Immanent Transcendence Research Articles

“SHINING FACE” AS HIDDEN AND REVEALED CHRISTOLOGY

The shining face theology as luminous metamorphosis of a visionary has experienced three great challenges: the anthropomorphic controversy, iconoclastic debate and the hesychast dispute. This study attempts to make a mystagogical connection between those three theological developments which are standing all together in God’s holy fire with the unveiled face. I have imposed myself a line of research into the contemplative spirituality field, which in fact represents a hermeneutical trajectory: Glory in the NT (hidden-revealed or being-energies) – Glory in the NT (theosis as Christification) – pre-Nicene Christology (eikonic and apophatic Light / glory) – Desert Fathers (“shining face” christology) – Efrem the Syrian (clothing metaphore) – Dionysius the Areopagite (veils of theurgic rays and Christ’s Presence as immanent transcendence or as tension between transcendent hiddenness and revelation) – Palamas hesychasm (christology of the uncreated light). I am the first who calls the light from the Shining Faces of the Desert Fathers as an uncreated light and a discovery of a Hidden pre-Nicene (apophatic) Christology. I have to emphasize that because these two aspects of my disclosure (meaning uncreated light and hidden christology of the Desert Fathers) were inspired to me by the readings in the field of palamite theology which consider that this light of the ascet’s glowing face to be an uncreated light experienced by the body (aesthetically), an inner presence of Christ who identifies himself with His light (apophatic), He Himself being the deifying light as uncreated divine gift. All studies in the Late Antiquity ignore this visionary experience, reducing it to the level of a simple metaphor of light (completing the ascetic quest for real self), a metaphor in which the saint’s life is hagiographically (mystifying!) described. A second reason for this blindness was a restraint coming from the Evagrian theology that draws attention to the danger of seeking visionary experiences, because in that light there is the risk of an illusory or deceitful demonic appearance. Another reason represents the fact that the hesychast controversy and the theology of the uncreated light as divine energy of the Saint Gregory Palamas’ theology (which in Western media has long been discredited as heretical) have played a negative role in accepting the nature of uncreated light into the shining face Christology of the Desert Fathers.

The Normative Authority of Social Practices: A Critical Theoretical Reading of Hegel’s Introduction to thePhilosophy of Right

AbstractWhat follows is an attempt to interpret Hegel’s Introduction to thePhilosophy of Rightin a way that explores the thesis of reason’s social character in light of the recent debate on Hegel’s theory of practical normativity. The discussion aims to highlight Hegel’s commitment to a ‘reconstructive’ version of the ‘immanent transcendence’ motive of Critical Theory and, more generally, to a programmatic critique of ‘deficient’ rationality and its effects on practice.

“The No to Nothing, and the Nothing to Know”: Immanent Transcendence as Eschatological Mystery

At an annual American Academy of Religion conference thirty years ago, Robert Scharlemann presented a paper in which he compared and contrasted Barth and Tillich with reference to how they named God in their respective theologies. He suggested that the former labeled God the “no to nothing,” while the latter symbolized God as the “nothing to know”—appellations out of which he formed his presentation title “The No to Nothing and the Nothing to Know: Barth and Tillich and the Possibility of Theological Science.” I have purloined Scharlemann’s title for my own essay, with the intent not only to maintain its theological implications but also to use it as a rubric for prosecuting the putative relationships that obtain among anticipation, nihilism, transcendence, mystery, and eschatology. If there are various species of transcendence, and if one can use and not merely mention the word “mystery” in some constative manner, then how may one speak of the actuality and potentiality of meaning? Is there a futurity to existential significance that empowers a life-affirming hope, which, in turn, embraces the inescapability of the “nothing” without plunging, or leaping, into the abyss of nihilism—the “no to nothing?” Alternatively, may one genuinely anticipate eschatological aspirations while remaining open to the enigma of the unprogrammable aleatoric “to come”—the “nothing to know?” Furthermore, how might one name “God” under either of these circumstances, even were one not to hold to any type of confessional theological ontology? Using John Caputo’s radical theology of the insistence of “God” as my Virgil (or Beatrice, which ever applies!) to guide us through the various paths one might take towards a genuine hope, I propose to investigate the plurivocity of discourses on meaning by inter-relating Caputo’s “nihilism of grace” with several supplementary works, including Ray Hart’s God Being Nothing, Amie Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics, Stuart Kaufmann’s Humanity in a Creative Universe, Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible, and Richard Kearney’s Anatheism. Additionally, I will also consult aesthetic vocabularies that address the issue, specifically the poetry of Robert Browning, Dan Fogelberg, and Wallace Stevens, along with the Abstract Expressionist work of Mark Rothko. I will conclude the essay by suggesting that although one may expound on the desire for existential meaning through diverse discourses, if there is genuinely any realization of that meaning, it will occur regardless of how it is articulated. That is to say, the creative and transformative function of any transcendent meaning may work ex opere operato in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s rose that does not depend on one exclusive naming.

