Transcendence

In plain terms

If something is genuinely beyond our concepts, then every statement about it is false, including that one.

That is not a clever objection; it is the problem the traditions that use the term have worked on hardest. Their standard response is negation. Say what it is not, accumulate the denials, and let the residue point rather than describe. Maimonides is the strictest: any positive statement about the divine essence is false, and the closest one comes is by subtraction.

The difficulty is knowing when a negation has said anything. Denying that something is red, or loud, or a Tuesday, produces no information if you never expected it to be.

And there is a second sense, Kant's, which is technical and much narrower: transcendent means beyond possible experience, and it is a boundary marker rather than a description.

As a philosopher would put it

Plotinus's One is epekeina tēs ousias, beyond being, and beyond intellect - so it cannot be an object of knowledge, and the ascent to it is not cognition.

The apophatic tradition develops from this: Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Maimonides, and Eckhart all hold that positive predication misdescribes. Maimonides' negative theology is the strictest version, and Aquinas's doctrine of analogy is the attempt to recover positive speech without univocity.

Kant's usage is unrelated and easily confused. Transcendent means beyond the bounds of possible experience, and is contrasted with transcendental, which concerns the conditions of experience - so the transcendental is not transcendent, and reversing the terms reverses his meaning.

The twentieth-century treatments split. Levinas locates transcendence in the other person rather than in a beyond; Heidegger's is Dasein's surpassing toward the world; and Nishida's Kyoto School work reads the absolute as absolute nothingness rather than as a supreme being.

What is actually disputed

Whether anything can be said.

Strict apophaticism holds that all positive predication of the transcendent is false, which protects its transcendence and raises the self-reference problem: the doctrine is itself a positive claim about what can be said.

Analogical accounts recover speech at the cost of some univocity - if good said of God and of a person share nothing, the word does no work, and if they share something, the transcendence is compromised.

The deflationary objection is blunter. A term that cannot be applied, denied, or tested may name nothing at all, and the accumulated negations have no more content than silence.

Defenders answer that this assumes all meaningful language is descriptive, and that the traditions using the term have always regarded it as regulative rather than informative - marking a limit rather than reporting from beyond one. Whether that is a defence or a restatement is where the argument stands.