THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

Can Transcendence Be Taught?

By John Kaag and Clancy Martin OCTOBER 07, 2016

I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,

Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied
through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Olivia Bee Poor fool, no wiser than before.

F
or two professors, the opening
words of Goethes Faust have
always been slightly disturbing,
but only recently, as weve grown older, have they come to haunt us.

Faust sits in his dusty library, surrounded by tomes, and laments the utter inadequacy
of human knowledge. He was no average scholar but a true savant a master in the
liberal arts of philosophy and theology and the practical arts of jurisprudence and
medicine. In the medieval university, those subjects were the culminating moments of
a lifetime of study in rhetoric, logic, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music, and
astronomy.

In other words, Faust knows everything worth knowing. And still, after all his careful
bookwork, he arrives at the unsettling realization that none of it has really mattered.
His scholarship has done pitifully little to unlock the mystery of human life.

Are we and our students in that same situation? Are we teaching them everything
without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that matter most? Is there
a curriculum that addresses why we are here? And why we live only to suffer and die?
Those questions are at the root of every great myth and wisdom tradition: the Katha
Upanishad, the opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita, Sophocles Ajax, and the Book of
Job among them. Job cries to the heavens, entreating God to clarify the tortuous
perplexity of being human. But God does not oblige, and Job is left in a whirlwind, in
the dark, just like Faust at the beginning of Goethes modern remake of the ancient
biblical story.

Johns grandfather Paul died this spring. He was 99. He was a pharmacist in a time
when pharmacists were treated like doctors. Being a druggist in the early 20th century
meant that you could still make drugs, which Paul did. Expertly. The medicine
cabinets at his home, in central Pennsylvania, were always stocked belladonna,
morphine, phentermine substances that are not readily available today. He taught
his family to believe in the powers of modern science, to believe that chemistry and
biology could solve the mysteries, or at least the fatal problems, of human life. And he
believed this almost to the very end.

Paul would have never told us straight out what he thought of philosophy or of our
choice to study and then teach it. But in his last years, and quite to his grandsons
surprise, he suggested that it might not be a complete waste of time. He had lots of
questions: Why is there evil? Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? What is the meaning
of life? What did Socrates mean when he said that the unexamined life is not worth
living? Wrapped in illness before pitching forward into dementia, the elderly man had
serious questions.

Clancys mom is still alive and thriving, in her 70s. But she recently wrote to him, as
though he might actually know the answer, "Is there something I should be doing to
prepare for death?" She wasnt talking about the practical issues of estate management
and end-of-life care and all the rest of the scary but sensible decisions we have to help
our parents make as they get older. She wasnt talking about the psychological issue of
how one might confront death itself, with techniques like mindfulness training or
terror management. She was talking about the most important question there is, the
one that made the ancient Greeks so notoriously anxious about the inevitability of the
end of life: What comes next, and how can I be ready?
The immanence of human nitude the fact that were dying right now and not in
some distant future should create the impetus for philosophical reection. Most
philosophers know this in some abstract sense. The Platonic dialogues are set against
the backdrop of the trial and death of Socrates for a reason: The difculty of facing
death is that it comes with the sudden challenge of giving a good account of your life,
what Plato called an apologia.

When dying nally delivers us to our inevitable end, we would like to think that weve
endured this arduous trial for a reason. But that reason cannot, unfortunately, be
articulated by many of the academic disciplines that have gained ascendance in our
modern colleges. Why not? Why shouldnt an undergraduate education prepare
students not only for a rich life but for a meaningful death?

B
iology offers certain answers about how we live and die. It can describe
apoptosis, autophagy, necrosis, and general senescence, the programmed
death, dismantling of, injury to, and deterioration of cells. But those
descriptions, like the terms they trade in, seem abstract, alien, detached from the
experience of living and dying. When a 98-year-old asks, "Why am I in pain?" the
biologist has answers: vasoconstriction, dehydration, toxicity. The evolutionary
biologist might say that pain is an adaptive response to the worlds dangers. But those
arent the type of answers that will satisfy a dying man, or Faust for that matter. Fausts
"Why?" is voiced in a different register, one that aches for a cosmic or existential
answer.

