A sociological genealogy of transcendence

Abstract

The aim of this article is to carry out a sociological genealogy of transcendence – understood as a condition of possibility of creativity – articulated from three milestones in its conceptual evolution: The first focuses on the study of the link between transcendence and religiosity in the scenario of primitive societies. We will stop to study how, as Émile Durkheim shows in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in this type of society transcendence acted and was articulated mainly through two types of mechanisms: ritual and collective effervescence. The second milestone is established theoretically on the basis of the analysis of transcendence carried out by Hans Joas, in his work The Power of the Sacred, and by Georg Simmel, in ‘Life as Transcendence’. For the former, transcendence is sacredness that becomes reflexive, while for the latter, transcendence is the essence of social life, and implies an exercise of going beyond oneself. In this second moment in the sociological evolution of transcendence we focus on its reflexive dimension, linked to the fact that, since the emergence of the Axial era (800-200 BC), the subject becomes an object for itself, a problem to which answers must be given, whether in terms of soteriology or truth. The third milestone analyzes what we can call ‘variable geometries of transcendence’, and for its study we take as a reference the typology of transcendences articulated by Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann in their work The Structures of Social Life (vol. 2), which unfolds around three categories: ‘Little Transcendencies’, ‘Medium Transcendencies’ and ‘Great Transcendencies’. In this scenario, the sociological key is provided not so much by the decline of the formulas of religious transcendence, but by the coexistence of different and heterogeneous formulas of transcendence (secular and religious) that struggle to obtain a voice and social recognition in the civil sphere.