To Be Good Is to Do the Truth: Being, Truth, the Good, and the Primordial Conscience in a Thomist Perspective

To Be Good Is to Do the Truth:Being, Truth, the Good, and the Primordial Conscience in a Thomist Perspective1 For Richard Schenk, O.P., on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday The Dominant Self-Image of Late Modern Humanity: The Sovereign Subject In the early decades of the twenty-first century, an observant spectator might perceive the striking ambiguity that haunts the self-image of late modern humanity in the Western Hemisphere. The rapidly accelerating progress of the scientific penetration of the natural world and the ensuing technological domination of the whole planet seem to have advanced humanity into a quasi-divine position, into a collective Demiurge. Sovereignty, once upon a time an exclusive attribute [End Page 53] of divinity, seems now to fall to humanity collectively, and to each individual human subject in rather far-reaching specific ways. In the affluent parts of the Western Hemisphere, subjective sovereignty is exercised by way of the unfettered rule of one's will over (ideally) everything exterior to one's will, from myriads of consumer goods to varyingly branded identities and, last but not least, ideological and religious affiliations. The precious and tenaciously defended privilege of subjective sovereignty is, of course, choice. The scope of choice is seen as directly proportional to the degree of subjective sovereignty—an increase in the former indicates an increase in the latter. However, the interpretation of reality that the natural sciences communicate to the public presents a jarringly different picture—a picture that puts into question the very possibility of subjective sovereignty. The human mind is understood as an epiphenomenon of the brain's neurological processes, and human choices are predicted with statistical precision and unmasked as ultimately driven by nothing other than the interests of the "selfish gene." According to the naturalist savants of the most advanced life-sciences, humans are nothing but highly sophisticated primates that will eventually be transparent without remainder to the scientific gaze and, therefore, open to comprehensive governance by way of the most advanced psychological and technological means of manipulation. Thus, the modern subject vacillates between two competing self-images. On the one side, we find the gnostic angelism of the putatively disembodied sovereign self that may submit to its will an absolutely malleable and fluid exteriority. And on the other side, we find the materialist animalism of a super-primate that is the accidental product of the intricate interplay between random genetic mutation and specific ecological niche preferment. The extremes touch each other insofar as trans-humanism (an outgrowth of the fantasies of the sovereign self) and post-humanism (the reductive understanding of the human being as super-primate) coincide in their de facto erasure of the embodied rational being, the animal rationale. As always, so also in our contemporary context, deeply shaped by the utopian pretenses of trans-humanism and post-humanism, sovereignty has two aspects: the sovereign agent and the objects upon which sovereignty is exercised. The interminable struggle in late-modern technologically advanced, economically consumer-capitalist, and politically putatively liberal societies of the Western [End Page 54] Hemisphere is to avoid at all costs being subjected to—and thereby objectified by—the sovereignty of others and simultaneously to maximize one's possibilities of exercising subjective sovereignty. In our robustly secular and deeply skeptical Western societies, subjective sovereignty is the one transcendence the modern subject remains certain of, since it is self-produced. This particular form of transcendence is a decidedly immanent transcendence, for its outer horizon is death. Death defies all strategies of maintaining or increasing subjective sovereignty—albeit with one significant exception: the unique strategy of folding death into the last act of one's own subjective sovereignty by sovereignly determining the terminus of oneself and the subsequent annihilation of one's body. It is this deeply ironic, yet equally deeply consistent, consequence that betrays the profound pretention and falsehood of the self-image of subjective sovereignty. The Metaphysics of Being and Its Three Fundamental Premises Regarding Being, Truth, and the Good2 What might be the cure from this pervasive but profoundly false self-image? I would submit, in all due modesty, that the only lasting cure will be nothing...

