If transcendence is to be denied, there are certain consequences that must be considered and addressed. For example, is language deterministic? Is the human will deterministic? Is the human mind deterministic?
Materialism depends upon a blind succession of events occurring, which result in the mind, the will, and language. As such, the events have no meaning, and the results should also have no meaning. So the mind, will and language should be, and are by many, considered deterministic.
If these entities are without meaning, can they have meaning, or project meaning? How could this be decided?
If the mind has no meaning and projects no meaning, then language has no meaning, and these words have no meaning. Therefore it is up to your intuition to determine whether or not meaning could exist, either here or elsewhere.
In fact, you might ask yourself if the word “meaning” itself has a meaning. If you did, you would be using language. So you have assumed that language has meaning. And you also assumed that meaning exists, because you asked if that word had any. You have, then, intuited that meaning exists and has meaning. And this means that intuition exists, and since intuition is transcendent, transcendence also exists.
The same goes for ideas: we all develop the idea of an idea. It is necessary for invention:
"What
is required for all other human inventions is the notion that one can actively,
consciously construct new ideas. We
take this for granted, but it is not a "natural" development.
Three-year-old children have lots of ideas and even make up new ideas. But they
do not have the Idea of an Idea that they can construct anew; they do not
naturally arrive at the idea that making up new ideas is something people do.
The Idea of an Idea is a cultural creation that children have to learn."
"It is only with the Idea of an Idea that we get conscious specific intellectual constructions like democracy, science, the number system, the computer, the birth control pill, and so on. The Idea of an Idea is the generative notion behind the very notion of an invention and is causally necessary for all specific inventions."
GEORGE LAKOFF is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is on the faculty of the Institute of Cognitive Studies.
Of course, an idea is a transcendent entity; it is not measurable by any material, natural, empirical method. It is known to exist only through either direct communication (transcendental), or by inference (also transcendental). The mind states, or brain states, or electrical activity of the brain will never serve to reveal an idea of an idea.