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The Limits of Transcendence

“A view from above.” We usually think of the transcendent as an ecstatic perspective, perhaps motivated by a divine insight, casting a gaze over a landscape of objects. Photo taken by my wife, Ksenia, in North Vermont last autumn, 2025.

Reflection on the meaning of philosophical concepts with a long history is illuminating for both its continuities and contrasts. The long history of “transcendental” reveals five major movements and corresponding points of contrast: (i) its medieval or Scholastic roots; (ii) its transformation with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism; (iii) Hegel’s objective idealist reification of the transcendental followed by the more austere “neo-Kantians;” (iv) its appropriation by Edmund Husserl; and (v) its critique by Martin Heidegger and later existentialists. After briefly running through each of these interpretations of the transcendental, I would like to suggest a couple of lessons concerning the value and dangers of appealing to “transcendence” within philosophy today.

The Medieval Origins of the Transcendental

Since at least the 13th century the term “transcendence” has been commonly associated with Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) and his followers, who took it to mean “being,” “one,” “true,” and “good.” These properties were attributed to beings in general, irrespective of their articulation in the Aristotelian categories of substance, quality, relation, etc. In this sense, transcendentia are transcendental because they are trans-categorical, an interpretation that can be traced back to Aristotle’s distinction between concepts of “being” and “unity/one” in his Metaphysics IV (Ch 1–2). Aristotle (1979) maintained that even though these concepts of being and unity are distinct, whatever fits one category will satisfy the other, and that both must apply to any kind of being whatsoever. Hence, in this early phase, transcendental was identified with how some linguistic terms act as meta-categories, which extend to insights about reality in general.

In the later Scotist tradition, this theme was made more explicit as the transcendentia are described as the “most common” (communisimus) and “basic” (prima) among all beings. For the Scholastics, including Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, this inspired the contention that there should be a universal ontology supportive of their theological intuitions.  The being of God was thus posited as “above” any given category; an essence wholly unconstrained by categorial determination, who stands in a unique, originary relation to all beings. If it was not the first instance in human history, it was certainly a unique case in which the category—as experientially or intuitively encountered—was identified with a being of ultimate reality.  

It should first be mentioned that the search for categorical priority is not lost to my own efforts to develop the metaphysics of “dialectical holism.” Indeed, I think this cannot be avoided as a feature of human experience and that it serves crucial functions both emotionally and cognitively. However, in relation to “God” or any other explicit predication of our most universal category, this concept of transcendence risks dogmatism and vacuity. Dogmatism is a danger insofar as our predications of the overarching category are maintained (come what may) for no other reason than some a priori coherence of preconceptions or faithful/wishful thinking. Moreover, it risks vacuity insofar as our transcendent category does not lend itself to a particular path of enactment or practice.

However, in relation to “God” or any other explicit predication of our most universal category, this concept of transcendence risks dogmatism and vacuity.

I think that the ideals that guide us down any philosophical path should be reflexively entertained, such that we consider where they are bringing us in our sensorimotor habits over time. Following my own “dialectical holist” interpretation of the transcendental, I will argue that the way forward should involve an onto-hermeneutic feedback loop, in and through which we transform our understanding of the transcendent category and reintegrate our understanding of how this changes our consequent enactments. In other words, insofar as we cannot help but relate our own consciousness to the transcendent in some way, we should be mindful about where this concept can bring us as we live and grow in this world.

“Infinite mediation.” When we try to apprehend the world, we may find a series of categories and cognitive structures that never quite reaches the things themselves. View up along the steeple of the Freiburg Cathedral in Germany, 2023.

Kant’s Epistemic Transcendence

In Kant, we find that a core of the original Scholastic sense of the “transcendental” remains intact—especially in its association with universal ontology and the a priori—though it undergoes a transformation most evident in its ontological implications. Kant still identifies his transcendental philosophy as ontologia, but for him, this is not in terms of immediate cogitations, but the conditions of possibility for any cognition whatsoever: “I call all cognition transcen­dental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori” (Kant 1998, B 25).

Kant thus retains the Scholastic emphasis on knowability, so it remains a form of ontologia, but we here shift our focus from an identification of concepts with objects of the world, to the necessary concepts, and their accompanying logic, which make any a priori valid knowledge possible. This transforms a purely ontological conception of the transcendental into an (a priori) epistemic conception of “prima” in Kant’s transcendental logic. Kant maintains that only those (a priori) means by which we cognize can be called transcendental, so it concerns only a critique of the origin of cognition, not a relation to empirical objects (Kant 1998, B 80). Here we find the rudiments of what would become essential to the development of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl—an issue we will return to below.

Though Kant appro­priates Aristotle’s categories, in his elucidation of the a priori con­cepts of the understanding (Kant 1998, A 76–77), he designates as “transcendental” what had traditionally served as a point of contrast to the transcendental. Specifically, the domain of transcendental logic—the objectively valid transcendental categories of the understanding—takes on the character of a transcendental immanence. Kant’s transcendence is immanent because it is based on a synthetic act of judgement, which produces the logical conditions of possibility for any immediate empirical experience. Though these “transcendent” concepts of the understanding can in principle never be encountered in an empirical experience, e.g. God, the soul, or the cosmos as a whole, they are believed to be necessary a priori.

I believe that what was missing in Kant, and later idealists, is a trajectory of refinement, a possibility of questioning the logic and categories themselves in a way that lends them to further development.