The Prose of Place in Grande Sertao: Veredas and Pedro Paramo

Abstract Grande Sertão: Veredas (João Guimarães Rosa, Brazil, 1956) and Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, Mexico, 1955), despite myriad differences, both portray regions that are both experiential and spatial, and do so through the translation of those regions into experiential, spatial narratives. In both works, the telluric spaces of the Brazilian sertão and the Mexican llano become narrative ones in threefold translation: (1) their narratives are spatially forged through temporal ambiguity, (2) the novels are participatory spaces, inviting reader collaboration through bridges and lacunae, and (3) the narratives’ paradoxes and unreliability reflect their translated regions’ spatial complexity. These regions are geographically placed, culturally inscribed, and spiritually felt: Grande Sertão: Veredas’ sertão is an immanent transcendence, and Pedro Páramo’s Comala, an immanent history of cruelty. Traditionally celebrated for being innovative despite being regional, these novels are, in fact, innovative in their relationship to their regions. Through parallel innovations in spatiality, these works invigorate their readers’ connections to the land as both its interlocutors and its dwellers.

Surroundings: Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari, as strict immanentists and consistent proponents of an “in-the-middle” or “in-between,” had little philosophical time for notions of “the outside” or “the beyond” construed in terms invoking traditional ideas of transcendence (even though they created their own absolutely original notion of an “immanent transcendence.” Any such “in-the-middle,” however, must presuppose a milieu that is outside that “in-the-middle,” albeit one constituting a surround or ‘interzone’ (a term borrowed from William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch) for the “in-the-middle” in question, even if this surrounding milieu or interzone will, like its contiguous “in-the-middle,” also be unequivocally immanent. The essay discusses the kind of conceptual assemblage pertaining to interality/interology that can be constructed with regard to Deleuzo-Guattarian “surroundings.”

Affective Realism

Affective Realism

Varieties of Transcendence and Their Consequences for Political Philosophy

In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of the transcendental and its Hegelian and Habermasian modifications. In my conclusion I briefly discuss two alternative versions of modern immanent transcendence—cognitive and exemplary—and their consequences for political philosophy.

The latent cognitive sociology in Habermas

The aim of this article is twofold: to display some of the fruitful starting points in the later Habermas’ principal monograph for the development of a new kind of cognitive sociology; and to indicate the form of such a sociology by critically extrapolating its major parameters from Habermas’ assumptions regarding immanent transcendence, formal pragmatics and reconstructive sociology. The intended cognitive sociology is conceived as a refinement of a hitherto largely implicit dimension of Critical Theory. Its promise is far-reaching: to sharpen considerably the latter’s analytical repertoire and penetration; to draw attention to the need to recognize that the foundations of critique are not to be sought directly in normativity but rather in the cognitively structured normative dimension; and to stimulate consideration of the materialist implications of the rootedness of the human cognitive endowment in natural evolution and phylogenesis and the role of the resultant cognitive structures in the construction and elaboration of socio-cultural forms of life.

