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Transcendence for Beginners
Transcendence for Beginners examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Clare Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle's place as one of our most innovative thinkers.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
181 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 11, 2025
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About the author
Clare Carlisle
17 books63 followersClare Carlisle is a British philosopher and biographer. She is the author of books on Baruch Spinoza, Søren Kierkegaard, and George Eliot. She was born in Manchester in 1977. She studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge between 1995 and 2002. She is a professor at King's College London. In 2024 she gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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January 14, 2026Clare Carlisle is a philosopher and a biographer. At first glance, these two occupations (or possibly callings) seem close to each other. But effectively they are almost opposite to each other. As Claire points out in the book, a philosopher is trying to look for an abstract, for some sort of generalities in the universe and in a human nature; at the same time a biographer is dealing with a unique specificity of an individual lived experience. So it seems challenging to combine these two things together. This book is an attempt to describe how Clare tends to work through these contradictions. In a quiet, elegant prose, she weaves together her personal experience, a bit of metaphysics (aforementioned ‘transcendence’) and what constitutes the art and craft of a good biography.
In dealing with philosophy, she is attracted to the elements that unite and contrast Spinoza, Hinduism and a bit of Christian metaphysics of Kierkegaard’s flavour. For me it was a quite well known territory. But i guess it might be of interest for ‘beginners’ who want to look at the questions of ‘what out there?’ in a way that differs from monotheistic religions.
I was more attracted to meta-biographical element. Clare has written biographies of Spinoza, Kierkegaard and George Elliot. I have not yet read those, but I’ve been reading quite a few biographies recently. As a result i’ve become genially fascinated with the choices a biographer has to make in her writing and her possible working processes. This essay has generally confirmed some of my intuitions. However, it contains a lot of interesting insights. This passage is an incisive and beautiful representation of this thread of the book:
It is a brilliant observation that this narrative arc is close to impossible to ‘even glimpse from inside’. (I personally think it is a good thing). So i wonder how it would impact self-knowledge of a biographer. She addresses this question to an extent by finding a great analogy. She compares writing a biography to ‘devotion of a spouse ..dealing with the ways they resist, annoy, disappoint, challenge and elude you’ that is is ‘bound to leave you changed, even as you move on’. I would speculate that it also leaves the biographer with the realisation of existence of their own finite ‘arc’ or maybe - a desire to make it more pronounced; to leave more visible trace. But it is just my speculation.
I haven’t been familiar with the concept of ‘kalon’ before reading this essay. It is an aesthetically pleasing, almost visual idea that gives a meaning to a life lived. I guess searching for this kalon from the perspective of a biographer can be compared to trying to find a pattern or assemble a dominate story while looking at a huge painting, especially an abstract one. To create a narrative... This implies that some elements of that narrative would be up to the biographer’s to choose. This brings us back to the question how reliable this narrative could possibly be. What if a desire of showing a ‘kalon’ starts to influence the completeness of facts chosen to represent a life? The author is of course aware of this:‘minimizing the constant risk of lapsing into untruth, the biographer runs into the deep question of the truth of a life.’ It is a hard work considering the sheer amount of ‘traces’ one can find; or alternatively, for some less documented life: the sheer amount of gaps. Some biographers then tend to close those gaps with their own imagination and start to write pure fiction. Often it happens that they switch to using a 'purplish' type of prose with sentences like "Imagine a man aged thirty in a brown jacket with dissolved hair walking on a Left Bank in Paris'. And it goes on in this dreamy but often that that well 'imagined' world. I am personally quite weary when it happens. My main concern is usually the question of stylistic unity even more than realism of the writer’s assumptions for those gaps. But inevitably, it also might bring some ethical dimension to deal with.
I've recently read Finding Time Again and thinking of these issues has reminded me of Proust's insight about writing:
In the ideal world, a biographer should be close this image of Proust's translator as well, 'interpreting' and representing a life in all its complexity for other people to be able to understand. But it would be an ideal world. A biographer is two steps more removed compared to a writer: firstly, she is 'outside' while the writer 'just' needs to 'translate' his interiority into language; and secondly, more prosaically she is removed in space, and more crucially in time.
