What

is Immanence?


By FT
November 2018







“Immanence” is one of the most important concepts in the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze, and it’s the central concept of Deleuze’s work on Spinoza.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the word immanence before.
There are also distinct Hegelian-Marxist and Christian senses of “immanence” that
are related to but not quite the same as what Deleuze means when he calls Spinoza’s
philosophy “immanent.” Maybe you’ve heard the word in those other contexts. As
Deleuze and Spinoza become increasingly popular, “immanence” is cropping up in
more and more places. But it proves hard to find a solid definition.

Take for example Brian Massumi’s reading guide, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, a text I appreciate and used myself as an undergrad to help
understand Deleuze & Guattari. There are 10 different entries for “immanence” in
the book’s index. But nowhere in the book is the term explained. On page 98 (to give
a random example) we find the sentence “In spite of its emphasis on the nonexistent,
the procedure of becoming is entirely immanent.” But what does that mean?

Massumi is the English translator of A Thousand Plateaus and one of the best-known
Deleuze scholars in North America. I’m sure he has a grasp of the word
“immanence”; I’m not suggesting that he doesn’t understand it. But he doesn’t stop
to explain it. That might be a choice and not an error; I’m not saying he forgot to
explain it. Maybe he decided that explaining that term would take too long or divert
from his main argument or go over the intended reader’s head. There are any
number of ways to account for the fact that the word “immanence” isn’t explained in
Massumi’s book. But the fact remains that a reader who didn’t already know the
word means would encounter it in the book at least 10 times and finish the book
without a clear sense of its meaning. Again, I don’t doubt that Massumi understands
what “immanence” means, but I do question where he expects his readers to learn
what it means, especially since there was no Wikipedia when he wrote the book.

Or take Francois Dosse’s generally great Intersecting Lives, a dual biography of
Deleuze & Guattari, published almost 20 years after Massumi’s book. Between
Massumi’s book and Dosse’s Deleuze Studies went from a footnote to an established
academic field, and yet there is no clearer sense of this strange term that is so
central to Deleuze’s philosophy. The first instance of the word “immanence” appears
on page 127 in my edition, where Dosse quotes Deleuze’s phrase “the internalized
difference become immanent” without explanation. On page 147, Dosse writes that
“What is is not substance [ibid] but expresses it without any hierarchical quality,
making Spinoza a thinker of immanence who breaks with all emanative thinking.”
On page 157, Dosse writes that “Removed from all transcendence, nature in all its
forms is legible in immanence.” Not only are these sentences largely nonsensical in
themselves, they don’t come with any further explanation. Dosse’s book is a great
and important biography, but it disappoints in its treatment of Deleuze’s concepts;
unlike Massumi, I’m not sure Dosse actually does have a clear conception of what
immanence means, though he obviously recognizes its importance to Deleuze’s work.

Massumi’s book is a reading guide to one of Deleuze’s major works; Dosse’s is a
biography of Deleuze. Neither book includes a clear definition or explanation of this
term that’s so central to Deleuze’s philosophy. Where is a student or non-specialist
interested in Deleuze supposed to learn what this concept means?

The likewise-generally-great Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also doesn’t have
an entry for “immanence.” If you search for “immanence,” it will send you to an
article on “The Metaphysics of Causation,” where the section on immanence begins
like this: “Are the causal relata immanent, or transcendent?” But here too, there’s no
explanation or definition given for immanence; you’re assumed to know what it
means already, which isn’t very helpful. Our short trip to the Stanford Encyclopedia
is enough to hint that the problem isn’t specific to people who write about Deleuze.

This short text is intended to familiarize a reader with the concept of immanence.

There are at least two distinct senses of “immanence” in contemporary philosophy.
The first is what I call traditional or metaphysical immanence. This is Deleuze’s
concept of immanence, the immanence Deleuze locates in Spinoza, the immanence
that can be traced back to late antique and medieval disputations about the nature
of existence. The second is the hermeneutic concept of immanence we find in
Christian theology and in Hegel (i.e., in Christian theology). It’s important to know
both concepts exist, because when you see an expression like “immanent” or “plane
of immanence” or “immanent critique,” you need to know which sense is implied:
“immanent critique” is usually but not always the Hegelian-Marxist concept, “plane
of immanence” is usually but not always the Deleuzian concept.