Kant’s transcendental philosophy was significant for how dramatically it challenged British philosophy in general, and empiricism in particular. While adherents to the latter, such as Hume, had hoped to establish the conditions and origin of the understanding, they were incapable of doing so insofar as they presupposed experience as the basis of knowledge. Kant rejected this presupposition and sought the a priori transcendental conditions of any such subjectivity capable of understanding.  Despite being “immanent” then, Kant’s transcendent categories stood as infinite mediations between the conscious observer and the world—this was an challenge that Hegel and the absolute idealists aimed to overcome.

While I appreciate the effort to recover the conditions of intelligibility through pure reflection, my only criticism is against any contention that this task could be completed. I believe that what was missing in Kant, and later idealists, is a trajectory of refinement, a possibility of questioning the logic and categories themselves in a way that lends them to further development. This, I believe, is a minimal requirement for any reflexive and humble effort to explicate the transcendental.

The Immanent Transcendence of Absolute Idealism

Kant’s transcendental idealism provided the groundwork for the later absolute idealists like Schelling and Hegel, who took these a priori (epistemic) conditions to be imbued with a deeper ontological significance. Hegel’s conception of the “transcendent” also departs significantly from traditional dualistic views that posit a “mere beyond” (Jenseits) or a supersensible world fundamentally separated from our own. For Hegel, transcendence was a dynamic inherent to the natures of consciousness and human history, both of which culminated in Absolute knowledge. While my own contentions for dialectical holism defends Hegel’s dynamical transformation on methodological and ontological grounds, I have rejected most fervently any claims of Absolute individuation.

For Hegel, finitude is inherently self-transcending, as anything determined, restricted, or limited can only be so in opposition to a “beyond” that lacks that restriction. This he illustrated with splendid precision in his Science of Logic (2010) with regard for the incomplete nature of Being. In terms of our own experience then, Hegel believed that transcendence begins with the “ought” (Sollen), which is the negative reference a thing has toward its own limit. Hegel reasoned that consciousness is thus self-transcendent. Unlike natural life, consciousness is “for itself its concept” and therefore possesses the inherent tendency to “go beyond itself” and “spoil its own limited satisfaction.” In this case however, the finite identity is not destroyed by one’s aim towards the infinite; Hegel believed that inherent to the transcendental movement of consciousness is an effort to negate one’s own limitation in order to “elevate itself to infinity.”

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argued that the Absolute is a transcendent unity that is immanent in all its natural and historical phases (1977). Thus, the Absolute transcends its parts not as a separate entity, but as the total Gestalt that sublates and determines the nature of the parts that constitute it. In a historical context then, the Absolute Spirit is the fulfillment of all finite forms, which are absorbed and transfigured within its “transcendent plenitude.” In the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite “overreaches” or surpasses the finite, yet this transcendence remains grounded in the activity of the whole. Contrary to many common misunderstandings then, the telos for Hegel, is immanent in each phase—the transcendent is the whole inherent to each phase—not a future state of being.

Applying this idea to the conscious experience of the transcendent, Hegel makes a crucial distinction between natural, contingent time and the conceptual movement of Spirit in History. Absolute Knowing involves the “annulling” or “extinguishing” of time—so again, it cannot be a goal state somewhere in our “future.” Spirit, for Hegel, does not exist outside of history, but conceptualizes its own movement without being bound by the intuition of time as a mere linear succession of events. Absolute Knowing is thus the moment when Spirit reflects on its historical becoming to achieve a timeless self-identity within its particular historical moment.

A central doctrine of Hegel’s philosophy is the rejection of the “unbridgeable gulf of intelligibility” that Kant and others posited between the subject’s representation (phenomena) and the thing-in-itself (noumena). Hegel thus defended the categorial continuity of thought and being: “what is rational is real and what is real is rational.” What things are “in themselves” can be identified with what they are “for consciousness” because both are conceptually structured by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. By construing Substance also as Subject, Hegel moves from a “thing-oriented” metaphysics to one based on the self-determining activity of the Concept: thus the “transcendent” is located within the self-developing movement of reality (Pippin, 2018). For my own part, I see this thread of Hegel’s contribution to be an advance that has been largely neglected by later analytic and phenomenological philosophies. Though this trend has begun to change with the works of Harris, Pippin, and Brandom, among others, I do not think that phenomenologists have yet to adequately appreciate how it is possible to distinguish reality from mental activity while also retaining a transcendental or epistemic bridge between the two.

Nevertheless, it was against the backdrop of absolute idealism’s demise that a neo-Kantian tradition arose as a fertile ground for what would become transcendental phenomenology. This development took place through a psychological reading of Kant by Neo-Kantians like Fries (1807),  J.F. Herbart (1776–1841), and Hermann Lotze (1817–1881)—the Marburg and Southwest Schools more generally—who interpreted Kant’s reasoning in naturalistic and materialistic terms. Though many appealed to Kant to mediate convictions of scientific realism and idealism, the trend at this time was towards empirical psychology, so a proper reconciliation was not forthcoming. Hence, in the positive sciences of the time, the transcendent was reduced to the scientific method and its resulting abstractions. In Husserl, we find a philosophy that erred in the opposite direction, by reifying the transcendental and making it the cornerstone of phenomenology. 

“Immanent individuation.” I have always thought of immanent transcendence as occurring in the moments when your whole life seems to be contained in the present. We discover ourselves in our own conditions of being. Photo of me hiking on Houth peninsula in Ireland, 2022, by Ksenia.

Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

The neo-Kantians were committed to a range of psychologistic theories, which blended logic and psychology in ways that were deeply incoherent. Neither psychology nor logic had a well-defined foundation, but psychologism (e.g. Mill) maintained the empirical discipline of psychology could provide an exhaustive ground for logic. Husserl’s phenomenology did not begin as a transcendental philosophy or an idealism, but he consistently maintained an idealist interpretation of pure logic. This was the basis for his rejection of psychologism, which put him at odds with the majority of contemporary psychologists and non-idealist philosophers. Husserl’s later and more mature embrace of transcendental phenomenology was even rejected by the phenomenologists who surrounded him, like Reinach, Scheler, and others in Gottingen. This put him in a unique and unpopular position regarding his appeal to the transcendental.

Husserl’s intention in phenomenological psychology was meant to elucidate the “eidetic” mechanics of mental life. He believed this could be achieved through an epoché or suspension of any background assumptions of the natural world that might influence our interpretation or judgement of the respective objects of experience. This was meant to stand as a self-sufficient a priori science of its own, independent of psychology on the one hand, and what would later become a transcendental phenomenology on the other (Husserl 1997, p. 92). By contrast, transcendental phenomenology, specifically addresses the problem of understanding, or the objects of experience, with regard for their evidential character. In contrast with the positive sciences, transcendental phenomenology seeks a ground for evidence in pure subjectivity.

Thus, the kind of phenomenology one endorses will depend on how far one takes the reduction (or thinks it can be taken). For Husserl, transcendental, subjectivity is no longer “positively” deter­mined on the basis of a pre-given horizon of empiricism or “nature:” what remains after the transcen­dental reduction is the “universum” of “transcendentally pure” subjectivity and, enclosed within it, Husserl believed we could find “all the actual and possible ‘phenomena’ of objectivities, all modes of appearance and modes of consciousness that pertain to such objectivities” (Husserl 1997, p. 97). In this way, the method aims to internalize the conditions and content of any other knowledge, science, etc. The concept of phenomenon takes on a double meaning from phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology: both are rooted in a “universum” of reflection as a ground of any manifestation, but permit two axes of explication—one positive and the other concerning the transcendental conditions of the world. These conditions, specifically concern how any object is “constituted as” any given kind.

For Kant, experience is understood as embodied in empirical knowledge, while subjectivity is a set of cognitive functions, the guiding principles of which are necessary for establishing the objective validity of empiri­cal knowledge. Consequently, Kant’s investigative method is regressive (via transcendental deduction), because he aims to trace objective determinations in empirical judgments back to the subjective conditions that rest in their corresponding cogni­tive capacities. By contrast, Husserl, “proceeds not regressively but descriptively, because any given intentio of consciousness and its intentum represents for him a given unity of experience available for intuitive apprehension” (Dodd 2021, p. 393). For Husserl, phenomena present themselves in their naked essence not under the pressure of a priori principles and transcendental deductive reasoning, but through an immanent reduction and reflection on the intentional structures themselves.

However complex (and problematic) the theme of transcendental subjectivity becomes in its later genetic phenomenological methodology, the analysis never shifts back to Kant’s regressive (deductive) strategy, but remains committed to attending to the eidetic structures. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology thus aims to bring us “back to the things them­selves!” Husserl nevertheless believed that his transcendental phenomenology could still be considered a universal ontology because it contained the basic structure for any ontology whatsoever, insofar as any such ontology must obtain in and through some intention-object-horizon morphology (Husserl 1997, p. 99). The quite radical presumption then (in modern terms) is that the method could elucidate the entire phase space of consciousness, i.e. thereby providing the absolute context of any cognition whatsoever. So, such an ontology would appear possible, only if the reduction could be completed to the extent that Husserl believed. Many philosophers however—myself included—have rejected the idea that Husserl’s meta-eidetic science is possible.

Transcendence in Heidegger and Existential Phenomenology

In his Being and Time, Heidegger maintains that “Ontological inquiry” into the nature of Being is more primordial than the “ontical” inquiry of the positive sciences (2001, p. 31). Consequently, given that Being is the proper topic of investigation for phenomenology, ontology is only possible in and through phenomenology. For Heidegger however, “phenomenology” takes a different meaning from Husserl’s Cartesian orientation. Whereas Husserl had uncritically embraced Descartes’ methodological principles that demand a delimitation of being in terms of clarity, distinctness, and certainty, Heidegger thinks this whole tradition has only obfuscated the nature of Being by trading in such abstractions.

Nevertheless, Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology, grounded in an analytic of Dasein (being-there) is no less transcendental than the philosophies of Husserl or Kant. The basic reason for this continuity is that Heidegger’s focus on Dasein remains the being of an understanding, the existential explication of which determines the horizon of the sense for Being in general. Because Dasein is that being for whom Being is an issue, Dasein enjoys (or suffers) a unique form of self-reference, which unfolds in and through time. Hence, temporality, for Heidegger, is revealed as the transcendental horizon of the meaning of being (2001, p. 63). Heidegger’s culminating appeal to the concept of transcendence can be found in his concept of care: insofar as Dasein is temporal extension, this is possible only because we extend our ideals of value from historical reflections into future projections. Care is thus seen as Dasein’s pre-ontological way of interpreting itself:

The transcendental ‘generality’ of the phenomenon of care and of all fundamental existentialia is, on the other hand, broad enough to present a basis on which every interpretation of Dasein which is ontical and belongs to a world-view must move, whether Dasein is understood as affliction [Not] and the ‘cares of life’ or in an opposite manner

Martin Heidegger (2001, p. 244)

Here, I believe we can begin to see a strong connection between Hegel and the later existentialists, which bypasses Husserl’s more radically idealist project. At least on this point of transcendence, Heidegger presents a way of reconsidering transcendence and immanence in a way that is grounded in our ever so finite and incomplete efforts to pursue value. It would take the later works of Merleau-Ponty to sufficiently develop these ideas—partially based on further connections back to Hegel—which resulted in a more coherent existential phenomenology based on embodiment. His contributions, specifically from his Structure of Behavior, for example, have been essential for the more recent development of the theory of autopoiesis: only here do we find transcendence located in the purposeful, self-preserving dynamic (conatus) inherent to all living beings (Thompson, 2007).

