Even though I have been talking about transcendent knowledge in most of my blog posts, the characteristics of that category of knowledge, even its qualification of knowledge, have not been properly discussed up to now. I’ll take three examples of transcendent knowledge and try to better define it through their presentation.

The first example, which has already been discussed, is transcendent knowledge of the self, that is to say self-consciousness. What I call self-consciousness is the intuition triggered by the cogito, that is to say the regressio ad infinitum relationship of the self with itself. I think that I think that I think, without any way to go further that the self. This infinite repetition, this absolute stop is the sign of the thing in itself, of something that does not need the support of any other notion to be acknowledged.

What needs to be recognized in relation to the cogito is that it is not a demonstration of the transcendent existence of the self, which would be contradictory with the self-contained nature of things in themselves. The cogito only triggers the experience of transcendent intuition that is self-consciousness: it is a mental exercise that allows us to become aware of the specific nature of our relationship with ourselves. Transcendent knowledge of the self is its own foundation.

Having identified a first example of transcendent knowledge (which could be called transcendent experience or intuition), we have a way to test other knowledge to establish whether or not it is transcendent. The test is as follows: if you are willing to die for something, you must have transcendent knowledge of that thing, as you are ready to sacrifice for that thing your self, and you have transcendent knowledge of your self.

Please note, as an aside, that I do not affirm by the previous sentence that the consequence of death for the transcendent self is annihilation: it is sufficient for our purposes to assume an agnostic stance and to our default position must be our ignorance of the transcendent consequences of ciscendent death.

If you are willing to die for something, you consider that that thing has equal value to yourself, hence your knowledge of that thing is transcendent. To find other examples of transcendent knowledge than self-knowledge, we must turn towards the things one is ready to die for.

One obvious objection can be made: one may believe that he has transcendent knowledge of something and be deluded. Considering the nature of the other examples of transcendent knowledge we are going to present, I have no doubt that this point will be made. In which case, we would probably have to conclude that no transcendent knowledge is possible outside of self-knowledge, and that we can only rely on the freedom to assume and transcendental knowledge outside of the transcendent island of the self.

What are people willing to sacrifice their life for? Other people, obviously. The easiest example of people being ready to sacrifice their life for other people is of course parents accepting to die for the sake of their children. Or one spouse for another.

The common point of these cases of self-sacrifice is love. Hence, we could define love as the transcendent knowledge of the existence of another person. You only are ready to sacrifice yourself for someone you love because you are as certain of his existence as you are certain of yours. Otherwise you would only assume that they exist in the same way as you do, and that assumption would not stand the test of self-sacrifice.

The main difficulty with love as a source of transcendent knowledge is that love is, in the way most human beings experience it, only actualised in relation to a few human beings. “You can’t love everybody.” But if you recognise that one other human being exists in the same way as you do, how can you not infer from that fact that all other human beings also exist in the same way? You would need a strange cosmology to explain why some human beings are conscious beings and others are just bundles of phenomena. If one other human being transcendently exists, all other human beings transcendently exists. Transcendent solipsism is defendable, but transcendent oligopsism makes little to no sense without baroque justifications.

Nevertheless, transcendent oligopsism is rampant. People are ready to die for their children but don’t care about thousands of people dying of diseases curable for a few dollars. As an explanation, we could state that what we have tried to do above is to build, out of the transcendent intuition of the existence of others, a logical case for the transcendent existence of all mankind: this attempt was doomed to fail, as logic is a set of transcendental assumptions, not transcendent knowledge (no one is ready to die for the sake of logic). Transcendent knowledge is not a foundation for logical deductions.

Another example of self-sacrifice is religious martyrdom, the man who is put to death for refusing to abjure his faith in God. Just as the parent who dies for his children, the believer that dies for his God proclaims that he has knowledge of the transcendent existence of the divine. This kind of believer is not a deist who, on the basis of observation and reason, assumes that God exists. His faith does not, just as the love of the parent, rely on a logical foundation. It stands on its own, just as the knowledge of a thing in itself should.

What is the common point between these three examples? They all express a relation between the self and a person (either the self itself, other conscious beings or God). From there one is tempted to state the following: things in themselves share the same quality of personhood.

Moreover, these relations are not, as we had first qualified them, well defined by the notion of knowledge, for they are living relationships: consciousness, love and faith are of a different nature than knowledge about phenomena. Transcendent relationships, relationships between things in themselves, have a richness that can only be found in interpersonal interactions.