Spiritual Renewal in the West“. As with anything Jason writes, it immediately set my thoughts racing.
Böckenförde’s spiritual vacuum
For those unfamiliar with the matter, the Böckenförde dilemma states that “liberal democracies rely upon the fertile soil of shared cultural values to flourish, yet they cannot replenish those very values.” In essence, the liberal democratic state relies on moral and social foundations outside of itself, like those emerging from religion, cultural traditions, or families and communities — but it cannot guarantee the ongoing existence of these values.
Following a sharp analysis of the current spiritual vacuum, its devastating effect on liberal societies, and the incapability of proceduralism and pseudo-religions to fill that gap, Jason argues:
“What we need is not necessarily a religion in the traditional sense. Be it a vision of virtue or a new morality, we must admit that certain substantive commitments must take place over mere proceduralism.”
Embracing human inability
While Jason’s piece was a great inspiration, I’d argue that the problem underlying our modern society runs even deeper. I don’t think that it’s merely about visions of virtue or a new morality; I’m convinced that we need to rediscover a lost skill at the root of religion, virtue, or morality, namely: transcendence. Let me explain.
In my view, human nature is defined not by our ability to reason, the ability to craft tools, or the ability to build social structures and use language; the defining feature of our species is actually our inability, paired with our awareness of it. Put differently, being human means being able to understand the limits of one’s existence.
Take death, the most drastic example of our inability. Animals die, but they do not anticipate their own death. Intelligent machines, on the other hand, have no need to confront mortality at all. Human beings, however, face the inevitability of death while possessing the peculiar capacity to grasp this immense limit of their own existence.
Transcendence: climbing beyond
This uncomfortable situation we are thrown into — unable to escape death and yet able to anticipate it — is the birthplace of transcendence, something unique to mankind. One could say that what differentiates humans from animals on the one hand and intelligent machines on the other is the ability to experience transcendence.
Transcendence is the essence of the human tension between ability and inability. The word is derived from the Latin transcendere, meaning “to climb beyond.” The transcendent mode of existence positively affirms our own limits: it acknowledges the separation between the immanent (within our limits) and the transcendent (outside our limits). But, at the same time, it encourages us to climb, to find our own answers in the face of the unknowable.
As such, transcendence necessitates what Søren Kierkegaard has famously described as a leap: a passionate move to accept that there is something we ultimately cannot know, and yet to search for answers — to live these answers — nonetheless. We sometimes forget that the first existentialist was a strong believer, and he based his belief on this precise leap he was taking.
Loving, believing, submitting
Not surprisingly, religion as a main form of transcendent experience strongly resembles this leap. Islam, for example, literally means submission or surrender; the daily prayers of a Muslim begin with the words “God is greater.” Accepting these limits of reason does not mean giving up on life: a believer commits to religious ethics and structures their life around them — a way to face the unknowable.
But religion is only one mode of transcendence. Think about ethics: at the core of each moral system lies a foundation that cannot ultimately be justified by reason alone. Even love — by the way, something that Hegel has termed the basis of all ethical life (Sittlichkeit) — has an element of transcendence. As Byung-Chul Han put it in Agony of the Eros, love is “a powerlessness in which, instead of asserting myself, I lose myself in the other (…), who then raises me up again.”
The lover, thus, is a transcendent being, just as the believer and the ethical person are, because of the passionate acceptance of their ultimate inability.
The illusions of techno-capitalism
The main issue of our current society is not that we’re lacking a specific religion, ethic, or moral structure; it is that we have lost our ability to make that passionate leap of accepting our inability and experiencing true transcendence.
The deterioration of that capacity is all the more devastating as transcendence is so foundational to human nature. A society without transcendence ultimately becomes a passionless, loveless, meaningless society — and mere procedural liberalism will not fill that gap.
But why have we neglected this skill that is so fundamental to our nature? It is because the paradigms underlying our modern form of financial capitalism and the scientific revolution — as ultimately crystallized in Silicon Valley and spread into our everyday lives and culture — have instilled in us the illusion of limitlessness.
Growth has no ceiling; technology can overcome any burdensome human condition; and ultimately, anything can be known. Homo faber, homo technologicus, and homo oeconomicus all claim that there is no limit to human nature — and thus transcendence becomes obsolete.
In a world of absolute reason, religion appears as mere superstition, ethics as an optional add-on, and the lover as a fool.
The rediscovery of transcendence
But we are reaching a point in time where we slowly begin to rediscover the importance and the positive force of accepting our limits. Without transcendence, we cannot build any moral structure capable of sustaining a society, whether through religion, ethics, or love.
In fact, the modern human being might need religion and other forms of transcendence more than ever, because no matter how deeply we are caught up in the illusion of our own limitlessness, the limits of our nature will confront us one way or another — through a simple twist of fate, the nearing of our own death, or the experience of true love.
So for me, the question is not whether we should reintroduce religion or spirituality into our liberal societies to circumvent the Böckenförde dilemma. What it requires from us is a giant, passionate, courageous leap of faith: in a time that proclaims absolute ability — editing human genomes, attaching machine interfaces to our brains, perhaps even circumventing death — we must passionately affirm our absolute inability, our limits, our impossibility: the beautiful impossibility of being human.
We must rediscover transcendence as the driving force of our personal lives and our society as a whole.
In other words: We must take the leap.
I’m grateful to Marius Neuberger for extensive feedback on this post, as well as Jason Zhao for providing the initial inspiration.