Immanence

Nathan Widder

Immanence is the attribute of being internal or remaining within, free from external conditioning. Immanence is opposed to transcendence, which concerns what is above, beyond, or outside. In theology, an immanent conception would hold God to be a divine spirit infusing the world, rather than one that lies beyond and independent of the world. The ancient Stoics assert such an immanent divinity, as does the early modern philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whereas Augustine's God is transcendent. Phenomenology, the science of appearances, aims to isolate what is immanent to consciousness through a phenomenological reduction that brackets off and eliminates anything that conditions consciousness from outside. Following this idea, Jean-Paul Sartre argues, against Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, that the ego, being an organizing principle extraneous to appearances themselves, is transcendent to consciousness, rather than immanent. An immanent critique would be one that derives its standards from within the domain being evaluated, rather than The ...

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