In one of those unexpected coincidences, at the end of the book Claire described her visit to a Scottish island to re-read exactly this volume of Proust among other things. While reading the book, she hoped to reach a few Proustian 'Madeline cake' moments. But she did not at all: This didn't happen to me; perhaps it never happened to Proust either. Instead, she picks up an image by Proust. In the last part of the volume he imagined a human life 'as though men were perched upon living stilts which keep on growing, reaching the height of church-towers, until walking becomes difficult and dangerous and, at last they fall.' I guess it is left for the biographer then to walk around the debris after the fall and pick up the remaining pieces.
For quite some time now, when i read a book of a fiction, i am interested to have a glimpse into the writer’s mind through the text. I want to catch a spark of that illusive singularity, really existing or have existed before, to which otherwise i would never have a direct access to. I’ve mentioned this in my previous reviews, so i apologise for repeating this here again. However, while reading a biography, the effect almost doubles: it applies to the subject; but even more so: to the biographer. It might sound counterintuitive as one might think a good biography should aim for objectivity, so the biographer should minimise her presence. It might be true, to an extent. But for me a good biography is the one when i can feel the presence of a person writing it; i can evidence the conversation between the writer and her subject. But it has to be done very skilfully without the writer overshadowing the subject.
Claire of course is familiar with this dilemma: As portraitist or biographer you are always there: making choices, asking questions, drawing lines. Is it better–more truthful–to show your hand and eye at work, or to efface yourself as much as possible?’ It seems after having written three lives, she still does not have a categoric answer to this question. This absence of a single algorithm makes the best biographical writing as a form of art. I also think best biography leaves a lot of space for the subject’s own unmediated words be it letters, diaries, memories or anything else of a kind.
Coming back to this book, it of course ‘transcends’ a single subject matter and connects many points forming its own castellations. Claire brings up a lot of writers and philosophers in her musings (from Plato to Proust, etc). She also records the stories of interactions between spiritual teachings of East and West and the characters involved. But the text never creates an impression of being too didactic or too academic on the other hand. The style is conversational in a good sense of this word. This is an achievement in writing about philosophy.
I am risking here to be wrong, but it seemed to me her favourite bio subject so far has been George Eliot. Elliot’s concept of ‘diffusive little life’ would stay with me. Claire’s brings up Elliot’s advice to her friend: ‘See how diffusive your one little life may be…. One lives by faith in human goodness, the only guarantee that there can be any other sort of goodness in the universe.’ Intuitively this concept of ‘little life’ was germinating somewhere in my subconscious for quiet some time. That might explain my recent interest in reading memoirs. diaries or biographies of ‘ordinary’ people. The one of the most poignant reading experiences of the recent years was Aug 9 - Fog. It a tiny book, a simple diary of an unknown old woman found by the author at an antique fair and lightly edited. I could not quite point out what attracted me to these literary objects. But this idea of a person ‘diffusing’ good things that might have passed totally unrecognised is a very poignant one. I want to believe that multitude of those ‘good things’ shape the future or at least impacts it somehow. Of course there are ‘bad things’ to consider as well. But that is another story.
After reading this book, the finale of Middlemarch has become much more than a set of a fanciful words for me. It might sound pathetic from 'outside', but it has become deeply felt:
In dealing with philosophy, she is attracted to the elements that unite and contrast Spinoza, Hinduism and a bit of Christian metaphysics of Kierkegaard’s flavour. For me it was a quite well known territory. But i guess it might be of interest for ‘beginners’ who want to look at the questions of ‘what out there?’ in a way that differs from monotheistic religions.
