Absolute Immanence Research Articles

Elvesztette-e méltóságát a koncentrációs táborok muzulmánja? Giorgio Agamben méltóságról, puszta életről és immanenciáról

In our analysis we focus on the Agambenian concept of human dignity against the background of the Kantian moral tradition. Our goal is to explore the connection between dignity and biopolitics in Agamben’s thinking through his concept of bare life as an absolute immanence, in the Deleuzian sense of indeterminacy, indiscernibility, undecidabilty. As for the philosophical context we draw attention to the Sartrean conception of lived experience in The Family Idiot, in addition to the well-known Foucauldian and Deleuzian roots of Agamben’s philosophy, and the early phenomenology of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego (with a focus on the impersonal transcendental field and the pre-reflexive consciousness).

Unity of the Existence of God and the Knowledge of God in the Phenomenological Ontology of Henry

This study approaches the question of the unity between the existence of God and the knowledge of God. Henry’s phenomenology of life, as a phenomenological ontology, offers a phenomenological way to rethink the existence of God and our cognition of God by seeking the essence in life’s self-donation. As a phenomenological heritage of Husserl’s intentional phenomenology, Henry’s phenomenology of self-affection (auto-affection) clarifies the essence of God in the dimension of subjective body or in the flesh. This truth, which presents our absolute immanence, is, in its depth, a divine revelation between God and human. When we experience our own existence in the tonality of corporal life, we receive the existence of God and the knowledge of God.

Ontosonographic Maps: Toward a Theoretization of Soundscape Forms in the Anthropocene Epoch

This paper deals with the ways in which it is possible to conceptualize and map forms of soundscape in the epoch of the Anthropocene. After humans became a geological force, which is a role that used to be reserved for the planet itself, one can pose the question of how to understand this new condition through sound, as well as of the ways in which (re)production of the Anthropocene is heard and performed through sound. With the usage of the terms world, globe, Earth and the planet, a certain understanding of the human environment, current state of affairs, but also of the past and the future is projected. To these terms I connect different ways of production and reception of sound (bio-melo-technology, bio-aural-technology, zoe-aural-technology), and describe their mutual relations through the concepts of biosound, zoesound, necrosound, geosound, and petrosound. I produce this typology on the basis of ontosonographic methodology, and apply it to particular case studies such as popular music (k.d. lang, Lesbian on Ecstasy, My Bloody Valentine, black metal, noise), sounds insects make, and the noise produced by urban traffic. With the help of ontosonographic methodology I map forms of being and becoming through sound and as sound, which makes ontosonography a key concept for understanding the soundscape forms of the Anthropocene. Of decisive importance for understanding the Anthrpocene soundscape is the relation between biosound and geosound, which is produced through petrocultures understood as a multiplicity of practices of extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels. The dominant form of soundscape in the epoch of the Anthropocene is the petrosound. Also, a new way for understanding fossil fuels appears as a possibility, a way that is grounded in a non-binary way of thinking beyond the difference between Life and Non-Life. It remains as a task for further research whether to approach this petrocultural non-binarity through radical or absolute immanence or, perhaps, some other set of concepts more appropriate for the Anthropocene.

Deleuze and Absolute Immanence: Achieving Fully Immanent Inquiry

The concepts of immanence and transcendence have a long and varied history in philosophy. In an ontology of absolute immanence, immanence is not dependent on something else. Immanence is immanent only to itself, with the result that all transcendence is eliminated. Deleuze, like Derrida and Foucault, has an unwavering commitment to absolute immanence, which he conceives of in different ways during his career. There is both a logical and an ethical problem with any ontology of transcendence, and an ontology of absolute immanence addresses both these problems. Fully immanent inquiry rejects all forms of methodological transcendence. It avoids relying on the authority of any existing qualitative (or other) methodological structures such as paradigms, methodologies, methodological concepts, methodological techniques, and methodological practices. It also avoids all binary opposites and universals and fosters experimentation and creation of the new. An example of fully immanent research is also discussed.