Might cosmic answers be found, then, in the heavens and the study of them? Faust,
escaping his library, emerging into the nights open air, screams his questions at the
stars. In our modern way, we do the same. We ask astronomers and astrophysicists to
explain the evolution of the universe, the way that all things come into being and are
snuffed out. But in regard to the meaning of this cosmic dance, physics itself remains
silent or, at least, inexplicable. Fausts foray into the night air terminates abruptly
when the Earth Spirit answers in its terrifyingly opaque way. In the face of that, the
little man simply cowers. Despite our star-directed sciences, its no different today.

The problem with the physical sciences or with the catchall that Faust called
"medicine" is that when it comes to the difculties of mortality, scientists are
committed to a particular methodology, which necessarily avoids satisfying existential
answers. End-of-life issues are subjectively felt; there is a singular quality of experience
to each passing life. This is what Heidegger means when he claims that death is a
persons "ownmost possibility." When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?"
he simultaneously queries the innitely more particular question: "What is the
meaning of my life?" Which is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my
death?"

Any satisfying answers would have to address what this meaning might be from the
inside, in terms that could be subjectively felt. The physical sciences, on the whole, are
wed to empirical, objective investigation, to examining things from the outside. They
are numb to the felt sense the frustration, regret, terror, guilt, uncertainty, relief, joy,
peace that prickles a life that is listing toward the grave.

This is not to say that Western philosophy and theology do a much better job.
According to Faust, they dont. Theology is the study of religion, not religion itself.
Theology, true theology, has the pesky consequence of disrupting belief, not
solidifying it. If you are looking for answers about the meaning of life, the type that
allows you to sleep at night, one should not turn to a theologian. Reading Aquinass
Summa Theologica is not, even for the most devout, a touching or reassuring
experience. It is a logical justication for belief that one already has, but has any dying
atheist read it and become a believer? There is a reason that proofs for the existence of
God are assiduously avoided by many teachers of the philosophy of religion: They are
dead boring, the type of tedium that can actually convince one that there isnt any
grand purpose to life. Go ahead, read the Summa. Persuade us that it is gripping or
even convincing.

Moreover, as Kierkegaard argued, rationally knowing that God exists as a consequence

of some proof is different than believing that God exists in the relevant way. Its a bit
like the Oracle tells Neo in The Matrix: "No one can tell you youre in love, you just
know it. Through and through. Balls to bones." If there is any consolation in faith, it
wont come from what someone else has told you.

Traditional Western theology lacks what Faust eventually craves: a handle on the
human experience. As a discipline, theology does not spend most of its time exploring
the inner, felt sense of transcendence, what William James called the "varieties of
religious experience." Theologians often skirt the felt need, the experiential craving,
for transcendence.

Who needs transcendence? We suspect that human beings do. Of course, it is

notoriously difcult to say what transcendence is. But we take Josiah Royce seriously
when he suggests that the need for transcendence is real and experientially felt by
most people at one point or another. It is experienced, according to Royce, as the
obverse of feeling completely, utterly, and totally lost. The prospect of losing ones life
or mind brings this transcendental need into sharp focus. How else to make sense of,
overcome the terror of, having your toenails grow, die, and fall off; the experience of
losing ones mind; the experience of scratching ones arm till it bleeds; of not
recognizing your loved ones; of slowly sloughing off esh until nothing is left?
Theology doesnt go there. But we do, headlong, unstoppably. And we would like to
know that it hasnt all been for naught.

Western philosophy has often followed

theology in erring in similar ways. For
much of its modern history, it has lusted
after the observational powers of the
sciences. As modern science took over
Europe, it put serious constraints on the
love of wisdom. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes,

Olivia Bee Hume, Kant the titans of modern

philosophy were, like the bench scientist,
bent on describing existence rather than
plumbing its deepest meanings.

At best, their rational systems masked the anxiety that Faust experienced, one that
stemmed from the sense that despite the pretenses of reason and logic, human life
was at its core largely irrational. We live only to suffer? That makes absolutely no
sense. At one point, philosophy, according to Socrates, was a preparation for death, a
way of getting ones existential house in order before it was blown away, or because it
needed to be in order for whatever might happen next. But this original intent faded in
philosophys growing desire to become a branch of math or science.
ompleting the rst part of Faust, in 1806, Goethe wrote at a time when the rationalism

C
of Descartes had ourished since the mid-1600s but was about to come
under attack. The rationalist could ascertain truths about math and logic,
like X=X, but could say pitifully little about the natural world. What
rationalism gained in certainty, it gave up in descriptive power. Empiricism
the works of Bacon and Hume, for instance had also had its day, but its models of
the natural world were addressed chiey to practical concerns. While science provided
certainty on smaller, provable points, it lost certainty and even the power of
imaginative conjecture on some of the important, larger ones.

