Consciousness and transcendence

 LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider John Kaag's fourth chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. "Consciousness and Transcendence" are big topics which I've considered before. I think Peter Ackroyd was onto something when he proposed to define transcendence in hyphenated fashion": trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The Plato Papers

Naturalized transcendence in the Jamesian vein, as I see it, takes us beyond our personal end and links us to life's great trans-generational chain. "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain," James said in Varieties of Religious Experience. 

And in Pragmatism James said our really vital question is: "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

For those questions and that vision of life to vitalize ours, we must have moved beyond our mortal end. We must have come to see our own consciousness as in some important sense continuous with that of trans-temporal humanity. We move beyond our finite span of years when we begin deeply to care about the life-world beyond them... (continues)