Relation to the world· Philosophy of religiondifficulty
Where the sacred resides
Does the sacred reside in this very world, or in a beyond that surpasses it?
If the sacred is here, in this world, the spiritual quest turns toward life, nature, the present; if it dwells in a beyond, this world becomes a passage toward something higher than itself. To take a position is to say where to seek the absolute, and what this life is worth depending on whether it lies here or elsewhere.
Immanence
20There is no world behind this one: whatever deserves to be called sacred or divine resides in this world, in nature, in life and its powers. To look for meaning elsewhere is to depreciate the only reality there is.
Explore this position →Camusexplicit
Deprived of any world beyond, man has only this world, and it is enough: Camus refuses to depreciate the sensible for the sake of an elsewhere that does not exist. Against a long tradition that makes the earth a place of exile and defers true life to the beyond, he sets a pagan fidelity to the tangible present: the warmth of the sun, the salt of the sea, the stones of the ruins of Tipasa are the only truth on offer, and the only sacred is that one. This rootedness in Mediterranean is not a mere metaphysical thesis about the absence of God but an orientation of value: every measure of the good is taken here below, in the happiness of existing, not in any .
Nuptials (1939) · Summer (1954)
Spinozaexplicit
Spinoza derives immanence from his definition of substance: being cause of itself and infinite, there can be only one, outside which nothing can be conceived. God therefore cannot be a transcendent creator set apart from the world, as in or in theology: he is its , and the whole of reality is but the deduction of his nature.
Ethics, I, prop. 18 (God, immanent cause) · Ethics, IV, preface (Deus sive Natura)
Nāgārjunaexplicit
The argument draws out the consequence of universal emptiness: if saṃsāra (the cycle of conditioned rebirths) and each had an , a gulf would separate them and one could never pass from the one to the other. But both are equally , and so lack the essential boundary that would set them in opposition. The metaphysical leap toward a beyond collapses: nirvāṇa is no other place to be reached, it is saṃsāra rightly seen, stripped of the grasping that made it suffering. Hence a radical immanence, with no backworld, which sets Madhyamaka apart from conceptions of salvation as escape out of the world.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. XXV (the examination of nirvāṇa)
Nietzscheexplicit
Zarathustra exhorts us to remain faithful to the earth and not to believe those who speak of supra-earthly hopes. The whole critique of "hinterworlds" makes Nietzsche the thinker of radical : life must be justified by nothing outside itself, and every is unmasked as a flight from the real.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3 · Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Afterworldly"
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Sartreinferable
With no God and no supra-sensible order, there is no backworld where values or meaning are deposited in advance: everything plays out in the immanence of the world into which man is thrown and which he must shape. Meaning and values do not descend from a beyond, they arise from the project of finite consciousness, here below. The position is therefore clearly immanentist.
Existentialism Is a Humanism (no a priori values, abandonment) · Being and Nothingness (transcendence as the for-itself's structure toward the world, not toward a beyond)
Epicureanismexplicit
Epicureanism is a pure : there is no world beyond, no providence, no purpose. Everything, the gods included, belongs to material nature; happiness lies entirely within this life and this world.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book I · Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus
Epicurusinferable
There is no transcendent order, no world of Ideas nor providence overhanging nature: everything, including the soul and the gods, belongs to the single universe of atoms and void. Meaning and happiness are found here below, in sensation and , with no recourse to a beyond. This is a thoroughgoing .
Letter to Herodotus, 63-67 (the corporeal soul, dissolved at death) · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, III (the mortality of the soul)
Lucretiusinferable
Nothing exceeds nature: there is no world of Ideas, no overhanging providence, no beyond in which to survive. Everything, from the gods to the soul, belongs to the single universe of atoms and void. The poem turns the gaze not toward a higher order but toward the infinite depth of this world, where thought, having crossed the flaming ramparts of the world, ranges through immensity meeting no bound and no outside. This is a thoroughgoing .
On the Nature of Things, I, 62-79 (the mind crosses the flaming ramparts of the world) · On the Nature of Things, II, 1048-1089 (the infinity of worlds)
Marxinferable
The whole of Marx's critique brings the figures of the beyond, God, the Hegelian state, eternal ideas, back to projections of earthly conditions: there is no backworld to realise but this world to transform. Salvation is awaited not from a transcendent order but from action immanent to history, hence a marked .
Theses on Feuerbach, IV (resolving the religious world into its earthly basis) · Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, introduction
Marxisminferable
Consistent with its materialism, Marxism rejects any world beyond: there is no afterlife nor transcendent ground of values, only the history of humans producing their conditions of existence. Emancipation is expected from humans' earthly action, not from a salvation come from elsewhere.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846) · Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
Stoicisminferable
The Stoic divine is not beyond the world: divine reason is , mixed with matter as a breath (the pneuma) running through and structuring reality. There is no , no world beyond, only this single, rational, divine cosmos.
