``Why us?---the effete intellectual snobs---because it's our job.'' (CG)
``This is part and parcel of the arrogance that has gotten the human species into such a pickle. It has nothing to do with snobbery. What's our job, to save humanity from itself?'' Ian
No. The role of an intellectual class is to articulate and interpret current events as history, through the cultural lens of all that class can bring to bare on those events---just as writers, artists, musicians, poets have since whenever somebody had the bright idea to make a mask, put it on, declare that all gods and laws are fallen, and play out the tragic consequences---to sing of great events of gods and men in dubious battle, far, far away. Anybody can join the play. Why apologize?
``I think it is [aspiring to transcendence], despite its [postmodernist philosophy's] so-called protests to the contrary...''
``Well the burden's on 'ya. Transcendence of what? Or as Sartre said, `no exit.' '' Ian
The entire genre is devoted to the rescue of meta-physics, as in beyond-material, so it is concerned with rescuing, re-interpreting and re-inventing modes of transcendence of material reality by definition. And of course, No Exit a play, therefore a performance with masks, takes place in Hell, a form of subtended or subservient transcendence, despite Sartre's intention to make it evident that Hell is here, trapped in an endless manage a trois of mutually dependent objectifications. A cultural life is a mode of primary transcendence, that is literally an escape from the material ground of biological evolution.
What I was trying to point out is that we are also engaged in a closely related reaction to many of the same material and cultural forces that seem to drive fundamentalism. We should be aware of that relation, and more of course understand it, and recognize its potential darkness.
Chuck Grimes