Transcendence, Genealogy and Reinscription

Abstract

Professor Barabas has argued in a very rich and useful discussion that we cannot understand what it would mean to ‘transcend the human’ in terms of prudence or practical wisdom for, in such terms, the ideal would be simply an unbroken string of satisfactions which would finally be quite boring. She has also argued that if we understand transcendence in terms of the ethical — at least from Kant’s point of view — we will be committed to a ‘hierarchically structured dualism’; but ‘few…would be willing to assert the independence and absolute value of the noumenal domain’ (p. 227). I am in broad agreement with her on these two points.¹ In fact, I have argued in some detail that the early Wittgenstein’s own views fall prey to the same sort of argument that she develops in Kant’s case.²