Introduction: Appropriating ‘Transcendence’

Abstract

We cannot take for granted our ability to appropriate the word ‘transcendence’ in our common discourse, if only because we may not have a common discourse for this concept. Words may slide, slip and lose their hold, so that a time may come when it is better to let them go lest further damage is caused. There is an irony in a situation in which intellectuals think of themselves as the guardians of sense. What if the perilous state of the concept of transcendence has to do, in part, at least, with what we, as intellectuals, have made of it? It is not my intention, in this introduction, to answer that question one way or another, but one cannot read the papers in this collection without being confronted by it.