I was more attracted to meta-biographical element. Clare has written biographies of Spinoza, Kierkegaard and George Elliot. I have not yet read those, but I’ve been reading quite a few biographies recently. As a result i’ve become genially fascinated with the choices a biographer has to make in her writing and her possible working processes. This essay has generally confirmed some of my intuitions. However, it contains a lot of interesting insights. This passage is an incisive and beautiful representation of this thread of the book:
Greeks included human lives among the things they called kalon: the quality of radiant beauty or nobility that belongs only to things that appear. And biography is only possible because lives leave traces of their appearance. The biographer gathers up these traces and turns them into a story, narrates them as a whole in order to bring into view the life’s arc, from beginning to end, which seems so hard to grasp or even to glimpse from the inside. This is the artistic or aesthetic element of biography: uncovering a life’s shape, and perhaps its kalon qualities.
It is a brilliant observation that this narrative arc is close to impossible to ‘even glimpse from inside’. (I personally think it is a good thing). So i wonder how it would impact self-knowledge of a biographer. She addresses this question to an extent by finding a great analogy. She compares writing a biography to ‘devotion of a spouse ..dealing with the ways they resist, annoy, disappoint, challenge and elude you’ that is is ‘bound to leave you changed, even as you move on’. I would speculate that it also leaves the biographer with the realisation of existence of their own finite ‘arc’ or maybe - a desire to make it more pronounced; to leave more visible trace. But it is just my speculation.
I haven’t been familiar with the concept of ‘kalon’ before reading this essay. It is an aesthetically pleasing, almost visual idea that gives a meaning to a life lived. I guess searching for this kalon from the perspective of a biographer can be compared to trying to find a pattern or assemble a dominate story while looking at a huge painting, especially an abstract one. To create a narrative... This implies that some elements of that narrative would be up to the biographer’s to choose. This brings us back to the question how reliable this narrative could possibly be. What if a desire of showing a ‘kalon’ starts to influence the completeness of facts chosen to represent a life? The author is of course aware of this:‘minimizing the constant risk of lapsing into untruth, the biographer runs into the deep question of the truth of a life.’ It is a hard work considering the sheer amount of ‘traces’ one can find; or alternatively, for some less documented life: the sheer amount of gaps. Some biographers then tend to close those gaps with their own imagination and start to write pure fiction. Often it happens that they switch to using a 'purplish' type of prose with sentences like "Imagine a man aged thirty in a brown jacket with dissolved hair walking on a Left Bank in Paris'. And it goes on in this dreamy but often that that well 'imagined' world. I am personally quite weary when it happens. My main concern is usually the question of stylistic unity even more than realism of the writer’s assumptions for those gaps. But inevitably, it also might bring some ethical dimension to deal with.
I've recently read Finding Time Again and thinking of these issues has reminded me of Proust's insight about writing:
I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer's task and duty are those of a translator.’
In the ideal world, a biographer should be close this image of Proust's translator as well, 'interpreting' and representing a life in all its complexity for other people to be able to understand. But it would be an ideal world. A biographer is two steps more removed compared to a writer: firstly, she is 'outside' while the writer 'just' needs to 'translate' his interiority into language; and secondly, more prosaically she is removed in space, and more crucially in time.
In one of those unexpected coincidences, at the end of the book Claire described her visit to a Scottish island to re-read exactly this volume of Proust among other things. While reading the book, she hoped to reach a few Proustian 'Madeline cake' moments. But she did not at all: This didn't happen to me; perhaps it never happened to Proust either. Instead, she picks up an image by Proust. In the last part of the volume he imagined a human life 'as though men were perched upon living stilts which keep on growing, reaching the height of church-towers, until walking becomes difficult and dangerous and, at last they fall.' I guess it is left for the biographer then to walk around the debris after the fall and pick up the remaining pieces.