“Transcendental phenomenology” was historically identified with Husserl’s Cartesian project, which was subsequently ridiculed by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and most of the existential philosophers who followed. For Sartre (1960), among others, the central assumption was that we are condemned to be free. The goal here was to secure our sense of responsibility for deciding value and purpose independent of religion or any worldly authority. The consequence of this move however, was to assert a much stronger metaphysical conception of transcendence over the natural world than is typically appreciated. In this way, an existential conception of freedom—just as Husserl’s eidos—internalizes the absolute that was previously relegated to the heavens or to the evolution of the cosmos.

In brief, I find myself siding with Merleau-Ponty’s assessment of transcendence and freedom. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he maintains that the subject should not be understood as merely constituting the multiplicity of its experiences or as constituted by them:

we must not treat the transcendental Ego as the true subject and the empirical self as its shadow or its wake. If that were their relationship to each other, we could withdraw into the constituting agency, and such reflection would destroy time, which would be left without date or place

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2005, p. 495)

He goes on to say that on the one hand, the inseparability of world and subject is because the subject is nothing but a project of the world; but on the other hand, their inseparability is because this world is likewise a projection of the subject. Thus, the “subject is a being-in-the-world and the world remains ‘subjective’ since its texture and articulations are traced out by the subject’s movement of transcendence” (pp. 499–500).

Here, we find the inspiration for the concept of co-emergence, which has become quite popular in enactivist philosophy of mind since the 90s. What is not typically recognized however, is that with this notion we return to Hegel’s triadic logic of Being-Non-Being-Becoming, and thus to a dynamical and immanent conception of transcendence. While this preserves our notion of an objective world, it finally makes possible a rigorous phenomenology that does not take our transcendence to be absolute from the first. In the final section, I would like to make some comparisons and suggestions on how we might make further progress in understanding the dangers and fruits of appealing to transcendence in philosophy today. 

“Transcendence in and through our embeddedness.” We find ourselves dissolved into our environment, where we cannot make a clear distinction between categories and objects of the world, our sense of self and the world itself. Photo by Ksenia of trees at night at Ilam Gardens in Christchurch, New Zealand, December, 2024.

Some Lessons for a Contemporary Phenomenology of Transcendence

The issue that most existentialists had with Husserl’s conception of transcendence—one with which I completely agree—was that it required that we can “complete” the phenomenological reductions to arrive at pure or eidetic structures of experience. Interestingly, the critiques that existentialists had of Husserl on this point were not so dissimilar from those they made of Hegel’s Absolute, i.e. both require an ideal form of knowledge that is ultimately inhuman. I would like to suggest that there does exist an opportunity for reconceiving transcendence in an onto-hermeneutic fashion, which reconciles the Absolute and existential interpretations.

Hegel and Husserl both redefine “transcendence” in a way that departs from traditional “other-worldly” (supersensible) meanings and locate it within the structures of subjectivity and consciousness. While Husserl understands transcendence to be “in immanence”—whereby objects are constituted within the stream of consciousness—Hegel views it as the self-transcendence of Spirit, where the “Absolute” is a whole that sublates its own moments. At first sight, this is not so dissimilar to Husserl, who argues that everything “outside” gets its being-sense from the “inside” of consciousness through the performance of intentionality. Indeed, completing the transcendental reduction as Husserl would have it, reveals the underlying essences, just as Hegel’s Aufheben is supposed to uncover the categorical moments that make any given moment of consciousness possible.

Hegel’s conception of transcendence, or “movement beyond limits,” also remains consistent with Heidegger’s appeal to Dasein—both are inherently self-transcendent in and through time because consciousness “is for itself its concept.” Thus, subjectivity constantly destroys its own limited satisfaction to go beyond its current boundaries. For phenomenologists of any kind, as a whole, consciousness (or Spirit) does not exist separately from its parts but sublates and transfigures the finite. Hegel’s Absolute is at once immanent in natural and historical phases and transcendent beyond any single temporal manifestation, just as the transcendental method is meant to hold moments of experience together so as to reveal their implicit essence.

However, the relationship between these respective approaches to phenomenology reveals fundamental disagreements about the “gulf” between thought and reality. Hegel argues that neither the pure nor the empirical “I” can be an absolute beginning; rather, the “I” is a result (Resultat) of the dialectical development of Spirit and history. In this way he manages to post an objective world that is identifiable in and through the process of thought itself. By contrast, Husserl starts from the apodictic (unquestionable) Cartesian “I am”—something he supposedly discovered as an essence through the reduction. Many philosophers however, including myself, see this kind of “absolute individuation” as a philosophical dead-end that lands us in subjectivism or dualism, rather than providing a viable starting point. For Hegel, transcendence is viewed as a closed circle where Spirit returns to itself as the “Absolute,” having mediated all immediacy (Pippin, 2018). By contrast, Husserl describes an “open teleology” where the telos of reason is an idea of perfection lying at an infinite distance—through infinite crises—which makes philosophy an incompletable “infinite task.” I do not see these two positions as being incompatible, but simply talking at cross purposes.

Ricoeur argues that because human existence is finite (situated in a particular time, culture, and social class), we cannot see the whole truth. Transcendence is thus achieved not by escaping finitude, but by traversing it through detour of interpretation. 

