Running the Line: More Help With Transcendentals for Beginners and Experts

I do not envy the person who first encounters the concept of "transcendentals," since this notion has about two thousand years worth of development built into it, as it shows up in contemporary debates featuring the biblical practice of apologetics (defending the Christian worldview against any other -- and all others). This practice ordinarily goes by the name "presuppositionalism," given its strong emphasis upon inquiring as to the presuppositions necessary simply to account for what we do in the every day world (not to mention in specialized activities like logic, science, ethics, and the like.

Today, I plan to digress briefly, touching upon Plato's famous doctrine of the "Forms" or "Archetypes," Immanuel Kant's main ideas about how we know things (Kantian epistemology), and then Dr. VanTil's use of the term "transcendentals" to outline a thumbnail sketch of just what presuppositionalists do -- and do not -- mean when they speak of transcendentals.

In other words, by giving a brief historical account (from the history of western thought), I wish to tie down as neatly as possible and otherwise elusive and somewhat nebulous concept.

First, Plato faced a difficult task in attempting -- as do philosophy teachers everywhere today -- to get students to think in term of what philosophers now call "universals." These are something like the "common denominator" as a set of attributes (or single attribute in simple cases) which members of a particular set have in common. These, however, are not incidental features, but defining features, the most relevant characteristic set that makes a thing what it is.

For example, upon asking "What exactly is a 'chair'?" one might attempt this or that definition. Then someone else will -- notoriously, here come the hecklers -- insert something we know is NOT a chair, but which meets the definition so far given. When a group of ancient philosophers met to define what is a man -- having given the operational definition to it as "a featherless bi-ped," Diogenes the Cynic was said to have met early at the place of their discussions, just at the right time, tossing a plucked chicken -- his counter-instance to their definition -- over the fence at their feet. A plucked chicken is a featherless biped too, after all, and not a man. (If this account is not historical, we all know it should have been).

On any account, the essential features of a defined class of objects or persons ordinarily receive the name "universals," so that "sweetness" (in general) might be said to be a universal of the class of "fruit." One might attenuate this class as "ripened fruit" to avoid the hecklers.

Plato saw a certain "hierarchy" to these, with which it is easy to sympathize as a Christian (and Augsutine and many others did so sympathize), calling them "forms." These were patterns not found anywhere in the material world, but in which each member of the set (say "ripe fruit") was said to "participate." For sweet strawberries, pineapple or watermelon certainly seem to participate in the attribute of "sweetness."

Now since Plato's judgment regarding life saw ethical attributes of the highest importance among men, he placed at the top of his hierarchy what we call "the Good." Just below this were the forms of "Justice," and other virtues. Plato envisioned -- this also is in some way consistent with the biblical outlook (and in others not) -- these Forms as existing by themselves eternally, since they were not subject to physical interaction, decay, time and change. If the rule -- do not murder -- was just yesterday, he taught, then it must always be the case that this rule is just.

Being eternal, these forms (Plato held) must necessarily exist APART from the objects or persons who participate in them. A just man, for instance, was just because he participated in this eternal form of justice. Justice could then not be found in whole in any one concrete example (any one person) of its expression in time. These are but copies or shadows of the actual Form so exemplified.

This necessarily made them the "universal preconditions" of knowledge, truth and goodness practiced down here in the emprical world of "copies and shadows." The sense of "preconditon" here is two-fold. Plato actually believed in the metaphysical existence of such entities -- these things he called "forms." They were not for him just some sort of convention we must assume in order to make sense out of the particular things we encounter in our daily lives (and why we classify them into sets like "all things fruit," or "the total number of cars in the world" by simply saying "cars use gas." I suppose at least Diogenes would have needed many men to throw an electric car over the fence at us.

So Plato recognized the forms as real-world things "out there" somewhere (metaphysical realities) and as entities who existence was NECESSARILY assumed in any debate about the world around us, and our knowledge of that world, the world of particular things. So the complement (you might say 'opposite' of) to universals is "particulars," where this term just means this or that thing you see, taste touch, smell or hear in everyday, which you distinguish as something separate from the other many particulars out there.

For example, we all notice that chocolate bars are not the same sorts of things as airline jets. These different sets of particulars belong to different classes of objects. Chocolate bars carry no passengers, and (so far as I know) 747's are not delicious.

In sum then, Plato recognized that in order to make sense out of ordinary human experience -- its particular details, we have to group them in classes with particular attributes, in which all members of the set we name must somehow "participate" in these universal traits. The more important universal traits were the ethical and jurisprudential ones (the ones you need to appeal to in law courts to get justice).

Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century, German "Enlightenment" philosopher would then adopt and greatly modify the original sense of Plato's Forms, for the first time calling them "transcendentals." Kant dropped the idea that these Forms actually existed "out there" in the real world, but retained the idea that humans must see the world according to these certain ways of perceiving it (and classifying things).

Why do clouds appear white to us? one might say in ordinary conversation, "All clouds are white." This might not receive much controversial attention. Kant answered (in short, very short) that humans have certain categories -- like filters -- built into what we might today called their "hard drives," which require them to sort out their many perceptions (which assault us all at once from the moment we open our eyes -- white clouds, bright candies at See's, all manner of different sizes of books, and the like.

Our brains must manipulate billions of bits of (again a modern metaphor) streaming data hurled at us minute by minute. How do we know how to sort and analyze them in ways consistent with the ways other people will do it too (if we all did this differently language would not be possible). So Kant's solution to figuring out how we know -- where the most important word is WE -- is that the human condition involves built-in perceptual categories which help us do all this sorting, analyzing and classifying (and whatever other jumping jacks the mind may do) of the particulars we run into daily.

These then became the necessary preconditions for rendering the overtaxing flow of streaming whatever that comes at us (reality) -- "intelligible" to us. Kant held that if the world tossed data at us -- say light that is not on the visible spectrum (perhaps infrared light) -- we simply do not have the filter for it, so this data would simply be ignored or unnoticed.

As a child, I encountered a game -- involving Play-dough -- where if you cranked the handle which shoved the dough forward, it forced it through some pre-cut shapes -- stars, squares or what not, and then Play-dough simply came out in these shapes for the pressure and pre-cut patterns built into the plastic machines. That is a fair picture of how Kant viewed the knowing process. We see stars because are hardware is set so to grasp the many colors of light, categories of size and shape, with which we show up to the game from the first.

These perceptual categories were then for Kant "the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience." This phrase cannot be found exactly in his works so far as I know, but Dr. VanTil did use it. VanTil restored the sense of objective reality to these universals -- as with Plato -- but found them not existing separately as discrete units floating about in etheral space -- but fully integrated and mutually affirming in the nature of the God of the Bible.

Chalk one up for Cornelius. Now He also, following the biblical world-view's understanding of man, agreed with Kant, that -- since humans are made in God's image -- we do in fact have "prefab" perceptual categories. But unlike Kant, VanTil held that these actually "matched" the world out there. The objective world, having been made by the same Creator who made man -- Augustine had already taught this after a similar fashion -- the sense and mind of man naturally correspond to the real world about us. Kant had shrouded the real world (he called it the "noumenal realm" beause this sounds more academic) in mystery by suggesting that we can only know what "fits" our "knowing filter" apparatus.

VanTil in the bibical tradition reaffirmed that there exists a natural fit between the two (the world and mind of man), and that in the knowing of these, God's attributes showed through as the necessary preconditions -- like a subtext in the study of literature or rhetoric or "substratum" in other fields -- which objectively gave light to us so that our categories of knowing are properly enabled to do their cognitive jobs -- analyzing, collecting, sorting, synthesizing, postulating, and the like.

This is confessionally, the light of nature, which gives light to every man. His built-in hardware which enable him to know are simply the result of his being made in the divine image. VanTil the restored the focus of knowing -- and especially its preconditions -- in the objective world which Kant would have called the "noumenal realm." The mystery of this realm God overcomes by the light of nature, and especially in His giving the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures to His people that we might know Him, and see plainly all the goodness, wisdom, power and marvel of His many other glorious attributes -- the true ethical "Forms" in the Person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ the Lord. He is supremely Plato's "just man," and the "philosopher-king" who alone is fit to rule all things for the inherent goodness of his noble character -- and far more than anything Plato ever dreamt (the fulfillement of all the light of nature and prophetic Word of God).

For "however so many be the promises of God, they are in [Christ] both the 'Yes' and the 'Amen.'"

So transcendentals -- though Plato called them only "forms" -- started off as "objective only" -- written in the sky (so to speak) for Plato and the many who followed him. Augustine added that they had a ready perceptual counterpart in the Imago Dei -- the image of God in man -- rendering knowledge possible. He added famously that without these preconditions -- both anthropological (built into us) and cosmological (built into the rest of the world) -- that knowledge would in fact be impossible.

Here was the first full argument which implied that the God of the Bible, and his particular attributes resident in all the creation (and especially clearly stated in the Bible) formed the neceessary preconditions for rendering the world knowable to us. Here is the punchline: Augustine also held that the contrary -- without these -- knowledge proved impossible.

