Page History

This is the distinction with respect to the concept-term "transcendental," which I have sometimes used in distinction from "historical" -- as, for example, in the thesis: "A religion's explicit primal source of authority is thus the _historical_, as distinct from the _transcendental_, source \[implicitly\] authorizing its claim to decisive existential authority" (5 December 1994). (Elsewhere, however, I have used "transhistorical" in place of "transcendental" -- as, for example, when I say, "the point is that the object side of the religious correlation is itself duplex, having a historical as well as a transhistorical aspect, each dialectically related to the other. Otherwise put: the object side of the religious correlation itself involves a correlation \-\- in Boff's terms \-\- between an 'order of _manifestation_' and an 'order of _constitution_' relative to the subject side of the correlation" \[10 June 1989; rev. 5 January 2001\].) In the case of this further distinction, however, the distinguishing adjectives are not "existential" and "empirical," but "existential" and "metaphysical," which yield the distinction between "existential-transcendental" and "metaphysical-transcendental." Whereas the first means the transcendental in its meaning for us, the second means the transcendental in its structure in itself \-\- just as "existential-historical" means the historical in its meaning for us, while "empirical-historical" means the historical in its structure in itself. Of course, the difference, requiring one to characterize this distinction as only analogous to the other is the logical-ontological type difference between "the transcendental" and "the categorial" \-\- "the historical" being simply a special case of "the categorial."