It’s enough of a task to write in a way that one considers satisfactory according to one’s own criteria; but to add the burden of communicating to those subscribing to other criteria, criteria that do not exert the same effects on one’s personal procedures, as they seem to exercise on those others; is an additional didacticism weighed down precisely by that which one is obliged to contest.
It’s somewhat uncertainly amusing to note the general history of conceptual inflations surrounding the words, and concepts, of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’.
The progress has merely been from the 18th and 19th century, as well as theological, fetishisings of the one; to the physics-envy, and scientististic differentiation, fetishisings of the other. Both have had a tendency towards positivist abbreviations and assumptions, automatically eliding, misrepresenting, or otherwise dismissing, serious narrative consideration of the opposing polarity’s distributive obligations.
There comes a time when a culture or civilisation is required to be equal to the self-images of development it has expressed; chaotically and clumsily weaving filigrees of positivist abbreviation around ad hoc structures of cartoon-like formalisation, might fulfill some Deleuzian fashion for ‘rhizomatic’ proliferation; or some other differential reaction to prior homogeneous styles of thought; or the opposed movement of homogenising reaction to allegedly established differential styles of thought; but all of that is a far cry from understandings not quite so susceptible to such fashionable and predictable fetishishisations, and, let us be honest, is a gesture of general cultural ‘backtracking’, one of enormous proportions. The gesture, being honest once again, is a revelation only of the inability to actually think in any way beyond the knee-jerk positivist surfaces of chosen substantial assumption. The entire sequence proceeds only according to the display of so many disingenuous nostalgias.
That’s not really a burden one would wish to carry; but it does require pointing out.
‘Immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, are always contextually dependent, and interdependent. Context is always subject to radically variable determination. So, neither is susceptible to any final determination. The same positivist instance, can be both ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’, both attributions being drawn from equally possible and available contexts.
Contexts themselves, can be both formalised or unformalised positive instances in their inflationary and extensible forms, as substantial orders. They are metaphorics, and their characteristic structural economies are the substantial patternings configuring logics of intuition and their substantial assumptions.
Anything at all, can be a ‘positive instance’, or a ‘context’.