For quite some time now, when i read a book of a fiction, i am interested to have a glimpse into the writer’s mind through the text. I want to catch a spark of that illusive singularity, really existing or have existed before, to which otherwise i would never have a direct access to. I’ve mentioned this in my previous reviews, so i apologise for repeating this here again. However, while reading a biography, the effect almost doubles: it applies to the subject; but even more so: to the biographer. It might sound counterintuitive as one might think a good biography should aim for objectivity, so the biographer should minimise her presence. It might be true, to an extent. But for me a good biography is the one when i can feel the presence of a person writing it; i can evidence the conversation between the writer and her subject. But it has to be done very skilfully without the writer overshadowing the subject.
Claire of course is familiar with this dilemma: As portraitist or biographer you are always there: making choices, asking questions, drawing lines. Is it better–more truthful–to show your hand and eye at work, or to efface yourself as much as possible?’ It seems after having written three lives, she still does not have a categoric answer to this question. This absence of a single algorithm makes the best biographical writing as a form of art. I also think best biography leaves a lot of space for the subject’s own unmediated words be it letters, diaries, memories or anything else of a kind.
Coming back to this book, it of course ‘transcends’ a single subject matter and connects many points forming its own castellations. Claire brings up a lot of writers and philosophers in her musings (from Plato to Proust, etc). She also records the stories of interactions between spiritual teachings of East and West and the characters involved. But the text never creates an impression of being too didactic or too academic on the other hand. The style is conversational in a good sense of this word. This is an achievement in writing about philosophy.
I am risking here to be wrong, but it seemed to me her favourite bio subject so far has been George Eliot. Elliot’s concept of ‘diffusive little life’ would stay with me. Claire’s brings up Elliot’s advice to her friend: ‘See how diffusive your one little life may be…. One lives by faith in human goodness, the only guarantee that there can be any other sort of goodness in the universe.’ Intuitively this concept of ‘little life’ was germinating somewhere in my subconscious for quiet some time. That might explain my recent interest in reading memoirs. diaries or biographies of ‘ordinary’ people. The one of the most poignant reading experiences of the recent years was Aug 9 - Fog. It a tiny book, a simple diary of an unknown old woman found by the author at an antique fair and lightly edited. I could not quite point out what attracted me to these literary objects. But this idea of a person ‘diffusing’ good things that might have passed totally unrecognised is a very poignant one. I want to believe that multitude of those ‘good things’ shape the future or at least impacts it somehow. Of course there are ‘bad things’ to consider as well. But that is another story.
After reading this book, the finale of Middlemarch has become much more than a set of a fanciful words for me. It might sound pathetic from 'outside', but it has become deeply felt:
Dorothea has added goodness to the world, though it is impossible to say exactly how. Her acts are not widely visible, unhistoric, undocumented, and they end in doubled obscurity – an unvisited tomb. Her life is literally hidden away, buried underground. All that endures is an incalculable, indeed unverifiable, truth: that some other lives are not so bad as they might have been.
October 9, 2025
Honestly, I will just never tire of hearing Clare Carlisle talk about Spinoza and Kierkegaard and George Eliot, or literally anything else
November 7, 2025
I found this a rich and inviting book of reflections using examples from a broad section of cultural vantage points. She has an accessible style that welcomes you in... from Proust to Plato, from George Eliot to Baruch Spinoza. It's about finding a spirit of transcendence, hard to explain, but she has some good examples. She also looks back at her own formative experiences in the Himalayas and the insights she gained from it. It also has fueled my interest in reading the Spinoza biography I have coming up soon.
November 11, 2025
Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the E-ARC. I had never read anything by this author previously but the subject matter really intrigued me and I was very pleasantly surprised. This is a philosophical take on life and looks at life through a number of different masks. The authors use of George Eliot's writing as a comparator to some of the historical philosophers positions was particularly interesting to me as a huge George Eliot fan. The descriptions of Indian pilgrimages and religious teachings was also incredibly well done. I could have read quite a few more chapters in all honesty. Will definitely look out for this author's work in future.
