Not what you can weigh or price, but what makes weighing and pricing possible to do at all in the first place.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) used “transcendental” precisely: not mystical, but referring to the conditions that make ordinary experience and knowledge possible in the first place — the structures behind the structure. The word has since drifted in popular use toward something closer to “spiritual” or “beyond the material,” which is the sense this vault leans on when it talks about purpose that exceeds mere utility.
That popular drift isn’t pure corruption of the term, though — Kant’s own transcendental philosophy was itself concerned with the limits of what pure reason alone can establish, leaving room for exactly the kind of meaning-beyond-utility question a purely materialist or utilitarian framework can’t answer on its own terms.
🔗 Related Concepts
Source: de Boer, K. “Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel,” Kantian Review, 2011. Primary: Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.