Bid Them Sell My Bones

The quality of being objectively real yet beyond immediate sensory experience applies to all human values and institutions. It could be described as the quality of any whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.

A marriage, for example, is not simply constituted of the man and woman who make it up; it is something larger in which the partners participate and which provides the very meaning of their life together, even though the institution of marriage that binds them is invisible to the senses and all that can be seen is the couple and their actions. Similarly, a sports team is not just a collection of athletes, but a larger entity that provides the ordering structure of their activities as well as the primary object of their fans’ loyalties; when a team becomes a collection of free agents, it often loses, to the fans’ distress, its character as something that transcends the individual players. In the same way, a nation, along with its whole system of common rules and interests, is a larger and more enduring entity than all the people who belong to it. Although its quality as a nation cannot be seen or experienced with the senses, its members do not doubt its reality or its function in establishing the meaningful order of their lives; they are even willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of that larger whole that they cannot see.

The idea of transcendence applies not only to social and moral institutions but to natural categories and socially defined roles such as male, female, child; policeman, priest, President. In belonging to any of these categories the individual partakes of a meaning greater than himself. The very idea of “man”—the largest human class to which we all belong—is not an object of experience. We cannot see “man” anywhere. We see individual human beings. None of those individual human beings is “man,” even though “man” is the essential nature of what human beings are, and, according to the Declaration of Independence, the very source of our rights as individuals. Further, each individual is also “transcendent,” in the sense that his inner self or consciousness cannot be seen or experienced by the senses, yet we know that it exists and is the source of his value as a person.

Though the concept of transcendence is not referred to in ordinary political discussion, it is at the heart of people’s deepest values that underlie all their political concerns—their love of their country and its history, their love for their parents and children and friends, their memories of their home town, their response to nature and art and literature, their belief in justice, or their sense of outrage at some injustice. All those things go beyond the specifics that can be seen, heard, or touched; and without the invisible added element they would fall far short of what they are for us. Transcendence is the matrix of basic allegiances that cannot always be justified in rationalistic terms because the true value of any thing can be known only through participation in that thing, not through mere external observation or manipulation of it.

-Lawrence Auster, What is Transcendence, and Why Does It Matter?