This text is mostly about Deleuze’s concept of immanence.
First, A Few Definitions

Early in my dissertation work, I grew incredibly frustrated by the sheer volume of
“secondary literature” that drew on theoretical and philosophical concepts without
explaining them. I was always very conscious of pedagogy, even before I started
teaching. And I was always a lot more anxious about looking like an idiot in front of
my students than about looking like an idiot in front of my colleagues; I always
understood that an undergrad was much more likely to ask for a definition or an
explanation of an obscure term than any academic, who would be worried about
looking ignorant and not understanding something.

I decided early in my dissertation writing to avoid or reject any concept that I
couldn’t give an adequate, succinct definition for, short enough to fit on one 3” x 5”
index card, including immanence. The definitions below are copy-pasted from my
original dissertation notes, with their original headline:




Immanance: An Experiment in Definition

The Winner:

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which takes as its point of departure

the relations between entities, rather than their essence, truth, or origin.”

1st Runner Up:

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which is able to equally account for

the relations between ideas and the relations between material entities
according to a single set of principles.”

Aliter:
“A purely immanent philosophy is one which is able to articulate equally its
ontology and its epistemology according to a single set of principles.”

2nd Runner Up:

“A purely immanent ontology is one which responds to the Cartesian

cogito with a simple proposition: I am, therefore I am.”
 3rd Runner Up:

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which can address existence both

from the perspective of being and from the perspective of becoming
without contradicting itself.”

Honorable Mentions:

“A purely immanent philosophy is one capable of grasping being as its own

sufficient cause.”

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which understands being in itself as

existence, rather than existence being somewhere or in some thing.”

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which is able to rationally distinguish

between necessity (sufficient cause) and determination (final cause).

“Pure immanence is the philosophical attempt to theorize the gap or

difference between the objective and the subjective not as absence but as
origin.”

“A purely immanent philosophy is one which constructs general principles

on the basis of specific entities, rather than elaborating specific entities on
the basis of universal principles.”


Revisiting these definitions now, I see clear traces of the personal history that led
me to the concept of immanence, which was an education in critical theory derived
from phenomenology (Derrida, and behind him Hegel, Heidegger, and all their
familiar struggles with metaphysics). I can see in these definitions what immanence
represented to me back when I first discovered Spinoza: the idea that all the things
I’d been taught as intractable metaphysical problems were in fact errors of
formulation and conceptualization.

They aren’t perfect, but I stand by these definitions today. The major difference is
that today I think the winning definition in this group is the last one: “A purely
immanent philosophy is one which constructs general principles on the basis of
specific entities, rather than elaborating specific entities on the basis of universal
principles.” I think it’s better than my original winner because “realtions” are
already a particular, differentiated kind of thing or entity, whereas we construct
principles to understand how things can even be differentiated in the first place.

Is that a pedantic distinction? Yes, but virtually all ontological distinction are
pedantic once we get past first principles. The truth is, immanence only really
matters if you’re already inclined to care about this shit.


Why Does Immanence Matter?

The shortest answer is, “It doesn’t.”

A slightly longer version is, “It doesn’t matter unless you’re invested in philosophy,
either for its own sake, or for the sake of something else.” Immanence only really
matters to people who already think that concepts like “immanence” matters.

Immanence is a philosophical principle. A principle is an algorithm that determines
the shape of concepts produced through and after it, so that you don’t have to start
thinking from scratch every time: you do the work of writing the algorithm once,
and then plug-and-play. Similarly, you do the work of establishing a principle, and
then proceed from there unless or until the principle fails you. Principles, unlike
ideas and concepts in general, have to be established; they are not simply given.

