auto-immunity or transcendence
This capacity is similar to, but not the same as, that of art, politics,
and philosophy. Art offers a new vision of the perceptual space we live
in. Philosophy does the same as far as the meanings we take for
granted. The result of such questioning, Patočka writes, is “an upheaval
aimed at the former meaning of life as a whole.” It is a shaking of our
worldview. A similar shaking occurs in political life as different
perspectives and interests confront each other in open debate. What
distinguishes the shaking brought about by the religious perspective
is the radical transcendence that is at its root. The basis of the religious
perspective, however, is inherently transcendent. As such it affords us
the possibility of calling the world itself into question. Doing so, it
undermines our preconceived ideas about how to overcome the
relativity of the meanings that mark the earthly economy. It thus takes
us beyond the familiar ways we reanimate the existing bonds of
collectivity and re-collection to gain a worldly, yet non-relative,
absolute perspective. Confronting us with the alterity of the absolutely
other, it undermines our unspoken conviction that we can overcome
the relativity of meaning by positing or acknowledging an absolute
sense of the world.
This, however, does not imply a loss of our capacity to overcome
relativism. Rather, that capacity is retrieved insofar as religion sensi-
tizes us to the experience of otherness in its exceeding our constitutive
intentions. This experience, it claims, is available in this world, con-
cretely, in our encounter with the other. Overcoming relativism here
becomes a function of our dependence on this other. Thus, if relativ-
ism involves taking oneself, one’s group, or one’s culture as the “meas-
ure of all things,” in particular, as the measure of one’s response to the
other, overcoming it involves our taking the other as the measure of
our response. By realizing that an adequate response to the excessive
appeal of the other requires a transcending of ourselves, self-tran-
scendence thus becomes an ethical and existential task. Religion, in
making us sensitive to the otherness within us and to the possibility
and scope of self-transcendence, thus establishes a renewed understand-
ing of the other: Recognizing the other as the measure of our experi-
ences, self-becoming loses its solipsistic quality. In its dependency on
the other and the reassessment the other provokes, it comes to be seen
as the process of reassessing oneself as a self-in-transcendence.
vip2019
(vip2019)
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