Goethe wrote in the aftermath of these theoretical failures and, indeed, on the heels of
another German, Kant, who had done his best to unify, and therefore preserve what is
best about, rationalism and empiricism. Of course, according to Goethe, Kant had also
come up short: In trying to wed the two principal theories of modern thought, he
generated yet another abstract system that had little to do with the bone-and-marrow
realities of men and women.

Post-Kantian philosophy, the type that Goethe helped to generate in the early years of
the 19th century, was dened by its dissatisfaction with, among other things, the
conceptual remove of Kants critical project, the sense that it had lost touch with the
lived experience of life and action. Kants philosophy was supposed to be about
freedom and human autonomy, but his books were regarded, even in his day, as dry
and lifeless. They were "correct" as far as they went, but for thinkers working in his
wake, they didnt go nearly far enough. Kant was missing the felt sense of human
meaning.

On the evening that Johns grandfather Paul let his grandson hear him talk about love
and see him cry, he also shared a story that had been pointedly redacted from his
family history. Hed grown up in Altoona, Pa., a coal-mining town that, even in the
1920s, was beginning to run aground. Hed fallen in love with a young woman named
Hope, Johns grandmother, from an even more dilapidated community called Alison 1,
a "patch town" owned by the Rainey coal-and-coke company of Uniontown. Hope
and Paul came from families that were close-knit so close that they never fully
rejoiced at the prospect of marrying off their children. So under cover of night, the two
of them eloped to Maryland, and then made for New York City. At one point in the
distant past, Paul had known the thrill of experience, a sense of love and freedom that
made life oh so worth living, but over the course of middle age it had been tempered,
or tamped down, by lifes practicalities. And only in his nal days was Paul willing or
able to return to those forbidden sentiments.

Goethe and his contemporaries, like Schiller, would have regarded this as tragic and
instructive in equal parts. They called their readers to an "education of the
sentiments," which quickly became a touchstone for educators of the 19th century. It
was probably drawn from Adam Smith and his theory of moral sentiments, and
reshaped by the Romantic poets, who held that a particular orientation among
experience, emotion, and nature was key to being fully human.

The sentiments, or subjective feelings, were necessary for the educated person to
motivate and sustain ethical relations and to develop ones own fully human
capacities. One could read, write, and speak about freedom, but to actually be free one
had to thrill with the sheer possibility and then allow this sense to determine ones
actions. The education of the sentiments had little to do with book learning and
everything to do with the lessons of human experience, the ways in which it can be
lastingly satisfying.

This is what Faust craves most: to experience everything. Or better yet, to learn how
human experience, transitory and fragile, could come to mean, if not everything, at
least not nothing. It is tempting to think that Faust desires an innite range of
experience to traverse its full horizon but we suspect that what he yearns for is
depth and height, a strange experiential quality that can occasionally pervade a fully
human life.

If philosophy of the 17th century was dened by the "epistemological turn" the
desire, bordering on obsession, to dene the nature of objective truth writers in the
19th century witnessed what might be called the "experiential turn," a continuing
attempt to explore the subjective inside intellectual life. That culminated, of course, in
the movement we call Existentialism.

G
oethes demand to concentrate on, and enrich, experience was echoed by
American transcendentalists of the 1830s, and was well tted to a nation
that lacked longstanding tradition but brimmed with opportunity and
possibility. For Emerson, Goethe was "the Writer," who, "coming into an over-civilized
time and country, when original talent was oppressed under the load of books and
mechanical auxiliaries and the distracting variety of claims, taught men how to
dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make it subservient." But subservient to
what? For Goethe, the answer was complicated.