A well-known example of a “principle” in contemporary theory is Freud’s pleasure
principle. Freudian psychoanalysis assumes that every individual aims to avoid
unpleasure whenever possible and increase pleasure if possible. So when Freud
listens to a patient describe a particular neurotic behavior, he immediately starts to
look for the ways in which the behavior either reduces unpleasure or generates
pleasure. This principle doesn’t arrive fully-formed into Freud’s skull; he arrives at it
gradually, over the course of his investigations into hysteria. Once he arrives at this
principle, though, it guides his assumptions and interpretations for two decades,
until the complexities of narcissism, masochism, and trauma demand the formation
of an additional principle, the constancy principle.

Immanence is also a principle. But where the pleasure principle is a principle for
generating and evaluating concepts about human behavior, immanence is a
principle for generating and evaluating concepts about metaphysics, that is, about
the relationship between being and causality. This makes immanence a particularly
difficult principle to establish. Freud arrives at the pleasure principle through
diligent observation of human behavior, but no direct observation of any kind will
allow you to arrive at pure immanence. The pleasure principle is an abstraction, but
an abstraction once removed from observation; immanence is a second-order
abstraction, abstracted from abstract metaphysical speculations. In an essay we’ll
meet again below, Deleuze observes that “abstractions explain nothing, they must
themselves be explained.” Immanence is one such explanation: immanence is an
algorithm for generating and evaluating abstractions.

We can finally get some sense of the importance of immanence to people who care
about that kind of thing. Principles matter because they “fall back on” other concepts,
as Deleuze & Guattari might put it. Principles aren’t given, they need to be
established; but once established they determine the shapes of other concepts, as
any algorithm determines the shape of its outputs. If you’re not into algorithms,
think of it like buying a baking tin: you can buy a tin in whatever shape you like, but
every cake you bake in that particular tin is going to have the same basic shape.

Another way to think of it: imagine stumbling around in a dark room, looking for a
light switch. Maybe you don’t even know for sure if the room has a light switch;
maybe you woke up in a totally unfamiliar space and you’re just hoping the room
has a light switch. Even if that room does have a light, that fact doesn’t help you in
your initial effort to locate the light. But once you find the light switch and flick it on,
everything in the room becomes clearer. Plus, after you find the light switch, you can
look around and finally figure out what it was that you banged your shin on earlier.
In short, while immanence isn’t much use in establishing the concept of immanence,
it’s a useful concept after you establish it. It sheds light on all other concepts.

Once we establish the concept of immanence, we can use it as a dialectical principle:
we can apply metaphysical principles to dialectics just as easily and fairly as we can
apply logical principles to dialectics. We aren’t born intuitively knowing that two
assertions are contradictory if only one of the two can be the case but both are
asserted; that’s a learned principle of logic, just as immanence is a learned principle
of metaphysics. In the Middle Ages philosophers used scripture as a higher-order
principle to check and correct philosophy: the grounding principle was that true
philosophy couldn’t contradict scripture, so every other assertion could be checked
against that grounding principle. Once we accept that immanence “is the case,” we
can check other concepts and principles against it – if they contradict the principle
of immanence, we’ve gone wrong somewhere, or at least have work left to do. The
difference between pure immanence as a principle and, say, the authority of
scripture as a principle is that pure immanence emerges from the very concepts it
organizes, whereas the authority of scripture is external to the concepts it organizes.

Aristotle tells us in the Organon that most disciplines and arguments rest on
principles external to themselves. Throughout the medieval era we see philosophers
struggling with the external authority of scripture and pushing the limit of that
external principle as far as it could go while always remaining within the orbit of
what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” For Heidegger, and for Derrida, philosophy
never truly escapes this appeal to an external authority, which is the problem
Derrida calls “the closure of metaphysics.” Deleuze would say, I think, that Spinoza
produced a set of metaphysical principles resting entirely on metaphysics, and that
metaphysics is not a trap that needs to be escaped from. Deleuze, unlike Derrida,
didn’t have a problem with metaphysics.

