Transcendentalising the Soteron
Transcendentalising the Soteron
A teaching of Zen is the insistence of “immediate this” and “not separate”. Reflecting on this, I cobbled together some thoughts on the present world situation. I called it ‘transcendentalising the Soteron” in a somewhat glib reference to the phrase “immanentising the Eschaton” which is often used as a kind of “don’t meddle with the powers that be, established order, don’t interfere with ’destiny’” . I don’t even think Soteron is an actual word (soter means ”save, or saviour”). I made it up. Buddhism is soterological, but the saviour and saving is not merely, or even mainly, transcendental. Reality is viewed as sacred. But it insists (in my understanding) ‘right here, right now, not separate’. So here goes....
The act of understanding history and change is itself inseparable from history and change. The historian, or the theorist cannot stand outside of the actual world of history and change. A purely objective view, and a logic that presumes a purely objective view is extremely practical. But it can only justify itself by appealing to some other greater universal as a predicate (and thus shifting the base for rationality and practicality paradoxically onto an unjustifiable and irrational presumption – or subsumption).
Whatever way we as humans are thinking, if it points beyond the real world, it diminishes the real. It is not that the world can be exhaustively explained by science. Not at all. Science itself explains the objective world. The actual, or real world is a reality prior to all objectifying and hence, subjectifying. It is literally empty of all such designations of discursive thinking because it is prior to them, as well as inclusive of them.
A paradox. Subject and object arise together from what is neither. They explain their respective fields in their own terms without being able to grasp the totality of their context in those terms; hence, the dialectic nature of the progress and development of understanding. It is a progress from limited to widening vistas of discursive understanding. What is important to insist though is the practical nature of discursive thinking and understanding. If this understanding is ever removed (or falsely taken as if it is removed) from the base reality which in itself is impervious to discursive understanding, it is like a single tongue of flame separated from the fire and it’s fuel.
The objective views of history and the movement and struggles of history have largely, if not completely, concerned themselves with humans and human society as if they were separated by an immense gulf in hierarchy and priority over the rest of the natural world and the environment. The very act of objectifying “history” is itself dependent on the living present of the Earth/Nature of which humanity is a feature. A truly progressive way of understanding ‘the world’ is one in which appreciation of the context is ever widening in circles of inclusion.
If the ancients (some of them) placed all important activity in a transcendental realm of the gods or God, or Heaven and thus divested the actual Earth of any real significance as either ‘damaged goods’ (the valley of tears, the fallen realm) or dead matter, (the realm of death) then the breaking through of such transcendentalisation returned (or exposed) the significance to the world of human society and the power relations within. That could be seen as widening awareness away from a ‘far far beyond’ into the dynamism of actual human interaction.
Now, for decades we have been aware that the matrix of life which predicates human life is threatened by the activities of humanity. Therefore we can no longer confine ourselves to thinking within the abstractions (in which we limit our appreciation of the real) of the merely human world of states, countries, economies, even classes. These too are abstractions and limitations. If a forest fire bursts through and burns through a city, if a tidal surge submerges a coastline, if a plague rips through entire populations, then the abstract divisions of the human world are revealed to be mirages. To return to the analogy, they are single tongues of flame.