Table of Contents

Introduction by David LaRocca
Defying Definition: Opening Remarks on the Transcendental

PLATO
Phaedrus
Phaedo
Parmenides

ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
Posterior Analytics

Svetasvatara Upanishad
First, Second, and Third Adhyâya

Vimalakirti
from The Vimalakirti Sutra
Beyond Comprehension

Lucretius
from On the Nature of Things

Longinus
from On the Sublime

Plotinus
from the Enneads
Third Tractate: The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent

Augustine of Hippo
from the Confessions

Benedict of Norcia
from The Rule

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
On the Rational Soul

Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
from On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy

Thomas Aquinas
from the Summa Theologica
Of Man Who is Composed of a Spiritual and a Corporeal Substance

Duns Scotus
Concerning Metaphysics, The Science of the Transcendentals

Dante Alighieri
from the Divine Comedy: Paradiso (1308-21)

Michel Montaigne
from Essays (1587-88)
“Of Experience”

William Shakespeare
Seven Soliloquies from Hamlet (1599/1602)

George Herbert
from The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633)
The Altar
The Agonie
Sinne (I)
Affliction (I)
The Quidditie
The Starre
Vanitie
Mortification
Miserie
Death

René Descartes
from Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Sixth Meditation: “Of the Existence of Corporeal Things and of the Real Distinction
Between the Mind and Body of Man”

Blaise Pascal
from Pensées (1669)
The Philosophers

Baruch Spinoza
from The Ethics (1677)
Concerning God
On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

Edmund Burke
from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1756)

Johann Just Winckelmann
from Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1759)
On Grace in Works of Art

Immanuel Kant
from The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87)
Of the Principles of a Transcendental Deduction in General
Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
Of the Supreme Principle of all Synthetical Judgments
Second Analogy: Principle of the Succession of Time According to the Law of Causality
Refutation of Idealism
Fourth Paralogism: of Ideality

Johann Gottlieb Fichte
from Characteristics of the Present Age (1806)
Mysticism as a Phenomenon of the Third Age

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy
Consciousness

Germaine de Staël
from Germany (1813)
Kant

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Dejection: An Ode (1802)

from Biographia Literaria (1817)

William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807)

from The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850)
[Intimations of Sublimity]
Imagination, How Impaired and Restored

William Ellery Channing
Likeness to God (1828)

Arthur Schopenhauer
from The World as Will and Idea (1818/19)
The World as Idea, First Aspect
The Failure of Philosophy: A Brief Dialogue
The Vanity of Existence

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
from The Christian Faith (1821)

Sampson Reed
from Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826)

Johann Gottfried von Herder
from The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782/1833)

Thomas Carlyle
from Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (1833)
Pure Reason
Symbols
Natural Supernaturalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Transcendentalist (1841)

Margaret Fuller
from Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Swedenborg, Fourier, and Goethe

Karl Marx
Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Søren Kierkegaard
from Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846)
The Task of Becoming Subjective
The Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity

Herman Melville
from Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
The Mast-Head
The Whiteness of the Whale

Henry David Thoreau
from Walden; Or Life in the Woods (1854)
Higher Laws

from Journals, 1837-1861

Gerard Manly Hopkins
Nondum “Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself”
Starlight Night
The Lantern out of Doors
Thee, God, I come from
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

Matthew Arnold
from Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Hebraism and Hellenism

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
from The Brothers Karamazov (1879/80)
The Grand Inquisitor

Friedrich Nietzsche
from Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886)
On the Prejudices of Philosophers
What is Religious?

Walter Pater
from Appreciations
Coleridge (1889)

Emily Dickinson
from Poems (1890)

Charles Sanders Peirce
The Law of Mind (1892)

Leo Tolstoy
Reason and Religion (1895)

Swami Vivekananda
The Absolute and Manifestation (1896)

Josiah Royce
from The World and the Individual (1899)
The Fourth Conception of Being

Sigmund Freud
from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

William James
from The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901/2)
The Reality of the Unseen

Paul Deussen
from Outlines of Indian Philosophy with an Appendix on the Philosophy of the Vedanta
in its Relations to the Occidental Metaphysics (1907)

Henry Adams
from The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
The Dynamo and the Virgin

Henri Bergson
Beyond the Noumenal (1907)

Marcel Proust
from Swann’s Way (1913)

Franz Kafka
from The Trial (1915)
Before the Law

Ludwig Wittgenstein
from the Notebooks (1916)