I say all this mostly to absolve you of any guilt you might feel if you don’t give a shit,
or if you really don’t understand what the hell immanence is even after you read my
explanation. It’s OK if you don’t care about immanence, and it’s OK if you don’t quite
understand it. That doesn’t mean you’re dumb, it just means you probably need to
do more basic reading and thinking in philosophy first. It took me a long time to
understand this concept and I’m still working through it. It’s fine if it doesn’t
resonate with you. But I’m writing this text because “immanence” is already a
widely-used word, so it doesn’t really matter whether I think it’s a good place to
start or not.

The Hegelian/Marxian Concept of Immanence

Last spring I saw the film Young Marx. “Immanence” is mentioned in the film
repeatedly, usually when a character is quoting Marx’s actual words. While I was
watching the film, two things occurred to me: immanence was mentioned but not
explained, as usual; and a student who had only encountered Deleuzian immanence
before might well hear these passages from Marx and wonder what the hell they had
to do with immanence. What Deleuze means when he says “immanence” is related
to but not the same as what Marx means when he says “immanence.” The terms
have a common history, as concepts designated by the same word often do, but they
aren’t equivalent or interchangeable. Marx’s concept of “immanence” is directly
derived from his teacher, Hegel.

The current text is mostly concerned with Deleuze’s concept of immanence, so this
next section is something of a detour. I’m not primarily a scholar of Marx, and I
absolutely hate Hegel, so I’m not the best person to explain the Hegelian-Marxist
concept of immanence to you. But Hegel’s concept and Deleuze’s concept branch off
from the same history, and I do think reading about that history “before the split”
can shed some light on the ways Hegel and Marx use the term. And at the very least,
it would be useful for you to be able to distinguish in context which sense of
immanence is implied.

Marx’s concept of “immanent critique” is drawn directly from Hegel, who was both
Marx’s teacher and a Protestant. Hegel’s work was, if not messianic, at least
teleological. Hegel assumed knowledge and history both had a Final Form and an
Ultimate End; he believed that Absolute Knowledge would arrive at the end of
History, because the entire purpose of History was to bring us to Absolute
Knowledge (you can tell a concept is Hegelian because It’s Capitalized). Hegel
thought history was a story, or maybe a video game, and he thought he knew how
the story of history ends; that’s what we mean when we say that Hegelianism is
teleological. I think this does a lot to explain the enduring popularity of Hegelianism
among literary critics and video game aficionados.

In Hegel’s teleology, the process of arriving at Absolute Knowledge and the end of
history was a process of exploring, exposing, and resolving (“sublating”)
contradictions in the world, in culture, and in philosophy: contradictions are present
in all these things equally to the extent that all these things develop equally and in
tandem towards final ends. For Hegel, “immanent critique” was an inquiry that
attempted just this task of exploring and exposing contradictions; he considered this
the fundamental labor of intellectual activity. A crucial assumption of this
“immanent critique” is that existence is somehow “made up of” contradictions, not
just on the level of inquiry but on the level of being: for Hegel, things “are”
contradictions in a meaningful way, or at least have contradictions somehow “inside”
or “underneath” them. We’ll see later why this notion is more or less directly
opposed to Spinozan or Deleuzian immanence. For now we can say that Hegelian,
Marxian, and Marxist references to “immanence” or “immanent critique” are almost
always references not to Deleuze’s concept but to the idea that our phenomenal
experience of being is organized and ordered by contradictions “in” things, and that
critique as a project should aim to examine and work through such contradictions.

This isn’t the place to explain why Hegel is a terrible philosopher, it would take too
long. Marx rejected many aspects of Hegel’s thought and critiqued his teacher
frequently, but he retained the teleological conception of history. Like Hegel, Marx
assumed that the resolution of contradictions is the dynamo that drives history.
Marx just disagreed with Hegel about the final ends of history, and about which
contradictions were the ones that really mattered. Marx thought the inevitable end
of all history was Communism, not the perfectly Enlightened bourgeois nation-state
Hegel imagined; he thought that what really mattered were material contradictions,
not the contradictions of spirit that plagued Hegel, a Prussian Protestant.