A fragile threshold: tracing Agamben’s reply to Derrida’s critique

ABSTRACTThe present work contends that Derrida’s critique of Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign reveals a fundamental misconception of Agamben’s formulation of the notion of biopolitics. Agamben differentiates the term ‘biopolitics’ from biologism and argues instead that biopolitics ought to be viewed through the metaphysical inheritance of the ontological division already present in Aristotle’s articulation of the notion of life. Derrida’s position is one that refutes any such division. Through Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s uses of the terms zoè and bios, and the distinction Aristotle makes between the simple fact of living (tou zen) and living well (tou eu zen), the article brings to light the fragility of the threshold while illustrating its operative function in the Aristotelian apparatus. Derrida contends that Agamben’s notion of biopolitics does not advance the Heideggerian discourse concerning the definition of man as animal rationale. The article argues that, on the contrary, for Agamben, Heidegger’s position remains biopolitical and does not overcome the metaphysical problem of presupposition. This article traces and unearths Agamben’s hidden reply to Derrida and draws a connection between Agamben’s formulation of a form-of-life and Deleuze’s conceptualisation of life as absolute immanence.

Fenomenologia do corpo em Michel Henry: uma leitura a partir da imanência subjetiva

O presente estudo visa apresentar o tema do corpo em Michel Henry mais especificamente, o corpo subjetivo a partir da imanência absoluta. As teorias clássicas e fenomenológicas investigaram a questão do corpo e deram suas contribuições, no entanto, foram constituídas a partir de uma relação transcendental. Para desenvolver o argumento do corpo subjetivo é fundamental compreender a noção de imanência, que será apresentada no primeiro momento da pesquisa. Posteriormente, será trabalhada a temática sobre o corpo subjetivo e por último, realizada uma contraposição com corpo transcendental. Assim, este ensaio busca sustentar a tese de que na fenomenologia de Henry existirá o corpo subjetivo desde que esse possa ser constituído a partir da imanência absoluta.

How Borges Wrote by Daniel Balderston

MLR, .,   Petrarch is, for the Goritian, above all the author of the Triumphi, and primarily a philosopher, whose fundamental preoccupation is to locate the ubi consistam: the stable place where authentic ‘persuasion’ can be achieved. e difference between Petrarch and Michelstaedter (according to Caliaro) is that, for the former, stability can be projected only in the dimension of religious transcendence, whereas for the latter it is only in the complete possession of the present that absolute value can be found. e fih and final chapter of the work is devoted to a thematic comparison between Michelstaedter and the Triestine writer Scipio Slataper (–). It is not known whether the two knew each other, although both attended, in partially coinciding years, the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence, and the latter reviewed the first volume of Michelstaedter’s writings when it was published in . One point of contact between the two is, once more, the interpretation of Christianism and, in particular, of the figure of Jesus and his teaching, seen as attributing value to a life deemed good precisely because it embraces the present, transcending itself not towards a distant future, but in the absolute immanence of giving to the other. Both reject the enslavement of man to society; but, if Michelstaedter comes to a complete rejection of society, Slataper instead maintains his commitment to practical activity and engagement for the common good. In Slataper’s words: ‘Quello che è stato disastro per Papini, Michelstaedter — felicità per noi. [. . .] Ci siamo accorti che nel lavoro, nell’esprimerci nel sodo, c’era una felicità.’ Michelstaedter had killed himself on  October . He was barely twentythree years old. U  O G S How Borges Wrote. By D B. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. . ix+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Jorge Luis Borges is one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To know how he wrote would be fascinating. is book by Daniel Balderston does not disappoint. It is about the method of writing, the manuscripts and other written evidence, not the motivation. e one-word chapter titles set the framework for this volume of Genetic Criticism based on the study of more than  Borges manuscripts: Reading, Jottings, Notebooks, Possibilities, Copies, Typescripts, Revisions, Fragments. ere are no genes or chromosomes present, but rather an attempt to analyse the metaphorical DNA of Borges’s creations, to explain his compositional practices and the genesis of his masterpieces. Techniques include analysis of Borges’s handwriting and of markings he made on his own manuscripts, as well as marginalia he le on his reading material. Borges donated hundreds of books, written by many different authors, to the Argentine National Library, of which he was a former director. He had le notes in the margins and on the backs of many of these, oen with precise references to other  Reviews volumes including page numbers. For instance, in his edition of e Essays of Oscar Wilde he writes ‘Carlyle once . . . ’, referring to a particular page from Wilde’s essay on Coleridge (p. ). is is a source for Borges’s own essay on William Beckford’s Vathek, where he recounts a joke attributed to Carlyle about the nature of biography. Balderston stresses the importance of the work of the two librarians Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez, who previously deciphered bibliographical references that Borges le in his reading material. Balderston examines many important Borges manuscripts and notebooks, particularly from the years –, consulting both originals and facsimiles or photocopies . ese include some of his most canonical works. I made ample use of my magnifying glass while examining the facsimiles, but Balderston provides either linear or diplomatic transcriptions of many excerpts. His book is dense, sometimes stylistically complex, but it is full of fresh insights into the relationship between Borges’s reading material and the multiple versions of the texts he created. He sees Borges’s use of notes in the margins of manuscripts and on the covers of reading material as part of a mnemonic exercise, a sort of ‘art of memory’ (p. ). Balderston mines the vast amount of visible information—handwriting, symbols, and other markings le by Borges—for evidence. e invisible, the motivation, the secrets, are not his main focus. ‘Sentirse en...

Reflections of Indian Philosophy in Deleuze's ‘Body without Organs’

As the title suggests, this paper looks at the Deleuzian concept of body without organs and compares it with Indian Philosophy. In the Indian context, the concept of moksha/nirvana comes near to it as both are practices that aim at liberation; here, ‘liberation’ is never the awaited end of the process but the process itself. The traditional western substantialism rests on things whereas Deleuze, like Indian Philosophy, celebrates ‘experience’ and the ‘incorporeal’. Thus, body without organs plays a role in individuation. It hints at a journey beyond ‘the self’ which is full of ecstasy or the ananda of the Indian thought system. The question of Being, which not only is conceptual identification, is presented in terms of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze and Guattari, every actual body has a virtual dimension, a vast reservoir of potentials, and this is the body without organs. The actual emerges from it and carries it with it. Further, the plane of immanence is a field in which concepts are produced. It is neither external to the Self nor forms an external self or a non-self. It is ‘an absolute outside’, very much like Brahman. The pragmatics of Deleuzian theory is that it explains life to be ‘immanence of immanence, absolute immanence’ – an utter beatitude – which has a Vedantic counterpart where the essential Brahman is a combination of three attributes – sat (being), chit (mind) and ananda (bliss). Thus, this paper aims at the interesting comparison between Deleuzian theory and Indian Philosophy.

La alegoría absoluta en "El Criticón": un diálogo con Benjamin

In his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin analyses the role of the baroque allegorist in an age in which his word is the expression of the melancholic gaze of an abandoned subject handed over to an absolute immanence. But the allegorist makes a move through which he achieves to go from immanence to God, allegorizing the concept of evil that he himself has produced. Even when he meets the characteristics of those allegorists, Baltasar Gracian does not make, in our judgement, this kind of betrayal to his own logos , surrendering completely to the consequences of natural history , the immanence and the allegorical saying.

The Clinamen of Community: Duns Scotus's Political Ontology

ABSTRACT Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community claims that the conflagration of community stands as the “gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world.” He does not, however, nostalgically yearn for the lost intimacy of the premodern world. Instead, Nancy asks whether absolute immanence—which takes the political guise of totalitarianism, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other—can be undone through community. Given this warning against nostalgic return to the premodern, introduction of the political ontology of John Duns Scotus might seem misguided. My turn to Scotus in this article, however, is not mere antiquarianism. Instead, one finds in Scotistic univocity, I argue, a powerful critique of immanentism. Given the inclination, or “clinamen,” of univocal being as always already being-as, Scotus allows us to think community as resisting its hypostatization but also its appropriation by individual subjects.

Donacyjny charakter dobra a kwestia transcendencji w kontekście myśli Martina Heideggera

In my paper I try to reconsider the character of the good. I show the specific structure of the good as “not-to-own-to-give”. Furthermore I investigate a possibility of such structure in Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. On example of the bestowing virtue I show Nietzsche’s structure of donation as “to-own-to-give”. At the same time such structure of donation reveals problematic status of Nietzsche’s paradigm of absolute immanence. Then I show how transcendence as an „essence” of immanence constitutes Martin Heidegger’s main concept. He is very close to the structure of “not-to-own-to-give”, but the structure of “to-own-nothing” is still an ownership. It shows, anyway, that both Heidegger and Nietzsche have philosophized very close to the paradigm of the good. Eventually I show in Heidegger’s thought a possibility to go beyond his own paradigm that reveals possibility of the good as an infinite donation.

A estrutura genética das entificações comunitárias

Thinkers of Heideggerian tradition such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito, through concepts such as being-in-common and communitas, suggest a fundamental ontology of community (Mitsein). This ontology, however, has generated a difficulty of interpretation and operation due to the hegemonic subjectivist paradigm that anticipates the reading of these concepts. This article aims to redescribe this ontology from a referential shift: from the Heideggerian metaphysical universe to the field of “absolute immanence” (Deleuze). This shift allows structuralizing and conferring operational communication to that ontology, as well as observing new political phenomena, such as those made possible by today’s technical communication devices.

“Immanence: A Life…”: An Educational Formula?

Shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze penned the rather enigmatic essay titled “Immanence: A Life...,” which became a kind of philosophical riddle. One of the most compelling attempts to come to terms with this riddle can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s essay titled “Absolute Immanence,”1 in which Agamben compares and contrasts Deleuze’s work with Michel Foucault’s “Life: Experience and Science.” Key to Agamben’s reading of these two texts is the philosophically provocative use of punctuation, and, in particular, the colon and the ellipsis. Indeed, Agamben immediately draws the reader’s attention to the peculiar use of punctuation in Deleuze’s title as the key to the riddle of life that both Deleuze and Foucault (in their unique ways) confronted before their respective deaths. Extending and in some sense intensifying the central claims about the relationship between life and immanence found in the concluding gestures of the two quintessential French theorists of the twentieth century, Agamben creates a rich ontology of the punctuation mark as a dislocating move in the history of thought — what might be referred to as a “punctology.”

Immanence, Transcendence and Thinking Life with Deleuze and Eckhart

This paper questions the post-Nietzschean, materialist assumption that divine transcendence is necessarily inimical to life. In light of Eugene Thacker’s distinction between Life and the living, this paper explores the concept of life in the works of Meister Eckhart and Gilles Deleuze, two thinkers who, when read alongside each other, reveal how the notions of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence invert into each other. One consequence of such inversion is that both thinkers face the question of how to think life in relation to nothingness. While it might seem that Eckhart’s negative theology confirms the Nietzschean suspicion that divine transcendence is anti-life, the paper seeks to forestall such a conclusion by showing how Eckhart’s apophaticism is better able to uphold the integrity of this-worldly life than Deleuze’s immanentism. However, the paper ultimately criticises both thinkers for failing to affirm the value of finite, creaturely life in itself.

Die Hauspostille (1927). Brecht et la quête de la modernité poétique

Young Brecht’s lyricism has long been interpreted from the point of view of a supposed nihilism that would be the expression of a partly unconscious perception of the historical process of bourgeois decadency. We might see it rather as the will of the author to put at centre stage the absolute immanence and the complete rematerialization of reality that is determinative.The attachment to a teleological conception that makes his first, and it is true, heterogeneous productions, a simple sign of the work of maturity conditioned by a Marxist vision is not a defensible position. The parody of utilitarian literature (Gebrauchsliteratur) cannot be put on the same level as use value (Gebrauchswert).Referring to some poems from the Manual of piety (1927) we will show that Brecht takes over forms borrowed from European subculture (Moritat, popular ballad) and from Stars of French lyric tradition (Villon, Rimbaud – both translated at the time by K. L. Ammer) so that Brecht’s poetic work has to be read as a decisive contribution to the genesis of poetic modernity in Germany.

Monstrous Individuations: Deleuze, Simondon, and Relational Ontology

Starting with Gilbert Simondon's theory of the individual (singular and collective) and its genesis, developed in his book L'individuation psychique et collective, this article discusses the principle of individuation and the critique of finalism. Simondon distinguishes and yet strictly binds together the two individuations that he calls psychique and collective, which is necessary, he argues, to avoid the double failure of psychologism and sociologism, by which he means the doctrines that assign a fixed (ontological) identity to man and his mind, on the one hand, and to society, on the other. Both psychologism and sociologism, according to Simondon, fail to understand their only reality, which is first and foremost relational. Influenced by Simondon's ontology, Gilles Deleuze's concept of nomadism is taken up in order to develop the idea of a principle of individuation intended as a critique of teleology. The question of individuation is thus referred to its ontological roots in the conflict between Aristotelian metaphysics (priority of act over power [potentia] and of final cause over efficient and material causes) and Spinozist metaphysics (power [potentia] existing only in act, absolute immanence, radical criticism of every teleology). This essay shows what is at stake between the two authors and what Deleuze could not have derived from Simondon, which Del Lucchese calls a Spinozistic problematic.

