Rethinking Transcendence: Towards a Generative Relational Theory of Divinity

Neural systems acquire structure, memory and functional differentiation under local rules alone, and the observation invites an inference: that the central institutions by which human communities coordinate belief are historical contingencies which a sufficiently distributed arrangement could dispense with. This paper argues that the inference fails. The self-organizing systems ordinarily adduced presuppose a lawgiver, since the rules under which they organize are fixed exogenously and the elements obeying those rules lack the standing to revise them. Human communities generate the constraints under which they live without such a source and without inductive warrant, and their central institutions are read here as provisional stabilizations of belief under finite rationality. A second obstacle, and the point from which the inquiry began, holds that a subject requires an other standing in the place of a power exceeding the subject itself, upon which its own subjecthood is witnessed. The paper proposes that what recurs across history is the reification of a generative constraint, of which concentration in a distinguished carrier is one form, and offers as an open hypothesis, stated together with the observations that would refute it, that such constraints recur through a succession of carriers, among which the forms human civilizations have called divinity are to be counted. A criterion is proposed for distinguishing a carrier that bears trans-subjectivity from one that has appropriated it: whether the revision of the constraint it carries remains open to the relations that generate it.