On this point of history, teleology, progress, etc., I think there exists a balance point between the two positions. The first step towards this synthesis is to consider Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics (1981). Ricoeur argues that because human existence is finite (situated in a particular time, culture, and social class), we cannot see the whole truth. Transcendence is thus achieved not by escaping finitude, but by traversing it through detour of interpretation. In his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” symbolic, poetic, and religious language are believed to reveal hidden, transcendent meanings of “the world of the text.” This transcendental movement involves a reader engaging with a text’s “proposal of a world”, an “otherness” that expands the reader’s self-understanding. To my mind, this movement recapitulates Hegel’s logic but tempers it with Merleau-Ponty’s “partial realism.” The result permits us to dispense with any hope of an absolute realization of self-consciousness, but retains a powerful recommendation to see our projected world as always being “read through” some “text” or another.

On a more fine-grained semantic interpretation (such as Robert Brandom’s), this transcendent movement is identified in linguistic representation. Here, normative statuses (meanings) transcend the attitudes of the subjects who institute them and “represented” objects thereby exert a rational constraint that transcends the immediate subjective attitude and its objects. Consequently, it is this transcendence that is made intelligible through recollection (Erinnerung), a retrospective process that gradually reveals a reality (the noumenon) that was implicit all along. If embraced to its ultimate conclusion, I believe his movement of explication holds radical implications of continually permitting us to reflect upon and interrupt onto-normative feedback loops that have constituted any given experience.

Conclusion: The Limits of Transcendence

Though this overview has not aimed to be exhaustive, I think that a couple conclusions can be drawn at this point. The following argument is meant to reveal the limits of the transcendental, whether in the case of the Cartesian I, essences, or even our freedom:

P1. Transcendence involves a process of differentiating (freeing) oneself from or overcoming the limits of a context or concept.

P2. The process of transcendence involves re-cognition / re-imagination of some “relevant” elements of respective contexts.

P3. If transcendence always varies in relation to contextual re-cognition and conceptual imagination, then it is context-dependent and scalar (not absolute).

C1. Our transcendence or freedom are context-dependent and thus scalar.

C2. If any form of phenomenology posits absolute transcendence (via freedom, individuation of self or eidos, etc.), then the theory is neglecting context-dependence and is thus mistaken.

Taking all of these lessons of transcendence into account brings me to some tentative conclusions. First, the Absolute, just like the Ego, cannot be wholly individuated at any point in history insofar as we lack a view of ourselves within the universe-as-a-whole. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with both existentialists and Hegel that there exist some categorical movements (even if they can undergo further refinement), which bring us to apprehend the conditions of our own individuation at any given historical moment.

In the end, transcendence cannot be all-or-nothing; it can be achieved to better or worse degrees of adequacy; and it must be undertaken as a contextually-embedded process, if we are to understand “humanity” an open-ended Concept.

I think that contemporary phenomenology remains of utmost importance for this end, but I doubt that it can achieve its goal of establishing essences if it neglects the hermeneutic feedback loop of seeing ourselves as mediated through innumerable “texts,” “categories,” or “lenses” that shape our worldly enactments. The New England Transcendentalists (Buell, 2006) come to mind as a tradition that—for all their technical confusions regarding the history of philosophical theories—got one point absolutely right: our contextual relation to community and environment is our means of transcendence, rather than something to overcome. In the end, transcendence cannot be all-or-nothing; it can be achieved to better or worse degrees of adequacy; and it must be undertaken as a contextually-embedded process, if we are to understand “humanity” an open-ended Concept.

What, then, is your path of transcendence; where has it taken you thus far; and how might it serve others in the future?

References

Aristotle. (1979). Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Translated by Hippocrates George Apostle. Peripatetic Press. 

Brandom, R.  (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press.

Buell, L. (Ed.). (2006). The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Modern Library.

Dodd, J. (2021). “Transcendental.”  In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by De Santis, D., Hopkins, B, C., and Majolino, C. Routledge.  

Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press.

—. (2010). The Science of Logic. Translated and edited by G.D. Giovanni. Cambridge University Press.

Heidegger, M. (2003). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY.

Husserl, E. (1969). Formal and Transcendental Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Nijhoff.

—. (1982). Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Nijhoff.

—. (1997). Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palme. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

—. (2001). Logical Investigations. Volume I. Translated by John Niemeyer Findlay. Routledge.

—. (2014). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Daniel Dahlstrom. Hackett.

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge University Press.

Merleau-Ponty. M. (1963). The Structure of Behaviour. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. Beacon Press. 

—. (2005). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Pippin, R. B. (2018). Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic. University of Chicago Press.

Ricœur, P. (1981). “Appropriation.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, edited and translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press.

Sartre, J. (1960). The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. Hill and Wang.

Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

A Meditation on Philosophy as an Embodied Art

“What first brought you to philosophy?” Over the years, I think this has been the most common question that students, acquaintances, or colleagues have asked me. Academically speaking, I began my studies in 2003, but that is an entirely different story about the intellectual inspirations of psychedelics, which will require a post of its own at some point in the future. For my present purposes, we need to go back further, to the spring of 1990, Hudson Massachusetts. At the age of six, I entered what is now the Rising Sun Studio to begin what ended up being 10 years of training in Kenpo Jujitsu. The intentions and practices I cultivated in martial arts would later be transformed by another 10 years of snowboarding and then some further years being captivated by various forms of dance. What inspires me to reflect on the relationship between such embodied practices and philosophy today is how apparently unusual, and on occasion even scoff-worthy it has appeared to some of my colleagues that martial arts could be my earliest form of philosophical training. Nevertheless, my most important lesson from each of these practices today is that they were, on the whole, a form of phenomenology and that phenomenological reflection was what each of these practices were driving towards from the start.

