Transcendence Act 4: A Teleological Complaint

It is in the midst of all this that a formal complaint should be set forth. These fundamental restrictions in the progression of thought walk hand in hand with philosophical development in epistemological history. That is to say, in the most obvious and general sense, that one can glean from the progression of thought the sense of a grand narrative. The supremacy of an “integral reality” forces one to reflect on the way in which the human psyche and philosophical inquiry has seemingly progressed from a state of high transcendental efficacy to a one that is almost devoid completely of it. It is clear, in the progression of human thought, that there are movements away from high transcendental paradigms. This occurs broadly, in a progression: from the mythical, to Platonic thinking, to the Christian thinkers, eventually to the Cartesian Cogito, to the Enlightenment, and presently into an “integral reality.” Thus the complaint: the anthropical nature of a post-enlightenment teleology should in no way lead to the conclusion that teleology itself is dead; though humanity has seemingly “evolved” from a status of lofty and incorrigible transcendental chains, the current interim epistemological king, Scientificity, has masqueraded a type of intellectual libertarianism, the idea which tells the world it actually exists apart from a contingent reality and is explainable within itself, and has caused the negligence of the possibility of any transcendental element in human thinking. On this Baudrillard says, “[i]f, in the past, the world reached toward transcendence, and if, in the process, it fell into other hinterworlds, it has today fallen into reality” (Fringes 25). It is not that humanity has knocked the feet out from under a teleological or even transcendental reality, but the abstraction of Christian thought and the subtraction of a transcendental paradigm have merely replaced the teleological function of service to the will of God.
So, it is that humanity’s purpose, in the post-enlightenment age, is to no longer serve God, but it is to serve the self – High Humanism. The subject has taken up not only the seat of discourse but also the seat of deity. The humanist glorification of the subjective creative ability has left the mind to its own egotism causing itself to become the teleological center of its existence. While Nietzschean thought screams that God is dead and leaves the door wide open for an ebb and flow chaos of a world devoid of transcendent power, the effects can only be seen as a call for permissible appropriation of human deification. In that sense, science and the ability of philosophy to subtract god from a “given” equation of truth has not necessarily executed Him, but rather God, in the post-enlightenment human psyche, is truly alive and well; God cannot be extracted from the human thought process – only His attributes may be shifted. One might say that God is dead, but what that truly means is that the human is now God.