His prioritization of experience over the traditional life of the mind was premised on a
deeper commitment to reshaping culture (Bildung), and to the belief that ideas, on
their own, without the corresponding sentiments, could do pitifully little to transform
a society. Goethe may have helped to initiate the experiential turn, but to the extent
that sentimental education remained instrumental, hinged tightly to societal reform,
the revolution had yet to be fullled, Emerson thought. Goethes "is not even the
devotion to pure truth," the American wrote, "but to truth for the sake of culture." And
this orientation, one that elevated culture writ large over the cultivation of individuals,
kept Goethe from, in Emersons words, "worshiping the highest unity; he is incapable
of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment."

Emerson would not make a similar mistake. He published his essay, "Experience," in
1844. It opens by revisiting the despair, frustration, and confusion that Faust
expressed 40 years earlier. But this existential crisis, unlike Fausts, was not the stuff of
ction, and it wasnt expressed only to be overcome in the grand movement of
Bildung. Emersons son Waldo had died two years earlier. The boy had contracted
scarlet fever at the age of 5 and succumbed in a matter of days. "I take this
evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our ngers then
when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition," Emerson
wrote. Unhandsome, indeed. For all of its uncertainty and transience, experience
assured Emerson of one thing: It would be over all too soon. This is perhaps the
hardest, but also the most profound, lesson of experience, and one that many people
learn in the twilight of life. The trick, if we understand it, is to learn before its too late.

"Experience," what became a seminal essay in the American philosophical canon, was
articulated not in order to be employed by the grand movement of culture, but to
refocus on the subjective sense of the most pressing of human problems. Emerson
wrote:
Did our birth fall in some t of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so
sparing of her re and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the
afrmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no
superuity of spirit for new creation?

Historically scholars have skirted, if not explicitly ed, that question, retreating to the
traditions, institutions, systems, and norms that seem to give some sort of ballast to an
otherwise precarious existence. But that has been a ight from experience, a type of
transcendence that amounts to a monumental feat of escapism. After the death of
Waldo, however, ight was not an option for Emerson. Experience: Its a noun, its a
verb, but ultimately, for a host of scholars in the 19th century, it was an inescapable
command. Experience all of it. "It is not length of life," Emerson instructs, "but
depth of life."

When one tries to sound the depths,

Emerson concludes that it is possible to
listen for a quiet inner voice that never,
even in our darkest or most ecstatic
moments, forsakes us, a voice that says,
"Up again, old heart." This perseverance in
the midst of experience, rather than any

Olivia Bee transcendental dreams for cultural revival,

was at the heart of classical American
philosophys education of the sentiments.
It was, at all points, geared toward what Emersons young friend Henry David Thoreau
would call improving "the nick of time." Each nick, each critical moment, singular and
always present, can, for the time being, be occupied and improved. Thoreau went to
Walden not as a demonstration of some environmentalist agenda but to "live deep
and suck out all the marrow of life," to cut, to mark, with pressure and precision, the
time hed been allotted.

America of the early 19th century was routinely pigeonholed by European thinkers as
having a climate wholly uncongenial to philosophers. But that wasnt exactly true. It
was uncongenial to a certain type of abstract thinker, and some Europeans began to
acknowledge American philosophers exploration of the relationship between action
and thought in a way that might allow one to face longstanding existential dilemmas.
Emerson, Nietzsche wrote, is "a good friend and someone who has cheered me up
even in dark times: He possesses so many possibilities, that with him even virtue
becomes spiritual."

The Romantic impulse ran deep with both thinkers: Experience was life-afrming not
in the abstract but in the emotional and intellectual tenor of an individual. Philosophy
at its best was to be learned by rote not in the sense of mindless memorization but
in the sense of learning something by heart. And this most personal of knowledge was
meant to give individuals the courage to determine their own lives and to ask a
question that Nietzsche voices in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "What is the greatest
experience you can have?" How deeply or gently or subtly will you make your nick of
time?

T
hose questions seem to have no place in academe. Is that because the
experiential turn has run its course? Or has it been only temporarily
interrupted?

The question of "the greatest experience" should be one that we resuscitate in our
colleges. Lessons, both narrow and grand, on drawing the marrow from life are, when
you think about it, the most crucial and timeless of all, to the self-seeking late teen and
the purpose-seeking nonagenarian alike.