John Dewey
from Democracy and Education (1916)
The Individual and the World

Bertrand Russell
from Mysticism and Logic (1917)

Oswald Spengler
from The Decline of the West (1918)

Franz Rosenzweig
from Understanding the Sick and Healthy (1921)

George Santayana
from Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Some Authorities for this Conclusion

Reinhold Niebuhr
from Discerning the Signs of the Times (1946)
Mystery and Meaning

Simone Weil
The Love of God and Affliction (1951)

Edmund Husserl
from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954)

Martin Heidegger
from An Introduction to Metaphysics (1959)
The Limitation of Being

Paul Tillich
from The Dynamics of Faith (1967)

Bernard Williams
Wittgenstein and Idealism (1973)

Stanley Cavell
Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions) (1983)

Michel Foucault
What is Enlightenment? (1984)

Emmanuel Levinas
Transcendence and Intelligibility (1984)

Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Sublime and the Avant-Garde (1984)

Giorgio Agamben
The Thing Itself (1987)

Donald Davidson
The Conditions of Thought (1989)

Iris Murdoch
from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1989/1992)
Fact and Value

Slavoj Žižek
from The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
“Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject”

Gilles Deleuze
from The Logic of Sense (1990)
from Difference and Repetition (1994)

Jacques Derrida
from Aporias (1993)
Finis [“Is my death possible?”]

Richard Rorty
Is Derrida a Quasi-Transcendental Philosopher? (1995)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999)
Philosophy

Luce Irigaray
Approaching the Other as Other (1999)
Spiritual Tasks for Our Age (2004)

Alain Badiou
from Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (2000)
Univocity of Being and the Multiplicity of Names

Jacques Rancière
The Janus-Face of Politicized Art (2003)

Charles Taylor
from A Secular Age (2007)

Acknowledgments

Credits

Promotional Information

The definitive single-volume anthology of transcendental thought from Plato through Kant and the American transcendentalists to the present day.

About the Author

David LaRocca is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, USA. Recently, he was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland, USA; Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, USA; and Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, USA. He is the author of On Emerson (2003), Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (2013), and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013).

Reviews

The concept of the transcendental is often invoked in philosophy and literature, but until now its history has been neglected. This volume, bringing together a variety of writings from different disciplines and different traditions, allows us to begin to reflect on the character of this elusive concept. In that sense, this volume is more than an overview of a field of study—it is participating in the creation of one.
*Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University, USA*

A splendid collection of some of the deepest thoughts of which humans are capable. The book is full of insights and surprises.
*John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, USA*

In the editor's own words, this anthology is at once 'essential' and 'impossible,' since it portends to give textual shape to a topic that has defied the entire tradition of Western philosophy, which concerns the very question from which all philosophizing begins, i.e., the transcendental. In taking up this task, LaRocca assumes more the guise of a curator than an editor, and provides us with a veritable Kunstkammer, that is, a cabinet of curiosities, a theater of memory, a world theater of philosophers, artists, and writers from all ages who have addressed the transcendental as a constant and elemental aspect of philosophy and life.
*Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of Humanities, Syracuse University, USA*

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought brings together an excellent selection of texts from several philosophical perspectives on the question of the transcendental, demonstrating the complexity of the concept's meaning, its rich and often contradictory histories. Edited with great erudition and care by David LaRocca, the collection will be an indispensable handbook for anybody researching the heritage of that tradition.
*Branka Arsic, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA*

In this unique and timely collection, David LaRocca offers us a thoughtful reminder that the very possibility and urgent task of thinking, of our acting and judging, ethics and politics, rests upon a willing exposure to an aspect of our everyday and ordinary experience that is hard to grasp and eludes most, perhaps all, epistemic criteria. Metaphysicians, mystics, and moral perfectionists of all stripes have called this 'the transcendental,' thus risking the fatal misunderstanding that this means only 'the transcendent,' leading to the dualist assumption that we are citizens of two separate (earthly and heavenly) cities or (phenomenal and noumenal) worlds. Yet the truth is far more simple, if much harder to accept and then also live by. We are what we are, here and now. Yet we're not, therefore, irrevocably bound by what thus is said 'to be'—much less by the proverbial powers that will always be—in what we can still further imagine and aim or hope for, against the odds, as it were. In this brilliantly edited and introduced anthology, LaRocca presents us with the broadest selection of authors, philosophers, visionaries, and artists, who have expressed this simple, difficult truth and freedom in the most profound and varied of ways.
*Hent de Vries, Russ Family Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, USA, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, USA*