Transcendentalism in the 21st Century

Transcendology

 * 1) A study of Transcendentalism.
 * 2) The application of transcendentalism to spirituality.
 * 3) Asserts that truthfulness and rationality in religions are truths that can be substantiated by science or those that can not be proven to be incorrect.
 * 4) A doctrine and proclamation that spiritual transcendence and spiritual interaction, if one believes this to be an actuality, could only be possible between the spiritual existence and the spirit of man.
 * 5) A tenet proclamation that supernatural acts performed by physical or spiritual beings in the physical universe are not capable of existing or transpiring.
 * 6) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
 * 7) A philosophy which holds that reasoning is key to understanding reality (associated with Kant); philosophy which stresses intuition and spirituality (associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson); transcendental character or quality.
 * 8) transcendologist; a movement of writers and philosophers in New England in the 19th Century who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.
 * The spirit of man – consciousness; the vital principle or animating force within living things; a fundamental emotional and activating principle determining one's character; liveliness, life; animation and energy in action or expression; denotes the rational, immortal soul by which man is distinguished. Dr. Lommel (NDE)states “You can call consciousness outside the brain "spirit", if you like, but this can be confusing because not everybody has the same ideas about what exactly "spirit" should be. And there are several "levels" of consciousness, waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, "subconsciousness", collective human consciousness, morphogenetic consciousness, higher consciousness, cosmic consciousness, and Divine consciousness. All these levels of consciousness are interconnected, and available, also during our life in our body”.
 * Spiritual transcendence, spiritual interaction - Spiritual transcendence into a Dimensional beyondness is a concept that was first used by Kierkegaard to convey the idea transcendence. Transcendence is thought of not as spatial distance, but as God's being in a different dimension altogether, or in a different realm of reality, from that in which we exist.
 * A tenet proclamation in Transcendology that supernatural acts performed by physical or spiritual beings in the physical universe are not capable of existing or transpiring…and the doctrine and proclamation that spiritual transcendence and spiritual interaction, if one believes this to be an actuality, could only be possible between the spiritual existence and the spirit of man…are based on rational certainty and the knowledge that the contrary would violate the laws of nature.
 * Kant sharply distinguishes opinion, belief, and knowledge, the three "modes of holding-to-be-true", three kinds of judgment "through which something is presented as true". Knowledge is the strongest mode of judgment of truth and is apodeictic: "what I know, I hold to be apodeictically certain, i.e. to be universally and objectively certain", although Kant suggests that we can make this judgment about "a mere empirical truth". [L:78] This kind of knowledge--"or certainty"--is a judgment of truth by on "a cognitive ground that is both objectively and subjectively sufficient". There are two kinds of knowledge (certainty), empirical and rational. Rational certainty is mathematical (in which case it is intuitive certainty) or discursive; all rational certainty is apodeictic. By contrast, "empirical certainty" is not apodeictic (And thus not, strictly speaking, knowledge?) but assertoric. Kant comments, "we cannot have rational certainty of everything, but where we can have it, we must prefer it to the empirical". [A320/B377]
 * In the Critique, Kant's first definition of knowledge--as "objective perception"--occurs early in the Dialectic. Kant gives this "definition" in the midst of an appeal not to use the term `idea' loosely, but to follow his terminology for the various kinds of representations; the passage rather confusingly invokes many earlier distinctions. Kant writes: "The genus is representation in general. Subordinate to it stands representation with consciousness. A perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation, an objective perception is knowledge. This is either intuition or concept, the concept is either an empirical or a pure concept". [A822/B850] Much later in the Dialectic Kant speaks of knowledge in the terms of the Logic, writing "the holding of a thing to be true...has the following three degrees: opining, believing, and knowing....when the holding of a thing to be true is sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is knowledge....Objective sufficiency is termed certainty". Presumably the "empirical knowledge"--experience--discussed in the Aesthetic and Analytic is different from this, which Kant characterizes (and then presumably goes on to critique) as "the transcendental employment of reason". In the Deduction in B, Kant speaks of the understanding as "the faculty of knowledge"--presumably empirical knowledge of appearances. "This knowledge consists in the determinate relation of given representations to an object; and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united", suggesting, as he does later, a coherence theory of (the nature of) truth. Of course, there is no kind of this knowledge beyond experience.

Metaphysics of Transcedentalism

 * Used by Kant in many senses:
 * to refer to a type of philosophy, to a type of deduction, to a type of exposition,
 * to types of idealism and realism,
 * to "content",
 * to a way of employing the faculties of the mind,
 * to the unity of apperception, to different types of proofs,
 * to a type of reflection,
 * to a special unknown "transcendental object = x",
 * to a type of truth,
 * to a type of knowledge,
 * to a type of reflection,
 * to a type of illusion,
 * to subjects(selves),
 * to certain ideas,
 * to a sort of negation,
 * to principles,
 * to a kind of theology,
 * to a type of hypothesis--not to mention the term's use in contrast to empirical, transcendent, etc.

Nevertheless, Kant did hazard some general comments about the meaning of the term. In the Introduction, he writes "I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori". In the Dialectic he defines a different usage: "we shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent; and those, on the other hand, which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent. In the case of these latter, I am not referring to the transcendental employment of misemployment of the categories, which is merely an error of the faculty of judgment when it is not duly curbed by criticism". Kant offers innumerable other such definitions in the Critique, e.g. "synthetic propositions in regard to things in general, the intuition of which does not admit to being given a priori, are transcendental. Transcendental propositions can never be given through construction of concepts, but only in accordance with concepts that are a priori"

Kant's four main perspectives, aiming to establish a kind of knowledge which is both synthetic and a priori. It is a special type of philosophical knowledge, concerned with the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. However, Kant believes all knowing subjects assume certain transcendental truths, whether or not they are aware of it. Transcendental knowledge defines the boundary between empirical knowledge and speculation about the transcendent realm. 'Every event has a cause' is a typical transcendental statement. The science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being, with reference to its abstract and universal conditions, as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as true of every kind of being; phylosophy in general; first principles, or the science of first principles.

Note:
 * Metaphysics is distinguished as general and special.
 * General metaphysics is the science of all being as being.
 * Special metaphysics is the science of one kind of being; as, the metaphysics of chemistry, of morals, or of politics. According to Kant, a systematic exposition of those notions and truths, the knowledge of which is altogether independent of experience, would constitute the science of metaphysics. Commonly, in the schools, called metaphysics, as being part of the philosophy of aristotle, which hath that for title; but it is in another sense: For there it signifieth as much as "books written or placed after his natural philosophy." But the schools take them for "books of supernatural philosophy;" for the word metaphysic will bear both these senses. Obbes. Now the science conversant about all such inferences of unknown being from its known manifestations, is called ontology, or metaphysics proper. w. Hamilton. Metaphysics are [is] the science which determines what can and what can not be known of being, and the laws of being, a priori. Hence: the scientific knowledge of mental phenomena; mental philosophy; psychology. metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science or complement of sciences exclusively occupied with mind. w. Hamilton. Whether, after all, a larger metaphysics might not help our physics.

Epistemology of Transcedentalism
The theory of knowledge: the study of the nature, sources, and validity of knowledge. It differs from logic and psychology. Logic is concerned with the specific and formal problem of correct reasoning, while epistemology deals with the nature of reasoning, with truth, and with the process of knowing themselves. Psychology is concerned with a descriptive study of behavior, phenomena, etc., while epistemology deals with our claims to knowledge, i.e., what we mean by & knowing Epistemological realism.

Related terms

 * philosophy
 * religion
 * transcendental
 * transcendentalist