Dependence as Transcendence

A critique of American thought and life

For me and my fellow native-born Americans, woven deep into our affections and our understanding of ourselves and others is that independence is the mark of a life fully worth living.¹ It is the kind of life we are supposed to want if we want what is best for ourselves, and it is the kind of life we should want for our children if we want what is best for them. To the extent we are independent, we are living fully.

On one level, and in a very real sense, there is something good and right about wanting independence for ourselves and for those we love. A man or woman who has always had the potential to strike out, to build something, to blossom and to flourish through the development and application of all the talents they possess but who, because they have been infantilized by those entrusted with their care, because they have been rendered pathologically dependent on their parents by a combination of effort and neglect from the side of those very parents, never strike out, never build something, never blossom and flourish. Such is a sad life, a wasted life, a life not fully lived; and those of us who love ourselves and others, we do not want this for ourselves or for others. For ourselves and those we love, we want the independence that the the sort of life sketched above lacks.

But in another way and on other, perhaps even deeper levels, to desire complete independence—from others, from the things and workings of our world—is a mark of malignancy, a feeling and a thought that is perniciously false and that places us at variance with the very constitution of ourselves and of the world. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in his book Dependent Rational Animals,² we are essentially such, intrinsically such, as to be dependent—on others, on our world. This is most clear at the earliest and last phases of our lives on this earth, in our dependence on others at the dawn of our lives, as infants and children, and then, many decades later, our increasing dependence on others in the evening of our lives, as elders in our respective communities. Our dependence is made clear, too, during times of infirmity and personal crisis, where we must rely on others for help lest we flounder or perish. Even our very existence is not our own: at all times, and everywhere we go, we are dependent on the air we breath, dependent on the order of the world remaining conducive to our continuation in life, and even dependent on others around us: a landslide, a collapsing roof, a distracted driver, or even an unknown heart arrythmia could all end our lives instantly, and without any say from us about it. Every level of our being is marked by dependence. Still, we as Americans will look at all these instances where our dependence is made clear, wherein our dependence as limited creatures, as existentially dependent beings, is made manifest and feel—even if they won’t say—that these are signs of imperfection, that in the final analysis they are undesirable and that it would be better if we were not so dependent at all—hence our practiced disregard for children and childhood (while longing to return to it!), and hence our utter disdain for our elders.

But are we right to so disdain our utter dependence as intrinsically dependent beings? Do we really not have in our dependence what we long for? Do we not find in our utter dependence precisely what we seek in our seeking after independence? Consider: what does it mean for us to be independent? Or, rather, what is it that we are getting, what is it that we are achieving—or, what is that we are receiving—when we find ourselves such that we would call ourselves “independent?” If any of us are independent, we can do what we want and when we want to do it; we can strike out on this or that adventure, find our way into this or that field, this or that endeavor. That is, we can move, go, or proceed beyond where or how we previously found ourselves into a new kind of activity, a different set of experiences, a way of life previously unknown to us concretely and personally. Independence, then, is the actual ability to move beyond something—a state, set of experiences, way of life—into another. In short, independence actualized is transcendence—transcendence of a previous state and transcendence toward another; transcendence of a set of experiences and toward another; and transcendence of a way of life, one already known, toward a way of life not yet known—and ever on and on. To be dependent would seem to entail a lack of transcendence, and the more one is independent, the greater the transcendence he knows: Even some independently wealthy who has become complacent, dependent on his or her environment and way of life remaining the same, and whose adventurous spirit and openness to change has died—such a person we would say is losing their independence in key ways; they have begun, slowly perhaps but truly, to die.

If it is true that it is precisely transcendence and the active power thereof that, whether we name it thus or not, is what we take as the essential mark of independence, and that it is precisely active transcendence that we seek in what we would term “independence,” then we are quite wrong in denying that we are dependent when truly independent, and we are wrong for disdaining those times when our dependence as intrinsically dependent creatures is felt or revealed most acutely. For in any act or experience of transcendence, it is precisely the movement from a set of circumstances into another that marks that transcendence, which mean that, in one’s life and form of life, one moves from being dependent on one set of circumstances to being dependent on another: If I am truly independent in the ways that I and my fellow Americans would wish, I am able to move from one set of relations of dependence on one set of things and one set of people—in a job, the community in which I live, or the things I use to work out my life—to another set entirely. It is not, then, that dependence and independence are for us humans mutually exclusive, but rather that the latter serves as a term for a greater degree of the former: to the extent that I am said to be dependent is the extent to which I am un able to be dependent on all that I may depend on in this life. The goal, then, that we pursue, is not less dependence but more—whether we recognize this or not.

We can, however, go further, deeper. For dependence always and already just is transcendence. We may not recognize it as such for being too busy, too preoccupied with this or that, or bereft of the peace to notice it. But it is true. If I am dependent on you, and to the extent I am dependent on you, I am taken out of what solitariness I have known and come to participate in your life—and you in mine. I am, by that very dependence, drawn out of myself, out of my very being as it has been, to an active encounter and involvement with someone who is not myself, the being of someone whose existence is not my own. This is true of the child dependent on his mother in the womb; of a toddler dependent on her parents for sustenance and care; of the invalid or sick person dependent on nurses, doctors, and loved ones for help and healing; and for the elders among us dependent on those younger than themselves for continued fullness of life. And it is true for all of us from moment to moment: in our dependence on our colleagues, on our spouses, on our friends, and even on all those persons who serve or wait on or help us in banks and restaurants and grocery stores. Each and every experience of dependence just is am experience of transcendence—the very thing we seek, the very thing we seek to secure, in all our strivings after independence.

1. Header image: Anton Otto Fischer, Chase of the Constitution, July 1812 (composition date unknown).

2. A review by John Haldane of which can be found here.