 On the face of it I don’t expect that it should require a stretch of the imagination to see an analogy between philosophy and martial arts, among innumerable other physical disciplines. In somewhat concise terms, the commonality appears to be found in one’s intention to navigate a space of relationships with an ever-expanding kind of ‘know-how’. Whereas martial arts may be the most general way to move through embodied relationships with wisdom, philosophy aims to do so in a maximally general conceptual space concerning the nature of wisdom itself. Both practices are self-reflective in that they endeavor to characterize new paths, or ways, of navigation. In the case of martial arts, dance, or extreme sports, this appears as styles, or forms, whereas in philosophy we find schools based on certain topics and assumptions. This is something I have become incredibly fascinated by in recent months, as it seems to me to provide key insights into what it might mean to develop a system of philosophy, or way of life.

The question I want to explore here is whether these embodied practices can teach professional philosophers a thing or two about how to pursue their own sub-domain of wisdom. To do so, I will take a look at some of the concepts that were particularly evident in my martial arts training and how they bear upon my understanding of the professional practice of philosophy. It is from this starting point that I would like to conduct a reflection on philosophy as an embodied art.

Etiquette

One way to grasp a potential oversight of academic philosophy with regard for the insights available to an embodied discipline like dance, martial arts, or an extreme sport is simply by comparing them in terms of etiquette. How do martial artists, dancers, or athletes earn respect, versus philosophers? One thing I have noticed from riding with professional snowboarders, sparring with martial arts masters, or dancing with truly excellent dancers is that they will never shy from an opportunity to develop their skills. Whether they are given a high-school gym, or an Olympic training facility, they simply do what they love and they share it with whomever they can. Experts thus earn respect for their capacity and willingness to demonstrate, to teach, and share their art at nearly a moment’s notice. This has generally appeared to me as an etiquette of passionate humility, and it is something I have rarely encountered in professional philosophers.

Receiving my black belt at the age of 13 from my Shihan Doug McDonald at Rising Sun Studio in Hudson, MA. March, 1998.

What I have found most surprising about my experiences in academic philosophy is just how scared most philosophers seem to be to reveal or discover the limits of their wisdom. So often professional philosophers will use their intellect to do anything possible to avoid genuinely engaging with others in good faith. Many strategies can be used for this purpose, but the issue seems to be that many have made up their mind beforehand about who is deserving of their honest perspective.

The most common strategy I have seen is contrarianism. This can easily be mistaken for philosophical skill, though it amounts to only pointing out what is surely mistaken about the reasoning of another so that it doesn’t have to be reflected any further. This would basically be equivalent to an athlete declining to train with others while remaining content to declare all that those being observed are making mistakes in their own efforts of exercise.

 Another strategy is to simply exchange citations. This is also quite common and strikes me as equivalent to what old, retired athletes do when they get together for beers and recount the good old days when they, or someone they knew, had previously enacted their discipline with spectacular expertise. This strategy is clearly quite good for making those who are not as familiar with the popular names, theories, and ‘tricks’ feel quite out of the loop.   

To briefly return to the top, the most disturbing aspect of etiquette that I have encountered in academia concerns respect. Whereas athletes have no problem demonstrating their passion whenever possible, there seems to be a curious presumption in academic philosophy that our interactions outside of lecture halls or conference rooms are somehow separate from the pursuit of wisdom. It seems to me that all such interactions are opportunities to demonstrate precisely how we are always both students and teachers of wisdom, whatever path it happens to involve.

To borrow an analogy from embodied cognitive science, this pursuit of wisdom cannot be separated from our embodied relations with others, just as a dance emerges between and among its participants. Upon reflection, my own expertise, whatever its extent, is the sum of my reactions to all the relationships and spaces I have occupied. This brings me to conclude that in the first instance, whatever our way is, it is an embodied intention to heal, grow, be vulnerable, and explicate ourselves with others. 

Discipline

In many cases philosophers’ area of expertise could be likened to a martial artist or dancer studying just one move, like an arm-bar or twirl, to the total exclusion of all other techniques. Obviously, doing so does not create new ‘ways’, ‘paths’, or ‘forms’ of that discipline if that expertise remains disconnected from others. Such fragmentation seems to have resulted from the mistaken assumption that all disciplines can progress by breaking down the problems they focus on into smaller and smaller parts. While this worked well for the mechanistic advances of the industrial revolution, it does not work with comparable satisfaction for concepts, nor for any embodied art. The wisdom of conceptual, logical, and embodied arts are all holistic. In fact, the common goal of both philosophy and embodied arts seems to involve a kind of feedback loop that cascades from a particular change of technique or idea of one scale, to the formation of more general principles at a broader scale of the domain or discipline in general.  

It should appear equally absurd for someone to come up with ever-more idiosyncratic ways to perform a particular move without connecting it to a wider practice, just as it is foolish to come up with increasingly specialized theoretical language without connecting it to peripheral fields of knowledge. I suppose it should be noted that I by no means mean to suggest that most philosophers commit this mistake, but I can say that most of the philosophers I have met or studied have made their careers on incredibly narrow areas of research that do not so often return to the questions of wisdom in general.

Learning a cork 720 at Snows Mountain, WV NH. 2003.

To advance beyond fifth degree black belt, a martial artist is often required to gain mastery in a completely different form; it is quite rare to find an expert dancer who does not dabble in multiple styles; and I think it’s fair to say that no extreme sport athlete will be content with just one means of defying gravity. Yet, philosophers seem all too comfortable to identify themselves with increasingly narrow domains of discussion, which often have ever-fleeting applicability to the practice of embracing the being and perspectives of others.

