Truth in a Post-Truth World: Transcendence and the Essence of Mattering

Abstract

The possibility of transcendent, objective, perdurant truth seems to have fallen on hard times lately, the very concept increasingly being called into question – if not simply dismissed outright. Indeed, some authors argue that we have entered a “post-truth world, where ‘alternative facts’ replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence.” Unfortunately, transcendence itself is seldom seriously or directly addressed in contemporary psychology, despite the fact that transcendence as a construct, or, perhaps better, as an ontological presupposition, is at the heart of every account, approach, model, or explanation in psychology. This paper introduces one explicit analytical project aimed at examining transcendence itself and its role in theory and philosophy in psychology. The paper will (1) briefly address the definitional task; that is, specifying what might be meant by transcendence as it is most often understood within the scholarly literature, particularly in contrast to immanence, (2) analyze some attempts to reduce transcendence to immanence and suggest that all such are unsuccessful, and (3) present a schematic framework for locating various theories and explanatory approaches in psychology within a conceptual “topology” that runs between weak and strong transcendence on one axis, and weak and strong evaluation on the other.