This put Jesus Christ, the Logos from the Beginning -- which enlightens every man -- as the foundation of all wisdom and knowledge. Shoots. Scores.

Kant explained well that without some form of pre-established knowing categories to act as filters for the knowing process, the world would otherwise remain altogether mysterious, even bizarre and irrational to us, without form and void. This actually provides the backdrop -- a very useful insight -- for the reason why God HAD to first reveal Himself lest we be altogether without knowledge. Hence our complete and total dependence upon the Triune Christian God for all things good. You won't get very far in life without knowledge now will you.

Doctor VanTil neatly integrated these various insights, producing the unbeatable premiss, that in order to explain anything at all, we must assume (presuppose) the whole Word of God written as a single unit of thought (or worldview), for its explanation alone provides escape from the otherwise dauntingly impenetrable mystery of the noumenal world, which like a large black void would rob us of all sure knowledge, once we fail to uphold both the subjective preconditions for knowing (we are made in God's image) and the objective preconditions for knowing (the truth of the Word of God). knowledge comes as a package deal, or it comes not at all.

Now VanTil also recognized from the study of philosophy -- following Augustine's lead again (and John Calvin's) -- that some propositions must be affirmed because their negation would undermine the possibility of knowing. These necessary truths were thus said to be "transcendental." The denial of any one of these propositions self-cancels. Go ahead and do the math for yourself. This is the nature of transendental claims -- their denials eliminate themselves by logical implication, leaving their affirmations as the only veridical game in town. They therefore MUST BE true because their contradictories (the contrary in ordinary speech) are logically impossible.

These include the claims that:

1. Our sense are generally reliable (barring unusual conditions, i.e. drugs, dehydration, etc)
2. That our memory-beliefs are generally reliable
3. That some truths are both true and knowable
4. Inductions can be warranted
5. Human language is objectively meaningful
6. Laws of Logic exist
7. Absolute laws of morality exist (or alternately, "Some acts are inherently wrong, not conventionally wrong only" (i.e. genocide, blowing up the whole planet, theft from innocent people, etc).
8. Some beliefs are true and others false.
9. Not all beliefs are equally valid.

And these have many implicates I could go on listing, especially when these transcendental claims are cross-referenced in syllogistic fashion. This is the teaching of the light of nature, as these are knowable and deducible apart from the Word of God, and yet remain wholly consistent with its teachings. Many philosophers have deduced them (and like propositions) in this manner.

Transcendentals then "run the line" between the transcendent (noumenal) world and the immanent world of everyday experience. They form a knowable -- anti-neutral zone -- providing information about the world we cannot see from the one we can, by logical operations common to men (or at least men and women who do their homework). This explains the title of today's post. The specific content of the light of nature -- transcendental content in the nature of the case - is in fact available in propositional form, and is known by them in all things they do and say in everyday life -- but only as a substratum -- as set of necessary preconditions that come as a package deal (not in slices or one at a time the way we must study them in isolation from the others -- see Dodging the Pepperoni Pizza Fallacy by Carson C. Day at many ezines)

In order, however, for us to understand how the parts of this package accurately and properly relate to each other, we will need some help from the "other side." God has graciously provided this to us in the form of the canon of Holy Scripture.

This is -- going just a bit beyond VanTil and his contemporaries (for God has commanded us to march forward) the only meta-transcendental -- which properly balances the teaching of any one proposition of the light of nature with any other, and qualifies each with additional information we could not have thereby obtained. And each form of God's revealing - from nature and His written Word -- comes togther fully integrated (with the mutual consent of all the parts) only in the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory and One greater than Solomon.

But we only know the Lord from the light of nature and the written Word of God. Christians do not believe in just any Jesus -- for many false christs have gone out into the world and some preach "another gospel," which is no good news at all. We believe in Jesus, the Lord and giver of life, the only-begotten of the Father -- ONLY as He is offered to us in the gospel and as this gospel is revealed from heaven -- taught, prophesied, explained, qualified and promised -- in ALL the Holy Scripture together as a single worldview.

This Gospel, as the meta-transcendental -- the light which interprets and judges finally and sufficiently of the less clear "light of nature" -- remains therefore infallible, unchallengeable, in debate unbeatable, invincible, irrefragable (for the Scripture cannot be broken), powerful to its appointed end, inescapable, sufficient, and the glorious point of boasting in which all God's people can rest in its verdict.

For the contrary is impossible. And all knowledge presupposes it necessarily. This saying is true is worthy of full acceptation. For it is written, "The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul." What is left to say, but the "Yes" and "Amen"? For Jesus is the light of the world.