Immanence - Continental Philosophy

Continental Philosophy

An exception to this idea would be Giovanni Gentile's "Actual Idealism" wherein immanence of the subject is identified with transcendence over the material world. Giordano Bruno's, Baruch Spinoza's and, it may be argued, Hegel's philosophies were philosophies of immanence versus philosophies of transcendence such as thomism or Aristotelian tradition. While risking oversimplification, Kant's "transcendental" critique, can be contrasted to Hegel's "immanent," dialectical idealist critique. Gilles Deleuze qualified Spinoza as the "prince of philosophers" for his theory of immanence, which Spinoza resumed by "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature"). Such a theory considers that there is no transcendent principle or external cause to the world, and that the process of life production is contained in life itself. When compounded with Idealism, the immanence theory qualifies itself away from "the world" to there being no external cause to one's mind.

In the context of Kant's theory of knowledge Immanence means to remain in the boundaries of possible experience.

Political theorist Carl Schmitt used the term in his book Politische theologie (1922), meaning a power within some thought, which makes it obvious for the people to accept it, without needing to claim being justified. The immanence of some political system or a part of it comes from the reigning contemporary definer of weltanschauung, namely religion (or any similar system of beliefs, such as rationalistic or relativistic world-view). The Nazis took advantage of this theory creating, or resurrecting, basically religious mythology of race, its heroes, and its destiny to motivate people and to make their reign unquestionable, which it became.

The French 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze used the term immanence to refer to his "empiricist philosophy", which was obliged to create action and results rather than establish transcendentals. His final text was titled Immanence: a life... and spoke of a plane of immanence.

Furthermore, the Russian Formalist film theorists perceived immanence as a specific method of discussing the limits of ability for a technological object. Specifically, this is the scope of potential uses of an object outside of the limits prescribed by culture or convention, and is instead simply the empirical spectrum of function for a technological artifact.