Transcendentalism Overturned

Abstract

“Transcendentalism,” denominating the philosophical approach that captured Occidental thought in the nineteenth century, is focused on enigmas of human cognition that have tantalized the human mind from the rise of Greek metaphysics onward. Conceptions of human cognition, of its origins, sources, modalities, its meaningfulness, and its objectives – seen as the essential factor of life – had varied much before the contemporary approach oriented toward the confrontation of subject and object was reached. The subject–object dichotomy endures and in particular informs the crucial argument of its Kantian–Husserlian expression, which continues to reverberate in contemporary thought. I have discussed the essential unity of the subject of cognition and the object in my monograph, “The New Enlightenment in the Newly Reformulated Alliance Between Philosophy and Science,” in Astronomy and Civilization in the New Enlightenment, Analecta Husserliana CVII pp. 2–17. Presently, it is in pursuing cognition/understanding in the course of its vibrating crystalizations, that we will unlock the great enigmas of sense, the crucial knot of the notion of “transcendentalism” from its origin, bringing to light that beyond the traditional subject–object schema of cognition (involving absolute consciousness) there lies the open horizon toward which human cognition has advanced with signal success in our scientific progress. In particular, in our wondering through the millennia about our primogenital existential ties with the planet earth, we have become quite significantly enlightened about our foothold in existence and the celestial orbit it takes as an integral partner among other planets, moons, suns/stars..., about the dynamic celestial architectonics. We then turn to life, which gathers in its prompting swing all the forces focused in becoming and centralizes them upon the earth; here ontopoietic individualization finds its peak expression as it establishes originary unfolding and sustaining systems. Cognition, the existential vehicle of life, remains geocentrically and cosmically linked and positioned. It is the challenge we make to transcendental philosophy. These expanded horizons of cognition have made it imperative that we revise philosophy and rethink the nature and role of sense in existence.