In Marx, history is kind of like a stalled vehicle and immanent critique is a shoulder
at the back of the car, nudging it forward however slightly. Immanent critique,
which seeks to discover the actual (i.e., material and economic) contradictions at the
heart of history, is thus opposed by Marxists to “reactionary” critique, which
disguises or masks these contradictions in an effort to keep the car stalled and
preserve the status quo, hindering progress towards full Communism.

This isn’t quite what Deleuze has in mind when he talks about “pure immanence.”
























Metaphysical Immanence and the History of Philosophy

The full history of the concept of immanence is the entire history of philosophy.

“Immanence” is a single conception, but it isn’t one idea: it’s a general principle,
arrived at after centuries of speculation about existence, being, and causality. The
history of the concept exceeds the history of the word “immanence” itself because,
as we’ve seen, principles must be established, they do not emerge fully-formed.

Why are things?
What is existence?
What is a cause?

These are a few of the fundamental questions of metaphysics. These questions are
exactly as absurd and asinine as they sound: how would you even begin to answer
questions like that? Well, you don’t, not really. In philosophy, as in experimental
science, you approach vast questions by breaking them down into specific inquiries
with limited parameters and finite variables. Of course these questions sound
absurd; they’re not very different from a child’s interest in “nature” or a medical
school student’s interest in “healing people.” What part of nature? Healing people
how? And what do you mean by “cause”?

Questions have answers, but not solutions; that’s the difference between a
speculative question and a technical problem. That’s why questions are posed again
and again over centuries. But in each instance, in each iteration of a particular
general question, philosophy breaks its inquiry down in different ways to arrive at
different technical diagrams and difference solutions. Philosophy is, in part, the
work of transforming questions into concrete problems; concepts are not answers,
but the expression of the problem itself. The history of philosophy is the history of
the ways in which questions have been transformed into concrete problems.

The grandiose, absurd question that ultimately rests behind the concept of
immanence is: What makes things happen?

*

If mythology is a piano sonata, metaphysics is a technical manual for tuning the
piano.

But HOW? – this is the perpetual cry of the metaphysician. There is always
something infantile and compulsive to metaphysics, like a child who answers every
explanation with a But whyyyyy?

Metaphysics substitutes technical problems for the questions for which religion and
mythology offer narrative answers: metaphysics transforms narrative questions into
philosophical problems; concepts in turn are the crystalized solutions to
philosophical problems. We would therefore be fully justified in accusing
philosophy of creating the problems it attempts to solve, and indeed of generally
creating problems where none existed. If humans weren’t around to ask questions,
existence wouldn’t consider itself a “problem”; it would just be, right? When we talk
about “the problem of existence” or “the problem of future contingency” or the
“problem of causality,” we’re first and foremost talking about cleaning up messes
that we’ve created for ourselves.

Immanence isn’t a “problem of philosophy”: it’s a place philosophy arrives as a
result of the problems posed by metaphysics. Immanence is one possible solution to
the problems of causation and being. Immanence is a general principle, an
understanding of existence arrived at through inquiry; it’s a fundamental view of
How Things Work, just as Marxism and creationism are fundamental views of How
Things Work. Like Marxism but unlike most forms of creationism, immanence offers
both an assertion about How Things Work and a technical diagram of that working.
Creationism offers only a narrative: God created the world in six days and rested on
the seventh. Philosophy asks, “But how did God create the world? What was the
actual process by which that happened? Direct? Indirect? Willed? Passive?” What
metaphysics demands is a technical explanation of the process, not a description of
the action. That’s the difference between a cause and an act, corresponding to the
difference between a diagram and a narrative.

This conception of metaphysics also offers us a conveniently simple definition of
transcendence: transcendence is introduced whenever there is a break in the
diagram, whenever the explanation breaks down or relies on something outside of
itself for its explanatory authority. Immanence and transcendence aren’t mutually
exclusive in the history of philosophy: most philosophical systems contain traces of
both, in varying ratios. Immanence is one kind of diagram of How Things Work;
transcendence is a break or a rupture in any diagram of How Things Work.

