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Epiphanies of Transcendence 

Epiphanies are suggestive of transcendence. Michael Morgan (1994, 56f)) points out that Charles Taylor sees a parallel between the epiphanies of art and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the I-Thou epiphany of religious encounter with the divine. Taylor elaborates the idea of epiphanies (1989, 419f, especially 490-93). He sees Post-Romantic and modernist art as oriented to epiphanies, episodes of realization, revelation, or disclosure. Epiphanies and epiphanic art are about a kind of transcendence, about the self coming in touch with that which lies beyond it, a ground or qualitative pre-eminence. Taylor reviews various ways of articulating epiphany in Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989, 419-93). He articulates how God, inserted into this idea of epiphany, fits as a moral source (C. Taylor, 1989, 449-52). Epiphanies can be a way of connecting with spiritual and moral sources through the exercise of the creative imagination: sources may be divine (Taylor), or in the world or nature (Romantics), or in the powers of the imaginative, expressive self (Foucault). These epiphanies are a paradigm case of what Taylor calls recovering contact with moral sources. A special case of this renewed relationship between the self and the moral source is religion and the relation to God, which he sees in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevski. The relationship to art parallels the relationship to religion. The self is oriented in the presence of the inaccessible or sublime, that which captures one’s amazement or awe, for example, when one’s eyes are riveted to a certain painting, and one’s inner emotions are deeply moved by a poem. One is taken beyond oneself, in an experience of transcendence; the experience involves both encounter and revelation. 

After Kant and the Romantics, transcendence meant more than a selfless exposure or reorientation alone, but also a receiving that deeply involves the self, its imagination, its inner resources, its visions and revisions. In this calculus, for religion and art, the self remains autonomous and becomes fulfilled as it opens to the impact of the other. Morgan elaborates through the example of Jewish writer, Martin Buber, on this concept of religious epiphany or I-Thou encounter (M. Morgan, 1994, 60-61). Taylor appreciates (C. Taylor, 1994, 226-29) his use of Buber in relation to his (Taylor’s) concept of epiphany. For Buber, the religious event, revelation, involves a meeting between the self and the divine other, an encounter that depends upon both parties. It is an act of self-affirmation, even as it is a giving over of the self to the other. 

The self is receiver, but it is a receiver, not of a content, a proposition, a truth, but rather of a “Presence, a Presence as Power.” Furthermore, that Presence provides “the inexpressible confirmation of meaning,” a meaning that calls out to be done, to be confirmed by the self in this life and in this world.… This confirmation and this affirmation of God and self in the world are what Taylor calls a “changed stance towards self and world, which doesn’t simply recognize a hitherto occluded good, but rather helps to bring this about.” (Morgan, 1994, 60) 

There entails the emergence of a good in one’s experience. Thus, the concept of transcendence through epiphany, that has currency for artists and poets of the twentieth century, provides a category for us to extend to the transcendence of God. The idea of God as a possible constitutive good should be at least intriguing to some late moderns. Taylor’s historical account of moral ontology incorporates an advocacy of religion and the potential of a transcendent turn to the divine, and in particular, that of the Christian Trinity. Given the language of moral sources, it provides a contemporary moral and cultural discourse for moral sourcing within the divine. As Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 479) notes, an encounter with God can be the epiphany that reveals an “unambiguously good moral source.” Morgan (1994, 63) clarifies: “In Taylor’s terms, practical reasoning about goods can apply to such goods in the religious context. Revelation—the religious epiphany—gives access to the divine.” This is what is involved in the transcendent turn and the recovery of a transcendent divine goodness in relation to moral self-constitution, one which lies beyond human experience (wholly other) and yet engages fully the human moral-cultural sphere. It is a transcendence that provides an encounter beyond one’s relationship to oneself and a space for transformation or transfiguration of the self. 

Definitions of transcendence can become confusing, so there is need for clarification of what I am expressing here, the specific kind of transcendence employed in the argument. There is a type of transcendence that many are attentive to, a horizontal version within the economy of self-articulation and self-interpretation, transcendence in the weak sense—a transcendence-within-immanence. Transcendence of this variety remains a form of intra-mundane and intra-temporal self-transcendence. For example, this is what is attempted in the quest for the beautiful life, living life as a work of art. It is one of the reasons we travel to other countries and cultures. It defines the project of the existing self, the pour-soi, as a dynamic process of transcending what is, by perpetually becoming what is not yet—through a continual re-invention of self and the finessing of one’s style. The emphasis is on becoming something new horizontally within one’s own history, something new and different. This process can involve some aspect of escape from the past and moral law as an impediment to free movement going forward (negative freedom). In order to distinguish the transcendence to which Taylor points, one can see it as transcendence in the strong sense, a radical alterity. This type finds its occasion within an encounter with radical exteriority, the radically transcendent divine other. But it is also punctuated by the incursion of the eternal into the temporal, informed by the descent of transcendence into the historical life of the self (the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God). 