January 12, 2026
I was making a cheese sauce listening to this on audiobook, and then it abruptly ended and there's me weeping into the cheese sauce which nonetheless (perhaps as a result) slapped. The next day I went out and bought a copy in Foyles with a book voucher and have since re-read two chapters. I'll maybe actually read Spinoza now.
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November 19, 2025被开头的故事深深吸引，但看到后面没有什么感触。可能没咋读过Kierkegaard, George Eliot, Proust, 跟Spinoza还不是beginner…
December 11, 2025
4.5 - This is one of those books that you read and immediately know it will change the course of your life. My favourite kind of writing: clear, inquisitive and inviting.
January 5, 2026
Transcendence for Beginners isn't much about transcendence and it's definitely not for beginners. Carlisle's opening story about encountering an inexplicably "noble" hermit in a remote mountain cave in India is very intriguing and I could have happily read a book all about that story, but instead she uses it as a tenuous link to her upcoming Gifford Lecture at St Andrews University, and then somehow as an excuse to write a lengthy addendum to her George Eliot biography. She goes as far to offer some specific literary analysis of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, which is only interesting if you're interested in those particular books (I am not). There are some interesting ideas about the concept of a 'milieu' (in my understanding, one's unique environment and consequential worldview) and the act of writing biographies, but the nebulous concept of 'transcendence' is never clearly defined, or even discussed explicitly. The blurb calls it "intellectually stimulating", which is a warning that much of this short book is baffling to those less familiar with philosophy - no fault of Carlisle, I just need to brush up on telling my epistemology from my ontology.
Much more enjoyable than the long George Eliot tangents were the final two chapters, the first of which presents the mystery and beauty of Ramana Maharshi, who aged 16 left his home to devote the rest of his life to worship a sacred mountain called Arunachala. Ramana's extraordinary devoutness and almost supernatural aura of calm and serenity was fascinating, and Carlisle did well to point out how Western explorers tended to visit him like a zoo animal and relay his teachings through a colonialist lens - she recognises that she is a new commentator in a long line of Western commentators on Eastern spirituality. This transitions into an elegant chapter on devotion, in which Carlisle attempts to distinguish the concept from habit, addition or routine. I'm glad I read Transcendence for Beginners for these two chapters. For the rest of it, I'm both not smart enough for it and not sufficiently interested heavyweight Victorian literature.
Much more enjoyable than the long George Eliot tangents were the final two chapters, the first of which presents the mystery and beauty of Ramana Maharshi, who aged 16 left his home to devote the rest of his life to worship a sacred mountain called Arunachala. Ramana's extraordinary devoutness and almost supernatural aura of calm and serenity was fascinating, and Carlisle did well to point out how Western explorers tended to visit him like a zoo animal and relay his teachings through a colonialist lens - she recognises that she is a new commentator in a long line of Western commentators on Eastern spirituality. This transitions into an elegant chapter on devotion, in which Carlisle attempts to distinguish the concept from habit, addition or routine. I'm glad I read Transcendence for Beginners for these two chapters. For the rest of it, I'm both not smart enough for it and not sufficiently interested heavyweight Victorian literature.
November 21, 2025
“And in writing as in life, linearity combines with complexity. On the one hand, the line of writing is unidirectional. It only moves forwards. On the other hand - yet at the same time - it loops, folds, gathers, knots, stitches itself together, forming layers. For example, a recurring metaphor, a rhyme, or a repeated word tacks one point in the line to another. Life shares this double character. It flows irrevocably in one direction: sooner or later (it's taken me many years) we learn that we cannot travel back in time. […] The line of writing, like the line of living, has an intermittent and rhythmic quality.” I really enjoyed Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners, which is based on a series of lectures in which life writing is a jumping-off point to think about philosophy, transcendence, meaning-making and so on. Steeped in Carlisle’s own experience as a biographer of George Eliot and Søren Kierkegaard, as well as drawing from her own life, this is a beautifully probing work that renders thoughtful philosophising relatively accessible and human. Carlisle’s lectures are brimming with luminous insights into life and writing as well as life writing: “The best I can do, if I write, is try to write truthfully”; “Writing a life or painting a portrait only exhibits the gift of time, as precious as it is commonplace, that we offer one another every day. These gifts are a communion of souls.” I love what she has to say about devotion and grief: “Devotion and loss are two sides of the proverbial coin. They both express love. They are so deeply part of human experience that it is difficult to imagine a life lived without them.” And I really enjoyed a brief cameo from one of my favourite painters, Celia Paul: “These paintings, quiet yet full of feeling, document Paul's search for the truth of a human life - and they find beauty in this search, even when it involves loneliness, sadness and loss.”
