Phenomenology of Immanence. Doxography on the “Idea of God” (Descartes, Kant, Schelling, Levinas)

Abstract

This article describes the history of modern metaphysics as the history of the immanentization of transcendence. We show this from the concept of the “idea of god”, which is the phenomenon that violently separates subjectivity from transcendence and opens up a tear in it that we call “psycho-theological”: the divine violently leaves a trace in us by its very distance. We describe this phenomenon by means of a study of four archives: Descartes’ third Metaphysical Meditations (1641), the refutation of the cosmological proof of the existence of God in Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781–87), Schelling’s commentary on this Kant’s text in his Introduction to the lectures on Philosophy of Revelation (1841), and the traces of Descartes’ third Meditation in the work of Levinas.