Calvin Schrag (1997, 124-29) points out that strong transcendence stands beyond the economy of the immanent culture-spheres of human life: science, art, morality, and even institutional religion. Yet it is still efficacious within them. It enters the economies of the culture-spheres without being assimilated by any one of them. This strong type of transcendent good provides a stance whereby no one culture-sphere or ideology can gain hegemonic control over such a transcendent good/goodness, or claim a God’s-eye viewpoint. It functions as a principle of restraint; for example, it works against the hegemony of the aesthetic culture sphere. Foucault mistakenly allows the radically transcendent to be assimilated or imploded into the aesthetic culture-sphere. More particularly, the ethical and the religious are absorbed into the aesthetic–producing an ideology of the aesthetic (Terry Eagleton). Human culture-spheres, however, are contingent and in flux, and this strong transcendence has the efficacy of a transcendent horizon of possibilities within those very culture-spheres. Such strong transcendence has the effect of opening up culture spheres to imaginative new possibilities. Charles Taylor believes that this understanding of strong transcendence is critical to one’s best and most robust account of the moral world. 

Moral economics is critical in this discussion: the refusal or resistance of this strong transcendence is a choice to restrict the moral horizon and the moral imagination (to disenchant self, so to speak). It entails refusal of such an epiphany. It is not a neutral decision, but one with serious implications and consequences. This is the choice that Foucault makes. It affects the ability to see the world and the self as good, and produces a crisis of affirmation (C. Taylor, 1989, 448). Taylor illustrates some of the consequences through Dostoyevsky’s (1974) work The Brothers Karamozov. 

One of Dostoyevsky’s central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but the reasons for doing so can be of the highest. In a sense the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape. We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for the world.… Rejecting the world seals one’s sense of its loathsomeness and of one’s own, insofar as one is a part of it. And from this can come only acts of hate and destruction. Dostoyevsky … gives an acute understanding of how loathing and self-loathing, inspired by the very real evils of the world, fuel a projection of evil outward, a polarization between self and the world, where all evil is now seen to reside. This justifies terror, violence, and destruction against the world; indeed this seems to call for it. No one … has given us deeper insight into the spiritual sources of modern terrorism or has shown more clearly how terrorism can be a response to the threat of self-hatred.… The noblest wreak it [destruction] on themselves. The most base destroy others. Although powered by the noblest sense of the injustice of things, this schism is ultimately also the fruit of pride, Dostoyevsky holds. We separate because we don’t want to see ourselves as part of evil; we want to raise ourselves above it. (C. Taylor, 1989, 451-52) 

This makes some sense of the moral dynamics in Foucault’s self-making: closing of oneself to grace, or transcendent goodness, is precisely what is commended in Foucault’s construction of the moral self. There appears to be a provocative link from self-sufficiency to pride to the aesthetics of violence. Foucault is resistant to, and suspicious of any transcendent good, which would inform the constitution of the self, for fear of a hidden will to power. In effect, however, he boxes himself in by restricting the moral horizon in this way, restricting the dynamics, the ways in which transformation of self can occur. It fatally restricts the sources of the self in significant ways. What is needed here is a transfiguration of vision, a transformation of stance towards the world and self: “The world’s being good may now be seen as not … independent of our seeing it as good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 448), as part of a recovery from the crisis of affirmation. This shows the critical importance of the horizon of the self. 

With this concern in mind, Taylor holds out hope for a transcendent turn, hope for a different type of transformation from beyond pure immanent, choice-focused self-invention which brackets the social world and God. Taylor’s critique of Foucault has revealed his lack of openness to discovery of self. It is likely that it is because of the self-restriction of weak transcendence. There is discovery of self within the economy of grace, a discovery and a transformation that offers a different stance towards self and the world. Continuing with his discussion of Dostoyevsky, Charles Taylor (1989) writes:

What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility.… Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. But the miracle comes on us if we accept being part of it. Involved in this is our acceptance of love from others. We become capable of love through being loved; and over against the perverse apostolic succession [of terror and violence] is a grace-dispensing one. Dostoyevsky brings together here a central idea of the Christian tradition, especially evident in the Gospel of John, that people are transformed through being loved by God, a love that they mediate to one another, on the one hand, with the modern notion of a subject who can help to bring on transfiguration through the stance he takes to himself and the world, on the other.… What he [Dostoyevsky] was opposing was that humans affirm their dignity in separation from the world. (C. Taylor, 1989, 452) 

The economy of grace spoken of here is connected to transcendence, to the goodness of a triune God. The love, which is at issue, which works itself out in the economy of loving one’s neighbour, is a love which finds its ultimate motivation and efficiency in love that is freely given. It is a love that loves for the sake of loving; a non-possessive love, a love that loves in spite of being unrequited, a love that expects nothing in return. I recall a lecture by Judith Wolfe of St. Andrew’s University in which she said, “Christian faith is a way of seeing the world which beholds an unseen level of depth of love, goodness, significance which we do not make, but in which we can participate…. Our world is poetic at its core.” This is what I mean by a transcendent turn in outlook. 

~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgrad students and faculty, author, blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.

Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Schrag, C. (1997). The Self After Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.