Where does transcendence collide?

In Immanuel Kant's 1781 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), the transcendent is what lies beyond the limits of any possible human experience, so that reason cannot reach it through the senses. Kant separated the transcendent, which oversteps those limits, from the transcendental, his term for the conditions that make experience possible in the first place, and he argued that claims about transcendent objects such as the soul or the world as a whole fall outside the reach of knowledge. Medieval writers had used the related word for concepts crossing all categories, but Kant fixed this new meaning, and later idealist and phenomenological thinkers kept the core idea: that which goes past the bounds of experience. Here transcendence is a boundary of human knowing, not a kind of number, a name for God, or a movement of the self.[1]

Unit

A claim or object judged to fall beyond or within possible experience

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued philosophically, by testing whether a concept can be given in any possible experience

A transcendental number is a real or complex number that is not the root of any nonzero polynomial with rational coefficients, so it cannot be captured by any finite algebraic equation. Joseph Liouville's 1844 note to the French Academy proved that such numbers exist and built the first explicit examples, now called Liouville numbers. Charles Hermite's 1873 Sur la fonction exponentielle then showed that the constant e is transcendental, and Lindemann proved the same for pi in 1882. The word here labels a property of a number defined by algebra, and it has nothing to do with a limit of experience, a name for the divine, or a state of the person.[2][3]

Unit

A single number, classified as algebraic or transcendental

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Proven case by case, by showing no rational-coefficient polynomial has the number as a root

Divine transcendence is the idea that God or the sacred stands wholly beyond the created world and beyond ordinary categories of thought. Rudolf Otto's 1917 Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy) named this the experience of the holy as the ganz andere, the wholly other: something felt as awesome and beyond comprehension rather than reasoned into. The theological idea that God surpasses the world is far older than Otto, but his account gave the modern study of religion an influential vocabulary for it, later set against divine immanence, the idea of God present within the world. Here transcendence names a relation between the divine and the world, not a bound on knowledge, a class of number, or a peak of human growth.[4]

Unit

A described relation of the divine to the world, from wholly transcendent to fully immanent

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through texts, theology, and reports of religious experience, not by physical measurement

Self-transcendence is the idea that a person can reach beyond concern for the self toward other people, causes, or a larger whole. In his late writings, gathered in the 1971 book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Abraham Maslow placed self-transcendence above self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of human needs, describing it as identification with something greater than the individual ego. Koltko-Rivera's 2006 review recovered this later version of the hierarchy, which textbook summaries often leave out. Here transcendence is a direction of human motivation and growth, not a limit of philosophy, a property of a number, or a name for God.[5][6]

Unit

A person's degree of orientation beyond the self

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with self-report scales of self-transcendence and related motivation