Cinema and the Meaning of "Life"

Cinema and the Meaning of "Life" Louis-Georges Schwartz (bio) Introduction If one were to ask about the role that the cinema has played in contemporary thought, one would discover it entangled in the complex struggle over the concept of "life." Cinema and the motion-picture technologies associated with it were invented and cultivated in a society whose moral, legal, economic, and semantic values organized themselves around "life." In modern times, biological life, understood as both pure survival and the potential labor power it implies, has become a human right, while questions of the quality of life have become sites of intense contestation. Transvaluation of "life" has been crucial to the emergence of contemporary social forms, as recent scholarship on the concept's genealogies has begun to show.1 Like other reproductive technologies such as photography and gramophony, cinematography suggested to its first public the possibility of preserving a living image of the dead, appearing as an event in the history of the concepts of "life" and "death." In what follows I will look at early journalistic accounts of cinematograph screenings in Europe and passages about cinema by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in order to sketch the extent to which cinema has been involved in the transvaluation of life. These texts invoke life and death in original ways as they attempt to respond to the experience of cinema in writing. My readings will only be indications of the mutations in the genealogy of life, occasioned by writing about the cinema, in order to establish a particular field of genealogical investigation. I will follow uses of words [End Page 7] associated with the concept "life," such as "living," "dead," and "ghost," attending to their differences from conventional usage "Meaning" appears under erasure in my title in order to focus on lexical variation, conceptual change, and contestation of values rather than static semantics. Recent work by Giorgio Agamben has helped us to understand modern philosophies as philosophies of life by situating Michel Foucault's work on biopolitique within a network of post-Heideggerian thought. Agamben's essay "Absolute Immanence" begins by pointing out that the last articles Foucault and Gilles Deleuze published before their deaths were both about the concept of "life."2 The correspondence between Deleuze's and Foucault's final texts exemplifies a turn in contemporary philosophy, which according to Agamben can only be a philosophy of life. Agamben calls for future philosophy to produce a genealogy of the concept "life" and to rethink it in ways other than those which enable contemporary forms of domination. Agamben's genealogy will be of the Nietzschean type as understood by Foucault, a genealogy that rearticulates values by showing them to be historical and by illuminating the ways in which values are the effects of an ongoing process of transvaluation. Foucault describes the development of concrete problems that call for a philosophy of life in his biopolitical studies. Starting with the observation that the modern state transforms the feudal sovereign's power to end life into a power to control life, Foucault shows how contemporary governance justifies itself and regulates society by invoking "life" in ways which are, at least in part, philosophical.3 The contemporary concept of "life" implicit in governing institutions responds to concrete problems faced by the state. To be able to decide legal cases concerning the termination of life support or abortion, for example, the state refers to definitions of life developed by biology, theology, and philosophy. Since Foucault's death, the philosophico-theological dimension of contemporary discursive formations has clarified itself by producing the noun-phrase "culture of life," as the President and the Pope both say when invoking moral authority.4 In biopolitical regimes, a vague, largely unthought concept of life, pricelessly outside of any economy, confers worth on all other values. Thus the task of philosophy in such societies is to make explicit the appropriation of the concept of life for social control while producing another one that would resist such appropriation. I hope that this paper contributes to this project without negating the differences between, for example, Derrida and Agamben, by sublating each into the unity of a single discourse. Instead, I hope [End...

Archiving the Potentialities of Events

CONSTRUCTING AN ARCHIVE exclusively for events that can happen--regardless of whether or not they ever will or actually ever did happen--is also to challenge limits of what an archive can do. Since 1999, Lebanese artist Walid Raad has done just that. His project Atlas Group Archive still documents, researches and produces a contemporary history of Lebanese civil that ravaged Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. In their exhibitions, Atlas Group Archive claims, like any other archive, that objects on display constitute factual evidence of past events. Ibis in no sense untrue, but as I will suggest in more detail, most striking experience when attending their exhibitions realization that documents represent not actual past events but potential ones. I will argue that archive's artefacts and explanatory texts produce historical paradoxes in such a way that these are capable of documenting historical potentialities of events. As Raad himself explained in an interview: The documents in this imaginary archive do not so much document 'what happened: but what can be imagined, what can be said, taken for granted, what can appear as rational or not, as thinkable and sayable about civil wars (Raad 2001). In short, Atlas Group organizes an archive for potentialities that only appeared historically after wars. in this article, I will describe and analyze what structural features are required of such an archive. Atlas Group Archive collects and displays physical things. Yet its collection amounts to an archive of potentialities. This in itself remarkable, since distinction between things and potentialities fundamental. Their separation ontological, which means that way things are completely different from way potentialities are. It was Aristotle who introduced this fundamental difference into philosophy. (1) He argued that if a potentiality were said to be, in same way that a thing is, one would confuse being of a thing with being of that which enables a thing to be way it is. Aristotle also said that, unlike a thing, a potentiality can exist without manifesting itself as an actual being: one can be able to do a thing without ever doing it, showing it or even knowing about it. There have been several different attempts to define difference between potential beings and actual beings. For purpose of speaking about Atlas Group Archive, I would like to avoid majority of definitions, which in one way or another hinge upon materialization or realization of a potentiality. Instead, I would prefer to take as my departure point how actual beings and potentialities change. A potentiality does not change same way as an actual being changes. Therefore, I would say that ontogenetically two belong to two different modes of existence. In essay collection Potentialities, Giorgio Agamben traces a philosophical history of potentiality from Aristotle until today. He ends by showing how Derrida and Daleuze differ precisely on point of how to separate potentialities from actual beings. Agamben concludes his remarks on Derrida by saying that in his conceptualization of trace:' its pure potential to signify (and not to signify) is no longer meaning's self-reference, a sign's signification of itself; instead, it materialization of a potentiality, materialization of its own possibility (Agamben 218). Trace in Derrida does not mean that potentialities materialize into actual beings, but that they materialize so as to make their own actualization possible. Quite differently in essay on Deleuze, Agamben finds that the potentiality that constitutes life in original sense (self-nourishment) coincides with very desire to preserve one's own Being that, in Spinoza and Deleuze, defines potentiality of life as absolute immanence (Agamben 237). Self-nourishment--as a desire to preserve--does not mean to reduce change to a minimum, but to encourage natural growth . …

Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy

Editor's note Editor's introduction Part I. Language: 1. The thing itself 2. The idea of language 3. Language and history: linguistic and historical categories in Benjamin's thought 4. Philosophy and linguistics 5. Kommerell, or on gesture Part II. History: 6. Aby Warburg and the nameless science 7. Tradition of the immemorial 8. *Se: Hegel's absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis 9. Walter Benjamin and the demonic: happiness and historical redemption 10. The messiah and the sovereign: the problem of law in Walter Benjamin Part III. Potentiality: 11. On potentiality 12. The passion of facticity 13. Pardes: the writing of potentiality 14. Absolute immanence Part IV. Contingency: 15. Bartleby, or on contingency Notes Index of names.

Measuring Christian Beliefs

This article opens with a critique on the conventional scales intended to measure Christian beliefs. It is concluded that the implicit theological approach behind Creed-alike scales is one that is taken for granted (a neo-scholastic one). The Humanistic Religious Beliefs Scale (HUMBEL) is meant to overcome this one-sidedness. Based on a critical review of two research lines, it was concluded that: a) researchers inspired by the study of Hunt (1972) failed to unravel distinct personality-based attitudes toward one and the same heritage, but that their findings unintentionally point to the existence of different religious beliefs, and b) Felling, Peters and Schreuder (1991), developed scales which represented only the concepts of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. The concept immanent transcendence was not included. The Humanistic Religious Beliefs Scale is designed to represent a Christian elaboration on the concept of immanent transcendence, and measures to which degree the faith is put forward that God could reveal Himself in the actual contact between people. Both the Humanistic Religious Beliefs Scale and the newly developed Individualistic Religious Belief Scale (INBEL), designed to represent a Christian elaboration on absolute transcendence, and intended to measure to which degree the conviction is expressed that God is concerned with every individual separately, were administered to 455 members of Roman Catholic nuclear families who were involved with the church. Both parents and one of their children were tested. Results indicate that several criteria of external validity are met. It is concluded that Christian religiousness, is rather severely underestimated, when making use of Creed-alike scales, solely. Furthermore it was concluded that the Humanistic Religious Beliefs Scale could neutralize the paradox, that some Christians can be in favour of prejudice and authoritarianism, while others are opposed to it. Some suggestions are made for further research.