Relation to the world· Philosophy of religion
Immanence
Axis: Where the sacred resides — Does the sacred reside in this very world, or in a beyond that surpasses it?
There 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.
Movements 5
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
Show inferred positions (4)
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
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
Philosophers 14
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"
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)
Show inferred positions (9)
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)
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
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
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)
Characters 1
Show inferred positions (1)
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)