Transcendentalism Revisited

The great question raised with modernity was formulated by Kant, and by Husserl after him, as the question of the possibility of knowledge/cognition. Both of these thinkers attribute the power to structure the import of empiria, of experience, to a specifically human consciousness that is understood as being “transcendental” and to exercise a dominion over the world of life that it establishes. And yet if we do not limit our cognition to the realm of the manifested world of life—the structured realm of the human mind—and consider also the vaster and more inclusive region of life englobing it, we have to ask, “To what may we ultimately refer the possibility of cognition/constitution of reality?” Then, we would further ask, “What circumferences of the transcendentally projected dimensions—planes or extensions—of the gradated evidences of the cognitive horizons may we consider to be accessible to experience and at levels that may reach beyond, and in virtue of what factors?”