Immanence

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from the etymology: immanere is what remains there, somewhat hidden beneath, and not in another world. He first sets the immanent against the transcendent. In animist religions and in the Greek world, the divine is inside things: nymphs live in the springs, Poseidon in the ocean. He specifies that this is the divine, not God12. For him this world of immanence is perilous and tragic: one can cross over into the divine without noticing and commit hubris, which tragedy comes to purge3. He also distinguishes the immanent from the transitive: in Spinoza, God is the immanent cause of the world, which he creates simply by being, outside time4. He applies the notion to the organism, whose parts conspire5, to the correspondences between the senses, and to the Kantian transcendental. Christianity, with Descartes, hunts down immanence, but it also unites immanence and transcendence in the incarnation.

1. 1Hölderlin, poetry and politics19 Mar 2022 · 1:19:05
2. 2The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction5 May 2026 · 12:14
3. 3The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction5 May 2026 · 57:35
4. 4“I is another”, or contradictory identity12 Dec 2023 · 20:13
5. 5#9.13 How can sciences of history be real?29 Jan 2021 · 37:08

Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.