The Subject’s New Clothes: Immanent Transcendence and the Moral Self in the Modern Confucian Discourses

In Modern Confucian philosophy the notion of the moral Self which is expressed through the natural moral substance (xingti 性體) represents both the foundation of each individual and the core of the universal reason. The indivisibility of the moral Self from its concrete activities within the social sphere differs in many various aspects from prevailing Western political and philosophical theories that are based on the separation of the empirical and transcendent subject. Hence, this holistic special feature of the moral Self is closely related to one of the basic paradigms of Chinese intellectual history, i.e. the paradigm of immanent transcendence, which is also known as the paradigm of ‘radical’ or ‘pure’ transcendence. The present article introduces and analyses both above-mentioned, mutually intertwined traditional notions through the lens of modern interpretations, focusing upon the philosophical work written by the representatives of the second generation of Taiwanese Modern Confucians.

The Philosophical Sinification of Modernity and the Modern Confucian Paradigm of Immanent Transcendence (內在超越性)

As a major source of social values, Modern Confucian theory assumes essential significance amidst the proliferation of instrumental rationality in contemporary China. This current is distinguished by a multifaceted attempt to revitalize traditional thought by means of new influences borrowed or derived from Western systems. It defines itself with a search for a synthesis between “Western” and traditional Chinese thought, aiming to elaborate a new system of ideas and values, suitable for the modern, globalized society. The present contribution examines the ways in which 3rd generation of Modern Confucian philosophers changed the framework within which traditional Chinese philosophical inquiry has been carried out, exposing the importance of immanent transcendence.

The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani (review)

Reviewed by: The Gospel According to Shakespeare by Piero Boitani Robin S. Stewart Piero Boitani, The Gospel According to Shakespeare, trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2013) xiii + 156 pp. Originally published in Italian in 2009 and awarded the prestigious De Sanctis prize the following year, Piero Boitani’s The Gospel According to Shakespeare is consciously tailored to appeal to a general audience. Much of its slim 145-page length consists of comprehensive plot summaries, a useful feature for the average reader unlikely to be familiar with Shakespeare’s late romances. In addition, as the author himself notes in his Preface to this English translation, the book “has little in common with contemporary Shakespeare criticism” and foregoes engagement with recent literary scholarship in favor of an intuitive essayistic style reminiscent of Eric Auerbach and Frank Kermode, an approach Boitani likens to “a classroom step-by-step lectura” (xiii). However, the modest size of Boitani’s book should not belie the ambition of his argument, which is that Shakespeare’s late romances are not just “old fashioned tales” casually engrafted with sacred themes and tropes, but in toto they constitute Shakespeare’s own Gospel, which, like those of the New Testament, activate a sense of wonder and affirm the miraculous in a way that cultivates something like Paul’s definition of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). Throughout his readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, Boitani equates this Pauline faith (and state of grace that accompanies it) with attaining a providential view of human affairs. As he insists in his chapter on Hamlet, “to abandon oneself to Providence, being ready for death, which can come at any moment: this is the evangelical message” (21). Thus, in his overall argument Hamlet and King Lear function prophetically, “where Shakespeare’s New Testament is only announced and where faith, salvation, and peace are only glimpsed at from far away” (xi), as in Hamlet’s brief reflections on “the fall of a sparrow” and Lear’s fleeting joy at the prospect of reuniting with Cordelia to become “God’s spies.” In the final scenes of the romances, however, he finds “a plenitude—a grace—that is found only in the Gospels (and particularly in those of John and Luke) within the post-Resurrection scenes” (5). In Shakespeare it is this-worldly grace, marked by “repentance and forgiveness … [and] the hope of immanent transcendence” (73), made manifest through the plays’ scenes of familial restoration—in Pericles’s rediscovery of Marina and Thaisa, in Imogen’s return to Cymbeline and Posthumus, in Hermione’s resurrection, and in the realignment of affairs at the [End Page 210] conclusion of The Tempest. “The Good News that Shakespeare’s last plays bring us,” Boitani claims, “is that we can reach happiness on earth,” by which he means “to be reunited with one’s loved ones, to rediscover them and recognize them, constitutes true happiness” (8). Walking this tightrope between the sacred and secular, between the theological and dramatic elements of Shakespeare’s theater, generates Boitani’s most compelling readings and inspires useful insights on the interplay between art and faith. In his discussions of Hermione’s resurrection, he observes, “if we can believe, through the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that Coleridge says is necessary for the fruition of art … then Shakespeare would seem to suggest that we can also believe in the resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity” (85–86). Throughout the book, Boitani pursues this interaction between dramatic art and faith by focusing on the concept of recognition, which can encompass both Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis and the recognition of divinity in scriptural narratives—a subject that Boitani’s previous works, such as The Bible and its Rewritings, have dealt with extensively. His readings of Shakespeare’s recognition scenes—particularly between Pericles and Marina, and between the complex network of characters in the final scene of Cymbeline—are far and away the most breathtaking sections of the book, and through the act of recognition, Botani most convincingly connects...

Ethos, Mythos, and Thanatos: Spirituality and Ethics at the End of Life

Every ethos implies a mythos in the sense that every systematic approach to ethics is inevitably based on some fundamental religious or religion-like story that gives answers to questions such as: Where did I come from? Where am I going? How am I to live? These narratives generally lay hidden beneath the plane of the interpersonal interactions that characterize all clinical encounters, but caring for patients who are approaching death brings them closer to the surface. For many patients and practitioners, these narratives will be expressed in explicitly religious language; others may invoke a sense of “immanent transcendence” that affords a spiritual perspective without requiring theism or notions of eternity. In caring for patients at the end of life, practitioners should strive to be more conscious of the narratives that undergird their own spiritual and ethical positions as well as seek to understand those of the patients they serve.

Face of the Human and Surface of the World

In this article, the surface of the world is envisaged as a face. Cinema as a record of this surface, and as a medium which “re-invented” the face in the close-up shot, makes it possible to reflect on the status of the human subject in the universe, thanks to the concept of cinematic pantheism. Following Elie Faure, the author underscores the pantheistic nature of cinema and claims that cinematic pantheism is the way by which film produces simultaneously transcendence and immanence, and materializes the unity of both, thus confirming Siegfried Kracauer's theory according to which man, nature and culture are part of the same “visible phenomena” in cinema. Cinema transforms all beings into surfaces: it operates by facialization and surfacialization. On the other hand, the article revisits Deleuze and Guattari's concept of faciality and argues that it describes a surface operating as the interface of the body in its interaction with other bodies in the media, the realm of the divine, or the universe. Thus faciality is also landscapity, and activating the camera means “transfiguring” the human (or the landscape) into face and introducing a vis-a-vis: the face of God, as immanent transcendence. In that sense, cinematic mysticism, as in Paradjanov's, Makhmalbaf's and Mikhalkov's films, is pantheistic.

God as immanent transcendence in Mark C. Taylor and John D. Caputo

This article aims at describing and evaluating Mark C. Taylor's and John D. Caputo's ideas about God as immanent transcendence. In the first part, the article provides a basic typology of immanent transcendence; the second and third parts present Taylor's and Caputo's philosophies of religion. It is shown that the two authors emphasize two different aspects of immanent transcendence which strongly affect their understandings of God. In Taylor, God is described in terms of imagination, while Caputo refers to God as an event. In the final section, the article then, for heuristic purposes, introduces a distinction between “pagan,” “Judaic,” and “Christian” interpretations of God as immanent transcendence, and argues that Taylor's God of imagination is more “pagan” than “Christian” and that Caputo's God of the event exemplifies a “messianic Judaism.” Here the article offers a few critical remarks as it attempts to develop an outline of a more “Christian” understanding of immanent transcendence.