January 7, 2026
There’s something so fun to me about reading someone explaining an idea/person they know insanely well that I didn’t know existed, and just immersing myself in their passion and fervour. When it’s combined with a form I love - biography - it’s double the fun. I hadn’t really put a huge amount of thought into the philosophy of life-writing, but here we are. Even using the concept of life-writing, rather than biography, to describe the genre is fascinating to me.
It follows an idea I’m really interested in, and that’s the role of the artist in the choice of subject matter of art. Of a horizon hundreds of miles wide, where do you place the four walls of the canvas? Can we go further, and ask if there is choice in the matter, and if there is, how can it be justified? When you write a biography, or a tale of someone’s whole life (like Eliot, Proust, Dickens etc) what parts you hone in on, gloss over, expose or hide are, as Carlisle shows, the indicator of the moment the author places themselves in the story.
Being introduced to Spinozan philosophy on God and Nature was fun, and I realised that I’ve actually read loads of books with that viewpoint. Namely, my all time favourite book, Septology by Jon Fosse. In addition, extending the pool of thought to monism and Hindu ocean-of-being concepts. As well as some dabbling in immanence vs transcendence in the context of love.
What’s really enjoyable, is the feeling that throughout this book you’re really part of something - a movement, a development of ideas that is by definition relevant.
Also, fitzcarraldo essays are HOT
It follows an idea I’m really interested in, and that’s the role of the artist in the choice of subject matter of art. Of a horizon hundreds of miles wide, where do you place the four walls of the canvas? Can we go further, and ask if there is choice in the matter, and if there is, how can it be justified? When you write a biography, or a tale of someone’s whole life (like Eliot, Proust, Dickens etc) what parts you hone in on, gloss over, expose or hide are, as Carlisle shows, the indicator of the moment the author places themselves in the story.
Being introduced to Spinozan philosophy on God and Nature was fun, and I realised that I’ve actually read loads of books with that viewpoint. Namely, my all time favourite book, Septology by Jon Fosse. In addition, extending the pool of thought to monism and Hindu ocean-of-being concepts. As well as some dabbling in immanence vs transcendence in the context of love.
What’s really enjoyable, is the feeling that throughout this book you’re really part of something - a movement, a development of ideas that is by definition relevant.
Also, fitzcarraldo essays are HOT
December 14, 2025
Dum curamus eum consequi, et operam damus, ut intellectum in rectam viam redigamus, necesse est vivere.
While we pursue this end, and devote ourselves to bringing the intellect back to the right path, it is necessary to live.
— Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
*
[reading the paperback fitz edition, not listed]
While we pursue this end, and devote ourselves to bringing the intellect back to the right path, it is necessary to live.
— Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
*
[reading the paperback fitz edition, not listed]
January 4, 2026
Beautiful!!!
January 9, 2026
Learning to love was easy; learning to lose what you love is very hard. As is learning to sit still. It helps, I’ve found, to consider yourself a beginner.
December 4, 2025
A work of philosophy, rather than 'self-help' as narrowly defined in bookshops, and as the title would puckishly suggest. Ranging across Spinoza, Kierkegaard, George Eliot and non-Western traditions, this is a wonderful, compelling attempt to answer life's biggest questions. If you have been thinking (and feeling) along similar lines to the author, you will love it; if not, it will at least give you pause.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews