The word ‘transcend’

Recently, I've become aware that my understanding of the word 'transcend' may be idiosyncratic or erroneous.

My dictionary (a disintegrating Concise Oxford Dictionary) has the following definition:

v.t. be beyond the range or domain or grasp of (human experience, reason, description, belief, etc.); excel, surpass.

However, I'm conscious of the inadequacies of my dictionary. I generally find its definitions vague and insufficient, and this is a case in point. Unfortunately, good dictionaries are very expensive.

I turn to the Internet now for a second opinion. Interestingly, the Internet yields up more helpful information. This is for the word 'trascendent':

1. Surpassing others; preeminent or supreme.
2. Lying beyond the ordinary range of perception: "fails to achieve a transcendent significance in suffering and squalor" (National Review).
3. Philosophy
a. Transcending the Aristotelian categories.
b. In Kant's theory of knowledge, being beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable.
4. Being above and independent of the material universe. Used of the Deity.

My understanding of the word (and its variants) is closest to the definition 3a here: "Transcending the Aristotelian categories", though this definition includes the all too common lexicographical trick of including a version of the word in the definition itself, and thus explaining very little.

The meaning of the word that I seem to be confronting more and more these days, and with which I have the greatest problem, is number 4 here: "Being above and independent of the material universe."

This is not the first time that this has happened to me. It is one of many times. I read a great deal as a child (not necessarily of the most edifying material, it's true) and I did not always look up new words in the dictionary. I often felt that I had intuitively grasped their meaning from the context and the sound, shape and spelling of the word. Hearing the same word again in different contexts, and finding nothing discordant with my understanding of the word, reinforced my first understanding. I even have a feeling that words learnt in this way constitute some of my favourite words.

Although I have looked up the word 'transcend' before, I'm not sure that I looked it up immediately on learning it. What's more, definitions encountered in the intervening years – of what is an abstract and abstruse word, anyway – have always been maddeningly vague. (The most specific being the Internet definition I have just looked up.) It's a word that appeals to me, however.

The sense I have had of the word has always been of a sort of rising up, somewhat like that of 'ascend', as in the Ascension. I see a specific physical form and some non-physical implication of this form which has an aspiring, vertical quality, like the spire of a Gothic cathedral. In fact, 'transcend' and 'ascend', unsurprisingly, share a root. The 'scend' part of each comes from the Latin 'scandere', meaning, 'to climb'.

'Trans', as we know, also denotes motion. 'Transport' = carry across ('trans' is 'across').

Therefore, a literal rendering of 'transcend' would mean 'climb across', which is closer to my understanding of the word, in fact, than "being above and independent of".

Perhaps to explain how my understanding differs from the "above and independent" one, I should use an example:

The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft transcends genre.

This is a fairly simple example. According to the "being above and independent of" understanding, this would mean that Lovecraft's work has nothing whatsoever to do with genre, is entirely detached from it. If this were the meaning of the word 'transcend', I would have to disagree with the above statement. However, if we were to say that Lovecraft has roots in the soil of genre, but rises above such distinctions as 'horror' and 'science fiction' like a bizarre toadstool, lifting aloft a grotesque and fascinating carapace on whose surface glitter gems of unthinkable corruption, then I would agree. In other words, Lovecraft uses elements of the supernatural, and therefore escapes being science fiction, but he does not use traditional supernatural tropes, instead depicting phenomena beyond human understanding and therefore open to interpretation. He is not 'horror' in a normal supernatural sense, and does not present merely visceral horror, either. In fact, his so-called 'horror' is more than slightly tinged with a feeling of awe at the vastness of the universe and all that is unknown within it. When one adds to this Lovecraft's stylistic peculiarities, which produce an atmosphere that many have emulated, but few, if any, have attained, we can see that while forms and conditions of genre are discernible in the soil (if you like, the body) of his work, there is an essence that is quite peculiar to Lovecraft.

In other words, my understanding of transcendence is that it starts with the form of things (part of which is what some call the physical) and moves beyond, upward, to the formless. The transcendent is the implied formlessness of forms, or the formless implications of forms. There is even a sense to the word that 'form' is something that must be passed through to arrive at formlessness, and that form must ever remain an anchor for formlessness, if formlessness is not to become nothingness.

Is this an erroneous understanding of the word 'transcend'?

I'm actually not sure. It might be. If it is, then it is an example of a phenomenon that interests me greatly – the idea that we each have our own unique language or 'idiolect'. Let us suppose that my understanding of 'transcend' is, by the standards of the world at large, false. What, then, is the word for the concept I have been describing? The concept itself is very real to me, and is one I have conjured up as it were ready-made each time I have used the word 'transcend'. But if I cannot use the word 'transcend' for it, the concept itself still exists within me. To me this points towards the possibility (in which I tend to believe) that thought precedes language and that language merely translates thought.

Just in case my use of the word 'transcend' has been wrong, please regard this blog post as an official statement that I have always used the word 'transcend' in the sense described above, and feel free yourselves to use the word 'transcend' in the Crispian sense.

And, as a further precaution, I will coin word to make my meaning clearer. If the word 'transcend' is unavailable for the meaning I wish to convey, then perhaps we can use the word 'interscend'. 'Trans', as we have seen, means 'across', as in 'transnational', 'trans-Siberia' and so on. However, this kind of 'across' suggests 'within' (within the nation, within Siberia, etc.), whereas my idea of 'transcend' suggests starting within and going out. In that sense, it is more like 'transgender', if we see genders as distinct states rather than part of a spectrum. In the 'transgender' sense, the word 'transcend' is certainly adequate to my intended meaning. However, since 'trans' often seems to correspond to 'intra', we might make the meaning more explicit by using the opposite of 'intra', to wit, 'inter': thus 'interscend'. I ask, therefore, that 'interscend' become a part of the English language. The only reservation I have about it is that 'inter' sounds like it might be two-way, whereas 'trans', to me, at least, has a dynamic, upward-thrusting quality to it – one-way, like the cathedral spires I mentioned.

PS. I have looked up again the various meanings of 'trans'. One of them seems to be 'into another state or place'. Perhaps this renders my 'interscend' redundant. Anyway, it's there should it be needed.