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book II · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VII, 138-139
Taoisminferable
A source that engenders everything cannot stand outside what it engenders: if the is the origin of the ten thousand things, it inhabits them all rather than reigning over them from a world beyond. Far from a personal, transcendent god who creates by decree and commands from without, the dao is and impersonal: it makes things grow without possessing them, acts without claiming the merit. Hence Zhuangzi's provocation when asked where the dao is: it is in the ant, the blade of grass, the tile, and even the dung, for what is everywhere cannot be missing from the lowliest thing.
Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (Knowledge Wandered North) · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 34
Beauvoirinferable
With no God or backworld, meaning and values play out entirely in this world, in the immanence of human projects and history. Beauvoir nonetheless gives the word transcendence a particular existential sense: not a beyond, but the surpassing by which freedom thrusts toward the future, oppression consisting in confining the other to the immanence of a fixed condition.
The Second Sex (1949), Introduction (transcendence and immanence)
Marcus Aureliusinferable
The divine is no beyond: runs through and animates the cosmos, and the human soul is a fragment broken off from it. A markedly conception of the sacred, with no world behind the world.
Meditations, XII, 26 · Meditations, VIII, 54
Senecaexplicit
The divine is not a beyond but an inner presence. The divine reason () pervades all of nature and the human soul is a fragment of it, a markedly immanent conception of the sacred.
Letters to Lucilius, XLI (a sacred spirit dwells within us)
Zhuangziinferable
The is neither a god nor a world-behind: it is everywhere, in the humblest things, even, Zhuangzi says to provoke, "in the piss and the dung." The sacred does not reside above the world but coincides with the immanent course of all transformations, accessible to whoever attunes to it rather than to whoever worships it. This radical immanence leaves only a thin residue of the inaccessible, the obscurity of the Dao before distinctions, which holds the score back from the utmost extreme.
Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (the Dao in the piss and dung) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)
Laoziinferable
The is not a separate god ordering the world from above: it is the immanent matrix from which all things arise and to which all return, which "gives birth to the ten thousand beings" without commanding them, nourishing them without possessing them. The sacred, here, has no world-behind: it coincides with the very course of nature. Yet this immanence keeps a residue of the inaccessible, since the Dao remains obscure and prior to all distinction, which holds the score back from the extreme.
Dao De Jing, ch. 25 and 51 · Dao De Jing, ch. 4 and 42
Hegelinferable
The divine is not a separate beyond posited outside the world: the Absolute is coming to itself in nature, history and human consciousness. There is no intact world-behind, but a process in which the infinite realizes itself in the finite and recognizes itself there. Yet this Absolute exceeds every finite moment, which forbids reducing it to a pure immanent naturalism: hence a position of immanence, but a qualified one.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §553-577 (absolute spirit) · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)
Odysseusinferable
offers him immortality and eternal youth if he stays; he refuses, to regain , mortal, and his perishable life as a man. It is not that he scorns life, which on the contrary he defends fiercely against every peril, but that no survival away from home is worth the return to him. This choice thus places all worth on the side of finite, earthly existence, not of a beyond or a higher state: without denying the gods, omnipresent in his world, Odysseus makes mortal life, with its ending, the good he prefers, finitude embraced against whatever would transcend it.
Odyssey, V, 203-224 (the refusal of Calypso: mortal Penelope preferred to the goddess)
Romanticisminferable
The sacred lies not in a separate world beyond but is spread through nature and in the depths of the soul: all is alive, all is divine, and it is the infinite that shines through the finite. This pantheist re-divinization, inherited from , nonetheless borders on a for the beyond, a longing for an absolute never reached, which draws Romanticism toward transcendence as much as it pulls it away.
Novalis, Hymns to the Night · Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches
Transcendence
11The sacred surpasses this world: truth, the good, or God belong to a higher order that sensible reality merely reflects. Human existence finds its meaning in its relation to this beyond.
Explore this position →Platonismexplicit
The argument proceeds by a solar analogy: just as the sun lets things be seen and grow without being itself either sight or the things, the Good lets the Forms be known and be, without being itself a Form among them. A principle that makes being possible cannot then rank among the beings it grounds: it must be set . radicalises this step by making the One the origin from which all proceeds by emanation, ineffable because prior to every determination. This of the ground sets Platonism apart from the divine of the Stoics, mixed into the matter of the world.
Plato, Republic, 509b, the Good beyond essence · Plotinus, Enneads, VI, 9, on the One
Platoexplicit
The analogy of the sun carries the argument: just as the sun makes things visible and makes them grow, the Good gives the Forms their being known and their being at all. As the cause of both intelligibility and existence, the Good cannot itself be one essence among others: it surpasses them, set "beyond essence". Plato thus pushes to its extreme, against any that would lodge the principle within the world, and makes the whole of dialectic an ascent, out of the cave, toward this separate principle that the soul beholds only at the price of a conversion of its gaze.
Republic, VI, 508e-509b · Symposium, 210a-212a
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
God is for Thomas radically , distinct from the world he creates out of nothing, and his essence surpasses everything we can conceive: by reason we know of him only what he is not (negative theology). Yet transcendence is not sheer separation, for God is also intimately present to every thing as the cause that gives it being at each instant. This articulation is expressed by the : the perfections of creatures (goodness, wisdom) are found in God, but in an eminent degree and in a mode that escapes us, neither purely identical (univocity) nor purely alien (equivocity).
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 3 (divine simplicity); q. 13 (the divine names)
Plotinusexplicit
The first principle can be neither a being nor a thought, for every being is already manifold, distinct from what it thinks: to ground multiplicity without belonging to it, there must be an absolutely simple , "beyond being" and beyond , of which nothing can properly be said. Plotinus thus radicalizes 's Good above essence into a pure transcendence. Yet tempers the distance: the One overflows without dividing or diminishing itself, and stays present to all that proceeds from it, more inward to the soul than the soul is to itself. Hence a strong transcendence, but not without a graded immanence, which holds the score back from the extreme.
Enneads, VI, 9 (On the Good, or the One) · Enneads, V, 3 and V, 5
Antigoneexplicit
Summoned by to account for herself, she pleads neither mistake nor ignorance: she sets against his decree an order that overruns it. It was not the gods, she answers, who forbade her act, and no mortal could have the strength to override heaven's unwritten and unshakable laws, which are not of yesterday or today. Her deed, performing the rites in defiance of the edict, carries this conviction into action before she puts it into words: human order is legitimate only so far as it does not collide with what precedes and overhangs it.
Second episode, confronting Creon (ll. 450-457), the unwritten laws speech · First episode, the guard's report: the rites performed despite the ban
Wittgensteinexplicit
All the facts of the world are on one level, contingent: value is therefore not to be found in it. The sense of the world must lie outside the world; ethics is transcendental, it cannot be put into words. What matters most, ethics and the mystical, can only be shown, not said. This silence is reverent, not nihilistic: Wittgenstein held the essential part of the Tractatus to be what he did not write in it. This is the position of the Tractatus; the later Wittgenstein will abandon the saying/showing machinery.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.41, 6.421, 6.522, 6.44, 7 · A Lecture on Ethics (1929)
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Leibnizexplicit
Against the of , who identifies God with Nature, Leibniz upholds a creator God distinct from his creation, a transcendent orderer who chose this world among the possibles and reigns over the City of God. The world depends on him without being identical to him.
Monadology, §85-90 (the City of God, perfect monarch) · Theodicy (refutation of Spinozist necessitarianism)
George Berkeleyinferable
The real does not stand on its own: both its existence and its order rest at every instant on a mind that surpasses and sustains it. God is not an immanent force diffused through nature, in the manner of , but a personal mind, distinct from the world, of which bodies are only the sensible discourse. The sacred, for Berkeley, thus lies on the side of what transcends perceived nature, even as God makes himself everywhere present by speaking to us ceaselessly through it.
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II · Principles of Human Knowledge, §§146-149
Śaṅkarainferable
is at once the most intimate, present in the heart of each as one's own self, and the absolute that radically exceeds the sensible world: the latter holds only an empirical reality, taken as (māyā) in the light of the ultimate. The balance tips toward transcendence, not in the sense of a separate backworld, but because truth is not found in the given: it requires passing through the appearance of the manifold to reach the one real. Immanence is real, but it is the immanence of an absolute that, in itself, depends on nothing worldly.
Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, II.1 · Upadeśasāhasrī
Vedānta (Advaita)inferable
The status of is delicate to place: it is at once the immanent ground of all that appears and the absolute that transcends every determination, beyond names and forms (nirguṇa). The world has no being of its own apart from it, which rules out a dualist world-beyond, yet the ultimate real radically exceeds the order of appearances. The stance leans toward , tempered by a non-duality in which the absolute is not simply to the world either.
Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad; Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya-Kārikā · Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya)
Confuciusinferable
Confucius acknowledges Heaven (tian) as an instance ordering the course of things and grounding his mission, and he respects the cult of ancestors and spirits, to be honoured while keeping one's distance. Yet his aim stays firmly turned to this world: not yet able to serve men, how could one serve the spirits?. Transcendence is affirmed, but subordinated to the ethics of the human world.
Analects, XI, 11 (not yet able to serve men, how serve the spirits?) · Analects, VI, 20 (honour the spirits but keep them at a distance)
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveA God beyond words
If God exceeds every concept, can one even affirm or deny his existence, or does the question wrongly assume he is one object among others?
GodExistence of God - PrescriptiveSacredA good beyond this world?
Is the highest good attainable here below, or does it lie elsewhere: union with God, salvation, a beatitude that neither earthly pleasure nor virtue can give?
a lifeThe highest good
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.Wittgenstein · Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7 (the last proposition)
There is no place where the dao is not.Zhuangzi · ch. 22
It is none of the things of which it is the source; such is its nature that, though nothing can be affirmed of it, not name, not reason, we can yet say something concerning it.Plotinus · Enneads, V, 3, 13-14
There is no difference at all between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa; there is no difference at all between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra.Nāgārjuna · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XXV, 19
The Good is not being, but still beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power.Plato · Republic, VI, 509b
A sacred spirit dwells within us, the observer and guardian of our good and our evil.Seneca · Letters to Lucilius, XLI