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,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

For two professors, the opening words of Goethe’s Faust have always been slightly disturbing, but only
recently, as we’ve 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 Goethe’s modern remake of the
ancient biblical story.

John’s 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 grandson’s 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.

1
“Are we teaching students everything without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that
matter most?” Clancy’s 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t
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 finitude — the fact that we’re dying right now and not in some distant future
— should create the impetus for philosophical reflection. 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 difficulty 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 finally delivers us to our inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve 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 shouldn’t 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 world’s dangers. But those aren’t the type of answers that will satisfy a dying man, or
Faust for that matter. Faust’s "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 night’s 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. Faust’s 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, it’s no different today.

The problem with the physical sciences — or with the catchall that Faust called "medicine" — is that
when it comes to the difficulties 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 person’s "ownmost possibility." When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?" he
simultaneously queries the infinitely more particular question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Which
is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my death?"

2
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
don’t. 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 Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica is not, even for the most devout, a touching or reassuring experience. It is a logical
justification 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 isn’t 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. It’s a bit like the Oracle tells Neo in The
Matrix: "No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones." If
there is any consolation in faith, it won’t 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 difficult 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
one’s 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 one’s mind;
the experience of scratching one’s arm till it bleeds; of not recognizing your loved ones; of slowly
sloughing off flesh until nothing is left? Theology doesn’t go there. But we do, headlong, unstoppably.
And we would like to know that it hasn’t 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, 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

3
preparation for death, a way of getting one’s 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
philosophy’s growing desire to become a branch of math or science.

C ompleting the first part of Faust, in 1806, Goethe wrote at a time when the rationalism of Descartes
had flourished 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 chiefly 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 defined by its dissatisfaction with, among other things, the conceptual remove of Kant’s critical
project, the sense that it had lost touch with the lived experience of life and action. Kant’s 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
didn’t go nearly far enough. Kant was missing the felt sense of human meaning.

On the evening that John’s 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. He’d grown up in
Altoona, Pa., a coal-mining town that, even in the 1920s, was beginning to run aground. He’d fallen in
love with a young woman named Hope, John’s 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 life’s practicalities. And only in his final 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 one’s 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 one’s actions. The education of the sentiments had little to do with book learning

4
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 infinite 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 defined by the "epistemological turn" — the desire, bordering on
obsession, to define 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 oethe’s demand to concentrate on, and enrich, experience was echoed by American
transcendentalists of the 1830s, and was well fitted 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 fulfilled, Emerson thought. Goethe’s "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 Emerson’s words, "worshiping the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral
sentiment."

“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.” 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 Faust’s,
was not the stuff of fiction, and it wasn’t expressed only to be overcome in the grand movement of
Bildung. Emerson’s 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 fingers 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 it’s too late.

5
"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 fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and
so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have
health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation?

Historically scholars have skirted, if not explicitly fled, 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 flight from experience, a type of transcendence that amounts to a
monumental feat of escapism. After the death of Waldo, however, flight was not an option for Emerson.
Experience: It’s a noun, it’s 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 transcendental dreams
for cultural revival, was at the heart of classical American philosophy’s education of the sentiments. It
was, at all points, geared toward what Emerson’s 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 he’d been allotted.

America of the early 19th century was routinely pigeonholed by European thinkers as having a climate
wholly uncongenial to philosophers. But that wasn’t 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-affirming 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.

6
At 81, John’s 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 didn’t 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 difficulty, 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, find 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 don’t think so. Experience is undergone and
absorbed subjectively, in the present — that is to say, in the same register as Faust’s most personal of
existential questions. Death might be one’s 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 final 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 Emerson’s transcendentalism and refashioned it in his American
pragmatism, claimed that it was "the zest" of experience that helped make life significant.

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 confines of modern subjectivity and guards against the charge of solipsism that has often
been leveled against the experiential turn. Thoreau’s direction is "to find your eternity in each moment."
The "your" is important, but so to, and equally, is the "eternity."

The "your" and the "eternity." There’s the intersection where you’ll find a grandfather’s quest for deep
experience and a mother’s 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 one’s own and never fully in one’s possession. Experience is, by its
very nature, transcendent — it points beyond itself, and it is had and undergone with others.

7
So how could John’s grandfather have reconciled himself with death, and how can Clancy’s mom
prepare for it? How can we grapple and help our students grapple with it? Surely it couldn’t 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 doesn’t know where one is going," Goethe wrote elsewhere, and
that’s 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 he’s never known anything about the most important
matters.

Faust’s 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).

A version of this article appeared in the October 14, 2016 issue.