transcendent
/tranˈsɛnd(ə)nt
/ /ˌtrɑːnˈsɛnd(ə)nt/adjective
1Beyond or above the range of normal or physical human experience: the search for a transcendent level of knowledge...
- Nor was he the only literary type to embrace Catholicism's indeflectability as the answer to modernity's assault on inherited tradition and the human longing for the transcendent.
- By the end of the eighteenth century, liberal theology transformed traditional doctrines into statements that are metaphors for a general human relation to the transcendent.
- It is thus the point of the soul itself, that which marks us as unique from other animals, and allows access to the transpersonal and transcendent realms above.
1.1Surpassing the ordinary; exceptional: her transcendent beauty...
- Artists in many fields collaborate, as painters did in the Renaissance, before there was any guff about the artist as transcendent, solitary genius.
- When viewed through a magnifying glass it astonishes you not only with its similarity with Torenia's flower sans the purple or violet luxury but also with its transcendent beauty.
- There are too many people participating for it not to eventually produce works of staggering intellect, transcendent beauty and infectious humor.
Synonyms
superior, supreme, consummate, predominant, pre-eminent, ascendant, paramount, superlative, unique, unsurpassed, incomparable, unrivalled, unequalled, unparalleled, matchless, peerless, second to none;
excellent, excelling, great, magnificent
1.2(Of God) existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe. Often contrasted with immanent.This, he states, is strong evidence in support of religion and of a personal, transcendent God....
- God is transcendent; the belief deduced from this is that nature was mere scenery in the divine order of things.
- This conception of Wisdom parallels a less significant, general Jewish explanation of how a transcendent God could participate in a temporal creation.
Synonyms
supernatural, preternatural, transcendental, other-worldly, superhuman, mystical, mystic, spiritual, divine, heavenly, exalted, sublime, ethereal, numinous, transmundane, ineffable
2(In scholastic philosophy) higher than or not included in any of Aristotle’s ten categories.Western concepts of God have ranged from the detached transcendent demiurge of Aristotle to the pantheism of Spinoza....
- In this shift, signs float ever more free of the reality (including transcendent reality) to which they point.
- However, he does make a good case that the demand for some more transcendent basis for ethics is misplaced.
2.1(In Kantian philosophy) not realizable in experience.Metaphysical entities are by nature and definition utterly transcendent of the physical....
- For Kant the issue was a boundary between-between consciousness and matter, subject and object, empirical and transcendent.
- You're kind of right, because the kind of postmodernism you describe - ‘the philosophy that claims there is no transcendent truth’ - was never really alive.
Derivatives
transcendently
- Such moments are melancholy as well as joyful precisely because they are fleeting: transcendently beautiful but so brief as to be immeasurable.
- But if the issue is war, in which many thousands of people undoubtedly will die, the cause had better be transcendently important.
- Sung a cappella, the song is transcendently impassioned and beautiful.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin transcendent- 'climbing over', from the verb transcendere (see transcend).