Maybe it’s just me, but the most beautiful forms of dance, extreme sport, or music for that matter, are always those that have integrated the forms of others. Similarly, the most effective martial arts have become those that have learned and synthesized the greatest range of alternative forms. What might it look like if philosophers were to intentionally pursue this end? For one thing, it strikes me as wildly antithetical to the analytic tradition to actively pursue such a synthesis. Nevertheless, taking the above into consideration, it also seems a moot point to provide an argument for why such a synthesis is necessary to arrive at an ever-more refined conception and enactment of wisdom.       

Spirit

I think that the greatest irony is that even those philosophers who claim to endorse embodied cognitive science are somehow unaware of what it means to engage in the practice of philosophy as an embodied art. The art of philosophy is not merely one of collecting knowledge or memorizing argument structures to cleverly disorient one’s interlocutor; it is a cognitive-emotional process of synthesizing perspectives towards a more inclusive embodiment of wisdom. This is to say that philosophy must have an end, an aim, or goal of self-transformation. Hence, the analytic pretense of objective exploration in philosophy is fundamentally confounded by the fact that we must create the very conditions that make the pursuit of wisdom increasingly possible. It could thus be said that philosophy is inherently proleptic and teleological. To ignore this is to fundamentally ignore the conditions of philosophy and to fail to reflect on one’s own purpose as a philosopher.

Me snowboarding at Mt. Hood, OR. July, 2000.

The embodied arts, including martial arts, extreme sports, and dance, have for the most part all been self-aware enough to recognize that the practice of self-transformation points towards a kind of fundamental good. As disciplines, each of these practices permit us to transmute trauma, anger, sadness, pain, etc., into intentions of creativity, self-empowerment, and agency. After spending twenty years of my life training in martial arts and freestyle snowboarding, it’s become apparent to me that the aim being pursued can be appropriately described as a spiritual enactment. Indeed, the attunement that we find when dancing with another can similarly be understood as the emergence of a spiritual space, in which we are both cleansed and empowered.

Certainly, one of the most crucial conditions of our entering such a common space is the good faith that self-transcendence is possible, that we are not to be identified with the limits of our beliefs, nor physical capacities of the present. What I find genuinely amazing is that while these embodied arts appear to have (for hundreds of years!) found the ongoing or perpetual cure to our existential depression and anxiety, professional philosophy ironically remains unequal to this task, or rests content in merely throwing words at the problem.

The last thing I want to say on the issue of spirit concerns the collective conditions of philosophy today. Philosophy, just like any embodied art, succeeds, progresses, and grows only insofar as a greater diversity of people can collectively participate in the practice. This means that the issues and debates surrounding diversity in universities today often appear to be missing the point. It is our birthright as conscious beings to pursue wisdom in intellectual and embodied ways. The business models operative in both academia and sports thus risk convincing us that some kind of antiquated form of competitive evolution is sufficient for progress. Consequently, ‘diversity’ becomes a mere numbers game.

I would like to suggest a symbiogenic alternative. Accordingly, we might downplay the glorification of those who perform at the peak of their discipline and instead attend to the conditions by which more individuals would be permitted to achieve excellence of wisdom in and through our collective participation with one another. As with the synthesis of alternative styles in any given embodied discipline, philosophy progresses by building bridges across the widest range of both disciplines and perspectives alike. Ultimately, it appears that the very same intention of philia-sophia can be found in expert dance, just as sparring partners, or philosophical interlocutors: it is an intention towards maintaining the intersubjective conditions of one’s discipline such that ongoing synthesis and differentiation of paths becomes possible.

Dancing with Ksenia in Leiden, The Netherlands. Summer, 2022

The Nature of Wisdom: An Interdependence of Therapy and Philosophy

By way of introduction to the philosophy, I would like to begin by providing a map of the problematic that afflicts our culture today. To my mind, the central thread of this problem concerns our collective misunderstandings of meaning-making as a practice, how it can be performed with more or less expertise, and the ways our social institutions can either facilitate or inhibit our capacity to do so. This problem can be brought into sharp relief in the context of both education and healthcare. A key distinction about dialectical holism is that it implies the interdependence of therapy and academic philosophy. This is because in functional terms, they are both aiming for the same end, which is wisdom.

As I understand it, wisdom involves being about the limit of a given conceptual domain. When applied to oneself, wisdom means bringing one’s attention to the biographical context and physical constraints that give rise to any given perception, reaction, or mode of being in the world. This eventually results in an alleviation of suffering via self-understanding and the capacity to make meaning of what lies within or beyond one’s control. On an interpersonal level, wisdom manifests as an effort to grasp the experiences of others and to see the conditions of their limits, which helps to further clarify one’s own identity within a wider space of human-being. As will be discussed below, both of these enactments of wisdom are essential for philosophy and mental health. In a more technical context, this definition of wisdom can be seen in the efforts to map out the limit of a given scientific discipline, which inevitably leads to increasing interdisciplinary dialogue at the interface between disciplines and the development of new fields of study.

If philosophy is to be about wisdom, then it must be about the facilitation of interdisciplinary discussions and the mapping of intersubjective phenomenological spaces. An interesting correlate of this commonality is that both appear to achieve their end through the practice of friendship. In a therapeutic context, the therapist serves as what I call ‘mindfulness training wheels’, bringing the client’s attention to the context that gives rise to their reactions and some tools for changing the context into something more desirable. In the case of philosophy, the philosopher provides scaffolding for the construction and arrangement of ideas, one that serves as both an anvil for testing new ideas and maps congruence with a common language across perspectives. Empathy, I claim, is required for success in each of these endeavors. This is because in either case of therapist or philosopher, they achieve their end by being able to recognize where an individual is located within a phenomenological landscape that has different valuations and logical structures from their own.

