The attributes that you confer on immanence in order to generate synonymy with non-duality are reflexive anchorings occurring after identity assumption, logically speaking. Those attributes affix themselves to subsequent substantialist positionings of identity assumption; becoming identified, substantialised, and positioned; themselves; according to uncritical conceptions and conventions of those substantialist positionings.
This entire structure of conceptual self referral, originates from two dualistic identifications; substance identity, and worldly identity, both, assumptions. Both are corollaries of each other, but not quite necessarily so. Substance identity, necessarily arises as an artefact of any positivist identity assumption, if that identity is held to be delimited in some way. As identity, in order to be an identification, is necessarily and simultaneously a delimitation, substance assumption characteristically arises as a question of the production of positivist identity, itself produced by this delimitation.
The delimitation producing positivist identity simultaneously produces negative identity, the two sides of any delimitation. The search for the ‘substance’; ‘essence’; ‘interiority’; et cetera, of the positivist identity necessarily occurs within the space of negative identity, everything that the positivist identity is allegedly not. This search, within ‘negative substantial space’, is a quest for correspondence, likeness, sameness, unity, homogeneity, et cetera. It is a quest for agreeable affinities in which the individual instance or instantiation discovers its own positivity in that ‘negative substantial space’.
Under the category of a substance, the individual instance or instantiation can be positively characterised, relieving it of a potentially infinite burden of possible negations. With a sufficient number of substantial categorisations, it can be ‘definitively’ characterised, if not exhaustively. The criteria and parameters of whatever that ‘definition’ might be, are contingent – at least on a prima facie level – on the production of that definition and its purposes. Though that characterisation is, of course, a positivist one. The joys of substantial concord or accord, affirm the ecstasies of positivist resolution, in definitional closure.
But note, this entire categorical drama, the theatrics of positive and negative duality, is contingent on an initial delimitation, and on the subsequent ascribing of values, such as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’; ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’; ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ (to a – positive – substance); et cetera.
All of it, is conventional.
Though it may have arisen, ‘naturally’, this does not really say very much; at least, the positivist assumption of it; as the category of ‘nature’, too, is a convention. So, too, with the category of tradition, whether formal or informal, and in its positivist garb. What positivist traditions and assumptions have not answered before, it would be unreasonable to expect them to answer in future.
What we see, with positivist distortion or bias, is the overuse of substantialism, attempting to populate ‘negative substantial space’ from a limited and inadequate stock of habitual, substantial instruments, at the expense of considering the logical role of ‘negative substantial space’ between those instruments, in a more sophisticated and intuitive, interstitial way. The neglect of this consideration, which really is the neglect of an entire and essential perspective, leads to the fevered production of posits in fruitless attempts at what has essentially become, a hamstrung positivist comprehension. It is even the case, often, that ‘negative substantial space’ becomes reified as a positivist, substantial identity; ascribed to another, configurational, identity; going by the rubric, ‘world’; as yet another reductive, positivist explanation.
It is not that positivist explanations do not have a role to play. But exclusive reliance on their habitual, uncritical use; at the expense of appropriate, specific, and complementary negative expertise; results only in a positivist hysteria manically throwing half-baked positivist ideas into the void in desperate attempts to resolve the leaking discrepancies caused by such exclusive reliance, in the first place.
The characteristically obsessive theme structuring this positivist hysteria is the figure of the ‘thing-in-itself’, whose desperate oscillations in psychosocial consciousness power the hysteria.
The justification for the emphasis of positivist identity, for the notion of a thing-in-itself, is the convention of everyday empiricity – the encounter with ‘things’. It is this convention of empirical encountering which is raised up into the fixation of metaphysical principle, displacing, eliding, and obscuring, to varying degrees, the logic of delimitation and identification from which it arises. Once raised up, its appeal and justification is always to some everyday intuition, as the occasion for this principled fixation.
Such occasioning becomes the pretext for prioritising the notion of a ‘thing-in-itself’, as the governing model of positivist identity, due to the sequential logic of perceptual and cognitive discovery suggesting metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, under the methodological signs of constitution or constitutivity, comprising ‘element’; ‘component’; ‘contingency’; ‘whole’; ‘mechanism’; ‘environment’; et cetera.
But a shift occurs, positivist identity and its governing model have become prioritised as an exclusive condition or centre governing all considerations, at the expense of serious reflection on the condition of delimitation from which its initial identification is produced. This often occurs under the sign of ‘the given’, an unquestioned assumption. If it were to be questioned, the customary response is to produce a spectrum of conventional intuitions occurring under the aegis of ‘the given’, affirming and negating these intuitions in a show of consideration, but not actually questioning the form or principle of ‘the given’, in ‘itself’, nor clearly delineating its function.
Positivist identity and its philosophical transactions, mainly occurring within the parameters of metaphysical systems of appearance and essentialisation, constitutes a globally hegemonic culture which relegates serious reflection on delimitation to either relatively innocuous formal specialisations or marginalised, fringe concerns. With this social and institutional distribution; seriousness is lost; genuine questioning is kept at bay; the grip of positivist imperialism seems to be unshaken.
If ‘forms of language’ reflect ‘forms of life’, then it very much seems to me that the culture of positivist instrumentalisation is beset by a very particular kind of referential poverty. The inflation of that culture exercises a systematic restraint or constraint coercing all expressions to follow the abbreviations and semantic routes of positivist identity. This is a dictatorship of coercive desire covertly hostile to any tranquility of consideration that might escape it.