Transcendentaal

Transcendentaal is a Dutch philosophical term used to translate the concept of transcendental. It designates an inquiry focused on the a priori conditions that make experience and knowledge possible, rather than on empirical facts or on things as they exist independently of thought. The distinction—often traced to Immanuel Kant and later developed by Husserl—separates the conditions of possible experience from the objects of experience.

In Kant's philosophy, the transcendental concerns the forms and structures through which objects are given to us. It includes the transcendental aesthetics, which identifies space and time as pure forms of sensibility, and the transcendental logic, which concerns the categories of the understanding. The aim is to explain how knowledge is possible, not to describe the world beyond experience.

In phenomenology, especially in Husserl, the transcendental standpoint analyzes how consciousness constitutes objects of experience. The term is used to indicate that certain features of experience are not empirical givens but necessary preconditions established by the subject's cognitive and perceptual machinery.

Transcendentaal is not the same as transcendent; the latter refers to things that lie beyond possible experience. Transcendentaal signals a methodological stance on the conditions of possibility of knowledge and perception, rather than a claim about metaphysical reality.