The first 150 years of philosophical inquiry, roughly the period between Thales of
Miletus and Plato of Athens, was the period during which the narrative descriptions
of myth began to break down into the technical diagrams of philosophy. The work of
the earliest philosophers, the “pre-Socratics,” was not properly speaking
metaphysical. Pre-Socratic inquiry asks two very reasonable and straightforward
technical questions: What are things made of? and How are things arranged? This
inquiry does produce technical diagrams like the atoms of Democritus and the maps
of Anaximander, but this inquiry is not yet metaphysical, because it still lacks the
concept of categorical distinction.

Pre-Socratic philosophy doesn’t seek general principles for the relation between the
mundane and the super-mundane, quite simply because it doesn’t yet recognize the
super-mundane as a category of being differing in kind from the mundane. Pre-
Socratic philosophy does seek principles. But the pre-Socratics located the highest
order of being in principles themselves, which is why their work is so often
summarized by individual claims: the eternal flux of Heraclitus; Parmenides’ claim
that motion and change are impossible; Anaximander’s apeiron. What is lacking in
pre-Socratic philosophy to make it metaphysical in the Aristotelian sense is the
technical problem of the relation between different kinds of things, plural. In making
principles the highest order of being, the pre-Socratics create different technical
problems: for example, how does a Something become Things, plural? How does a
thing become another thing? But we don’t find in pre-Socratic philosophy an order
of things categorically distinct from another order of things, as Ideas and existents
are distinct in Plato, for example. Even where there is an entire pantheon of gods,
the pre-classical Greeks didn’t seem concerned with the causal problems of
substantial division: to put it more simply, they thought the gods were made of the
same “stuff” as the rest of existence, so “How are the gods able to affect the world?”
didn’t occur to them a philosophical problem (at first).

In Plato we do find categorical distinction. Ideas are pure, eternal forms, while
actual existents are pale imitations of those Forms. Both kinds of things are
simultaneously, and therefore the question of Being becomes the technical problem
of coordinating these categories. Every actually existing table is just an imprint or
copy of the ideal form Table. At this point, a very obvious technical problem arises:
how? If every actually existing table is an imprint or copy of the ideal form Table,
then the ideal form Table and every actually existing table must obviously stand in
some kind of relation. But if ideal forms and actual exists are two absolutely distinct
kinds of things that share nothing in common, how can they possibly be related?
What is the mechanism of this relation? What is the actual process by which a
beautiful, perfect Ideal Form is corrupted and locked into the degenerate trap of
mere matter? How?

Ultimately, after actual millennia, this same set of questions and problems will
ultimately resolve into Spinoza’s concept of pure immanence. If there are at least
two kinds of things, how can they produce one single existence? if there is one single
existence, how can there be at least two different kinds of things? How? How? How?
This “how” is the impetus for the whole of metaphysics.

Unfortunately, Plato never really answers any of these questions. We don’t have any
metaphysical exposition in Plato; we only have descriptions embedded in the
narrative sections of the dialogues. In the pre-Socratics we don’t find metaphysics
because we have technical diagrams but not categorical distinction; in Plato we
don’t find metaphysics because we have categorical distinction but not technical
diagrams. Plato’s “metaphysics” barely rises above the level of mythology: we have
second-hand stories about angels and caves and reincarnation but no systematic
treatment. Plato describes actions, but doesn’t arrive at any principles about causes.

Plato’s dialogues don’t present his ideas as a systematic approach called “idealism”:
that’s what other people called Plato’s ideas after he died. We can summarize the
ideas we find in Plato under the name idealism after the fact; similarly, we can
describe his treatment of substances as a kind of analogism, even though Plato
himself didn’t use that word. Analogism is principle or a conception of being in
which there are at least two kinds of things, and one kind of thing is a lesser or
degraded version of the other, just as existents and ideas are in Plato. We can never
grasp the Ideal Form of the Table; we can only look at actually existing tables and
assume that the Ideal Form of the Table is that, but, like, way better. We establish
the nature of the superior or transcendent substance by analogy to the stuff we can
actually perceive and understand.