This point concerning the importance of empathy brings us to the core of our meaning-making problem: if all perspectives are granted equal value a priori, then we have undermined any possible motivation for learning from or synthesizing the perspectives of others. This is because such an equal valuation presumes that there is no better or worse way to behold or engage with a common world. Consequently, all differences across perspectives become reducible to idiosyncratic emotional reactions. Quite concerningly, these emotional reactions have been taken to be indicative of reality in both therapeutic and philosophical contexts. In the therapeutic domain, the individual’s emotional response is often taken to be indicative of whether they ought to move towards or away from a given stimulus because the individual is often assumed to have sufficient knowledge of themselves and the values that guide their meaning-making practices (e.g. feminist and CBT approaches). Doing so avoids the challenge of uprooting the unconscious associations that form one’s worldview. Philosophically speaking, recent critical theories have asserted a priori knowledge of an oppressive bias in all human practices, which ultimately undermine our ability to posit an objective world through scientific discourse and thereby dispenses with any capacity to build a knowledge of our relations to others. As we can see, both problems result from an assertion of unquestionable valuation: therapeutically, this is the positive assumption of the free agency and self-knowledge of the individual, while critical philosophies assert the negative assumption of our collective participation in oppressive forces.

The consequence of either of these mistakes will be a state of increasing narcissism on an individual scale and a relativism about truth and morality on a collective scale. Indeed these trends are being exacerbated by our use of social media and the mind-numbing polarization narratives that have been fed to the public in recent years. Interestingly, this problem can be formulated as a lack of critical philosophical reflection on part of the therapy and a lack of a positive trajectory of thriving for the philosophy. If the practices of therapy and philosophy are to be about wisdom, then they thus converge on an exercise of navigating towards increasing coherence.  By coherence I mean an integration of one’s unconscious intentions into our conscious practices on the one hand and an ongoing synthesis of perspectives with scientifically rigorous analysis on the other. However, the interdependence of therapy and philosophy can be made even more clear when we examine emotions as a context to our beliefs.

Here, I part company from analytic philosophers who hold out hope for achieving a deep sense of truth about the world through a pure method of linguistic analysis. I claim, the aims of any academic study of philosophy typically articulated as wisdom, can only be achieved insofar as the emotional context of one’s beliefs can be sufficiently reflected. If emotions are co-arising with values and values dictate our phenomenological landscape, then analyzing our beliefs about this landscape will be insufficient to understand or alter its dynamics. This must be done in and through living one’s values and emotions, for they are not mere propositions, but a multidimensional process of meaning-making. This implies that the tools of psychotherapy and phenomenology are eventually required during the development of one’s philosophy, since this involves interpersonal communication of the worldview and reflection of one’s own motivations in sustaining it. However, it appears these reflective capacities would inevitably develop as cognitive capacities of self-reflection if the practice of philosophy were to be rigorous in maintaining multi-scale investigations. In the interest of facilitating wisdom then, it is suggested that philosophers embrace this role as phenomenological guide, thereby obliging us to articulate a trajectory by which emotional intelligence can advance in tandem with the development of one’s worldview.

If the aim of psychotherapy is the mental well-being of an individual and if ‘well-being’ depends upon the capacity to develop a sufficiently complex and personally satisfactory worldview, then the aims of psychotherapy depend upon philosophy. An implication of this position is that contrary to many theories on offer, the client is not sufficiently capable of setting their own developmental trajectory through life, since part of their problem may be that their logical and self-reflective capacities have been insufficient to establish a worldview that can respond to the actual complexities of our world. The consequence is that rather than attempting to avoid the possibility of indoctrinating a client in some theory or another, this bias must be embraced. Doing so means we recognize the theory as a tool and offer it willingly, while also providing the skills to evaluate any theory by looking for its limitations. Such an addition of therapy would inevitably involve incorporating philosophical methods into the process to help a client acquire the skills necessary for building their world-view with increasing rigor.

Though there are many practices that integrate the common processes in therapy and philosophy into a single process, I offer one example in an artistic context. Surrealism is a means of uprooting one’s unconscious value structures and non-conscious intentionality. Under the guise of the paranoiac critical method, one can produce icons of mythos for an individual or a culture’s developmental biography. In doing so, surrealism simultaneously provides tools for self-reflection and meaning-making, which are the two primary aims shared by both therapy and philosophy. A further feature to note is that surrealism exists as a polar opposite of mindfulness and both appear as methods within a phenomenological space of investigation: mindfulness aims to recognize and see past respective associations, while surrealism aims to recognize and magnify associations ad absurdum. What all of the above appears to suggest is that the practice of phenomenology, as a means of recognizing and representing one’s emotional associations within an interpersonal context, is currently underappreciated in philosophy and therapy. The skills that this method of investigation facilitates appear to be essential for cultivating empathy, self-reflection, and navigating the limits of one’s sense-of-self. Phenomenology, I suggest, can provide the missing philosophical ingredient in therapy and the missing emotional ingredient in philosophical practice. Taking these lessons together, our capacity to develop wisdom is necessarily interdependent with an increasing self-awareness and the integration of other’s perspectives. Cultivating wisdom in this way appears as a parameter of health as it develops along a trajectory of thriving, while also implies an intellectual process of constructing an increasingly coherent worldview.