At 81, Johns grandfather, Paul, wanted to see the Grand Tetons one last time and
asked John to chaperone the outing. The whole family thought it was ludicrous: an old
man with a mechanical hip hiking through the woods. They were right. The elderly
fellow went "ass over tincups," in his words, and had to be taken to the emergency
room (a fact that didnt at the time get back to his hand-wringing daughters). At 85 he
wanted to ride a bike again, despite not being able to get his leg over the crossbar, and
again enlisted the family philosopher as an accomplice. Another secret trip to the
emergency room. A year later he wanted to talk about love, despite having assiduously
avoided the word for most of his life. This time, something more notable than the
emergency room: tears.

"We should do this again," he said, after he dried his eyes.

There was something about the quality of the experience, despite its difculty, that
continued to beckon.

So what exactly is the allure of experience? Thoreau gives us a hint: "You must live in
the present, launch yourself on every wave, nd your eternity in each moment. Fools
stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other
land; there is no other life but this." That might sound as if he were endorsing a
shallow form of hedonism, but we dont think so. Experience is undergone and
absorbed subjectively, in the present that is to say, in the same register as Fausts
most personal of existential questions. Death might be ones ownmost possibility, but
so is experience. Plumbing the depths of experience allows one to own up to life to
say this life was, for better and for worse, "my own."

In his nal months, Paul forgot everything his keys, his grandson, his name
everything. But one morning, a few weeks before his death, he remembered falling off
his bike. "I," he paused to catch his breath, emphasize the word, and press on, "did
that," he said grinning.

He articulated part of the draw of experience: It is, at every moment, personally felt, a
marker of a life lived, if not with grand purpose, at least with authenticity. The ancient
philosophical imperative to "know thyself" would be impossible to satisfy without
keying into experience. At the brink of the 20th century, William James, who inherited
Emersons transcendentalism and refashioned it in his American pragmatism, claimed
that it was "the zest" of experience that helped make life signicant.

There is a type of Promethean self-reliance implied in this discussion of experience, a

willingness to live in the moment and claim "no other life but this." But there is
another aspect of experience that takes us beyond the connes of modern subjectivity
and guards against the charge of solipsism that has often been leveled against the
experiential turn. Thoreaus direction is "to nd your eternity in each moment." The
"your" is important, but so to, and equally, is the "eternity."

The "your" and the "eternity." Theres the intersection where youll nd a
grandfathers quest for deep experience and a mothers appeal for guidance toward
some kind of transcendent perspective in the face of mortality. As loving children, and
as philosophers, we feel the urgent call for meaningful answers.
The need to have authentically lived and also to know what to do about dying are
knotted together in a way that none of our usual intellectual approaches can
adequately untangle. It is related to the strange way that experience is both wholly
ones own and never fully in ones possession. Experience is, by its very nature,
transcendent it points beyond itself, and it is had and undergone with others.

So how could Johns grandfather have reconciled himself with death, and how can
Clancys mom prepare for it? How can we grapple and help our students grapple with
it? Surely it couldnt come down to a simple reading list; a well-planned course; a
humble, fundamental step back to view the why and wherefore of our knowledge and
its conveyance.

Then again, none of that could hurt. It must be part of our jobs, as college teachers, to
launch our students on the search for something larger than their immediate
concerns, to confront them with the challenges that are presented by such intractable
questions as the meaning of suffering, life, and death. "One never goes so far as when
one doesnt know where one is going," Goethe wrote elsewhere, and thats a big hint.
The elusiveness of knowing about life and death might be the point. Like falling in
love, or even like remembering riding a bike, thinking about death might be the
willingness to embrace what is unknown, what is unknowable. The cheerfulness
displayed by that old skeptic Socrates in the face of death is apt for one wise enough to
admit that hes never known anything about the most important matters.

Fausts despair is not a consequence of the limitations of his knowledge but the
frustration of a mistaken attitude. Yes, in the face of life and death, all that knowledge
amounts to nothing. Of course it does. The meaning of life and death is not something
we will ever know. They are rather places we are willing or unwilling to go. To feel
them, moment by moment, to the end, authentically, thoughtfully, passionately
that is an answer in itself. And for us as educators, to show our students the
importance of trying to go to those places that may be one of the best things we can
teach them.

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

His book American Philosophy: A Love Story is out this month from Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at
Kansas City. His books include Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and
the Growth and Care of Erotic Love (FSG, 2015).

Copyright 2016 The Chronicle of Higher Education