According to hints in Aristotle, Plato’s also wrote technical treatises in addition to
his dialogues, but none of them survive, and neither does any mention of them by
name or any direct quote from them. We can extract a set of metaphysical assertions
from Plato’s writing and call them idealism, but “metaphysics” as a systematic study
begins, as far as the record is concerned, with Aristotle and not with Plato. Aristotle,
Plato’s student, challenged and revised his teacher’s theory of forms. How did
Aristotle think the world worked? What did he think caused things to happen?

Aristotle’s cosmology would become the single most important and enduring one in
the entire history of philosophy: it would dominate Middle Eastern and European
thinking for over 1500 years. Aristotle claimed that existence was a series of
concentric spheres with the earth in the center, and the sun revolving around the
earth. The center, the mortal world of generation and corruption where humans live,
is the terminus or endpoint of an infinite process by which the movements of a
Prime Mover at the very top radiate down through all the spheres. Unlike Plato, who
posited an absolute break or difference between Ideal Forms and earthly existents,
Aristotle thought that there was a gradual set of stages by which immortal Form is
slowly expressed as individual entities.

For Aristotle, and for many, many Aristotelian philosophers after him, the cause and
the act are a kind of like the x and y axis of a two-dimensional graph. Acts are a set of
horizontal relations between temporal existents (finite individual entities): you act
in a world where everyone and everything around you is also a temporal actor in
the same way. But the causes of your actions and your existence stretch up along the
y axis and away from the world of actions and events, through spheres and agents
all the way to the Prime Mover and the First Cause. This is one example of a
technical explanation for relations between things; it’s one kind of metaphysics, or
one kind of metaphysical diagram.

Aristotle’s metaphysics is what’s called an emanationist metaphysics, because all
subsequent causes, things, and events are assumed to emanate from a single Prime
Mover or original cause: you start at one place, and you end up at a different place
several times removed. Another example of an emantionist conception of existence
is Kabbalah, which holds that God produced actual existence through a series of
sefirot. Kabbalah is not a metaphysics, though; it’s an anti-metaphysics that spread
in response to Aristotle during the Middle Ages. Kabbalah, like Sufism, is a non-
philosophical emanationist conception that ultimately traces back to Aristotle.
Emanationism would be the dominant paradigm for much of the history of Western
philosophy.

*

So far we’ve met analogism and emanationism as two different general conceptions
of How Things Work. Aristotle’s emanationist cosmology would dominate Western
philosophy for centuries, but it didn’t take long after his death for dramatic new
alternatives to emerge.

The two most influential schools of Athenian philosophy to emerge after Aristotle,
the Stoics and the Epicureans, both had very different cosmologies and metaphysics
than either Plato or Aristotle. In Epicurus, philosophy approaches closer to
immanence than it would again for over a thousand years.

Both the Epicureans and the Stoics were determinists. They believed that everything
happens because of a prior thing, which happens because of a prior thing, and so on
into infinity. This too is a kind of assertion about How Things Work.

Epicurus, like the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, believed that all things were
made up of tiny particles called atoms, and that all change and all events are caused
the action of atoms on each other. Epicurus argued that existence must be infinite,
and that all of existence follows according to the chain of determination. The only
variable in this conception was something he called the clinamen or “swerve”: atoms
follow regular paths, but can sometimes randomly deviate from those paths,
producing unexpected effects.

In Epicurus we meet for the first time immanence as a principle, immanence as a
fundamental perspective on the metaphysical relations between things. In Epicurus
there is only one kind of thing, really – atoms – and places where atoms currently
aren’t, which he called void. There is no second kind of thing; there is no higher
power; there is no external principle, agent, or Cause that initiates or orders
existence beyond the nature of the atoms and their trajectories. Things in existence
are not mere imitations of Ideal Forms. There is only the infinite movement of the
atoms in the void, occasionally swerving as they move. To put it most simply, in
Epicurus, things are because they are. That’s How Things Work.