Towards a Cognitive Sociology for Our Time: Habermas and Honneth or Language and Recognition … and beyond

This article argues that Habermas and Honneth's respective critical social theories contain elements which, although largely concealed, can be unearthed, consolidated and developed for the purposes of constructing a timely kind of cognitive sociology. The proposed departure attempts to draw out and build on the strengths of both authors, however divergent and opposed their social theories might appear. Amidst all the differences between them, the common core elements in their respective language-theoretical and recognition-theoretical versions of critical theory provide the means for devising a theoretical innovation that goes beyond both, yet remains within the metatheoretical parameters of critical theory encapsulated by its key concept of immanent transcendence.

Horseshoes, angels and other UFOs: Rethinking faith in light of present-day superstitions

The monotheistic religions see God as the author of human faith. Faith comes �from above� and as such is unnatural or supernatural. The faith of pagans, by contrast, is regarded as superstition and hence natural (Rm 1). One can make a case for the �natural� universal incidence of both religion and superstition and their fulfilment of similar needs. In addition both are characterised by the pattern-finding operation of the human brain. The (causal) connections we make and the patterns we impose on reality have always helped people to comprehend and manipulate the world. Historical circumstances led to the development of �official� religions as institutions wielding political power, whereas superstition has remained a para-religious phenomenon to this day.But how should religion and superstition be viewed in a postmetaphysical, technoscientific environment? How can the supernatural aspects of religion and superstition be accommodated in such an environment? The role of affect and belief (placebo effect) in religion and superstition is also scrutinised. Viewed differently, both religion and superstition are considered natural and are proposed as a form of immanent transcendence, in which the �supernatural� is not posited as a metaphysical model but is worked out �from below� in terms of the human constitution.

A Notion of “Immanent Transcendence” and Its Feasibility in Environmental Ethics

AbstractThe focus of this paper is twofold. The main part is dedicated to an exploration of a possible foundation for a notion of “immanent transcendence” in environmental philosophy. As a foil to constructivist and relativist positions on “nature” as human creation/projection, I discuss nature as a self-emerging process larger than—hence transcendent of—us that is not linked to the supernatural (either religious transcendent power or “higher” metaphysical reality), by considering and building on a phenomenological account of the lived experience of nature, including an acknowledgment of the otherness of nature. This basis of an “immanent transcendence,” though distinct from religious transcendence, might nonetheless be categorized as a form of spirituality, and can be linked to the emergent “spiritual, but not religious” selfidentifi cation. In the final part, having established this framework, I consider its feasibility as a basis for environmental action and ethics.

Can Heaven Bear the Weight of History? The 'Spirituality of Concrete' in the Work of Anselm Kiefer

The theme of heaven and earth has been present in Anselm Kiefer's work from the beginning (The Heavens 1969). In this article I will explore the spirituality of Kiefer's work, particularly his view of transcendence in works in which he makes use of Jewish mysticism. In doing so, I will be discussing, among others, Mark Taylor's, Daniel Arasse's and Donald Kuspit's interpretations of Kiefer's paintings. Kiefer's 'spirituality of concrete' has not only a melancholic, leaden tone of grey but also a hopeful stripe of light. It does not concern a transcendence irreparably torn from this world but a transcendence in which there is a direct connection between heaven and earth. Kiefer's 'spirituality of concrete' expresses immanent transcendence as an open question to heaven with a gleam of hope. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press 2010; all rights reserved.

Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens

Rilke and Stevens evoke the question of transcendence, understanding the task of poetry within the post‐Romantic context of the eclipse of the divine. This study shows that rather than simply give up on transcendence, Rilke and Stevens both innovate on and transform its momentum, and that this transformation constitutes a central achievement of their respective poetics and a core of their configurations of modernism. It argues that in the context of modern poetry transcendence, or “crossing beyond,” must be understood in two distinct senses, as vertical and horizontal projections, and it is the usurpation of one by the other or the transfer between them that distinguishes the poetry of Rilke and Stevens and makes a comparative reading particularly illuminating. Establishing their relation to the phenomenological tradition helps to bring out a sense of transcendence distinct from a traditional or Romantic longing for a realm above and beyond earthly existence. This would be an “immanent” transcendence, a crossing of horizons between perception and imagination or imagination and reality.