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Transcendence

As a follow-up from indexicalism, I´m thinking more and more in terms of the violence of immanent philosophies been redeemed by some kind of transcendence. Been thinking in terms of how a Kripkean account of proper names made them transcend the immanence of descriptions (and other meaningful gestures towards the referent, like Fregean Sinne supposedly are) and how a transcendental account which is clearly not empirical transcends the immanence of the empirical. This is part of my current project of understanding transcendence in terms of supplement with Derrida and in terms of excess with Bataille. In all those cases, there is an outside that can only make sense from the inside and that cannot be encompassed (put in terms of, reduced, translated, understood as a complement or as something missing) by the inside.

I was rehearsing today the idea that Wettstein formula for the Kripkean revolution in the philosophy of language (in his Magic Prism) can be adapted to be a more or less general formula for transcendence (or exteriority). The motto he proposed for the revolution is: linguistic contact without cognitive contact. Hence, for instance, the external world - or The Great Outdoors - is something we make a contact which is metaphysical, positional or transcending and in some sense lingustic whithout cognitive contact. We can be wrong about our beliefs that, say, everything out there is water and still refer to everything out there. Transcendence requires a lack of cognitive contact in the following general sense: there is no transparency. The external world is not transparent, everyone could be systematically fooled about it - the external world is transcendent if it doesn´t necessarily amount to what eventually will become transparent. If this is right, there is some sort of general internalism about philosophies of immanence, even if there is often much more to them than human cognitive abilities.

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