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Transcendence for Beginners

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Transcendence for Beginners

By: Clare Carlisle
Narrated by: Clare Carlisle
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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.

©2025 Clare Carlisle (P)2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essays Philosophers Professionals & Academics Religious Studies Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

‘A work of thrilling lucidity and substance, on the singularity of lives and the value of life-writing, in which Clare Carlisle shows herself to be the most companionate of thinkers, gifted with uncommon modesty and intellectual grace. A book to read slowly, talk about, savour and learn from.’ — Claire Harman, author of All Sorts of Lives ‘Spanning continents and centuries, traversing mountains and seas, this expansive book asks what it means for a philosopher, or a biographer, to work from life. Carlisle’s beautiful prose fizzes with illuminating questions, stories and, above all, human connections, as she maps out a powerful and moving “philosophy of the heart.”’ — Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife ‘In this elegant, eloquent, elegiac book, Clare Carlisle describes the movements of other lives, as well as those of her own life, that open paths to understanding what it means to live a life of devotion. This is philosophy as rigorously thought, but also as felt and lived. In an era marked by rampant cruelty and selfishness, Transcendence for Beginners offers its readers various modes of the radiant life, one that embraces joy but can also navigate loss and grief in that strange flux of being we call “time.”’ — Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others
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I keep coming back to this book, to the different chapters which I think are different Gifford lectures. They blend a light touch of biography with philosophy - Spinoza in particular - and all the examples of philosophy seem to lean towards religion, which is maybe what transcendence is. And the author reads it so beautifully and at such a perfect pace that I think I’ll listen many more times.

Beautifully read

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