When we “do” the history of philosophy, it’s important to remember that we are
constantly going back and imposing our own concepts and conceptions on
philosophers that lived centuries or even millennia ago. A concept is the
crystallization of a particular problem, but as Deleuze & Guattari explain in What Is
Philosophy?, particular problems crystalize at particular moments in history and not
before, even if all the elements that would form that concept are already in place.
We use the expression “Platonic idealism” to describe a set of metaphysical tenets
traditionally extract from the dialogues of Plato, but Plato wouldn’t have recognized
“idealism” as a term. Likewise, Epicurus wouldn’t have recognized the word
“immanence” as a description of his own philosophy, because the word is a Latinate
coinage that didn’t become the unifying label for this particular set of ideas until the
14th or 15th century.

Our story has only gone as far as the first 500 years of philosophy’s history, but in a
sense we’ve gone as far as we need to: we’ve reached an initial formulation of
immanence: things are because they are. This is, to return to my initial definitions, a
conception of existence that accounts equally for being and becoming according to a
single set of principles. Immanence is a conception of How Things Works that finds
the causes, the origin, and the ends of things in things themselves. We’ve met
Hegelianism, which thinks all things move towards the end of history; that’s not
immanence, because existence is not its own cause or end. We’ve met emanationism,
in which the Prime Mover is the initial cause of all subsequent effects; that’s also not
immanence. And we’ve met analogism, in which existing things are lesser copies of
immortal things, copied by some mysterious process that can’t quite be explained;
that’s also not immanence.

In Epicurus there isn’t a God, or many gods; there isn’t a higher sphere of existence
in which all entities are perfect and immortal; there isn’t a mysterious place outside
the universe from which substance arrives; there isn’t a teleological end towards
which all things move. There’s just stuff in motion, which affects other stuff in
motion and produces effects in it, and those effects in turn affect other stuff, and so
on and so on, world without end. That’s it. There’s no other reason. There’s no other
cause. There’s no final end. There’s nothing outside the limit of the material
universe affecting things within it. Things are because they are. This is the easiest
way to understand immanence, the easiest explanation I can give.

If we wanted to, we could stop here: we’ve reached a concept of immanence, which
is what we set out to do. We’ve provided a solution to a problem, as philosophy does,
always one of several possible solutions. If you’re getting bored, maybe you don’t
need more than this initial sense of what immanence is to satisfy your curiosity:
immanence is the idea that both the causes and the meaning of existence are to be
found in existence itself.

*

With the appearance of philosophy’s first immanent metaphysics, we’ve reached an
organic turning point in our story, but we’re still almost 2000 years away from
Spinoza and even further from Deleuze. We haven’t seen any of the political or
ethical implications of immanence yet.

For the next few centuries, Mediterranean or Greek philosophy was largely a back-
and-forth between the four major schools: Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and
Epicurean. The next major shift in the conceptual landscape of our history comes in
late antiquity, more than four centuries after the death of Epicurus. 150 years or so
after the death of Jesus, at the end of the 2nd century, Christian apologists begin to
systematically apply Greek philosophy to explain and defend the tenets of Christian
faith. It the first attempt to combine Greek philosophy and Abrahamic monotheism,
which took place at least as early as Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus.
But Christian dialectics were a new phenomenon in several ways.

First, Judaism didn’t develop in a world where Greek culture and thought were
endemic and wide-spread. Judaism encountered Greek philosophy centuries after its
core tradition and scripture were established, and even more centuries after the
miraculous events described in scripture. By the time Judaism encountered Greek
philosophy, it was an established religion with a people to call its own, rather than a
reviled sect in search of a theology. The miracles of Jesus were not like the miracles
of Moses, untold generations in the past: they were contemporary stories that had to
fit into a Hellenized Roman mindset which expected phenomena to correspond with
the principles of reason. Some of the apologists who now sat down to rationalize the
miracles of Christianity were only three or four generations removed from the
Apostles who had witnessed the miracles personally.

Moreover, Judaism came with its own explanation of How Things Worked:
creationism. The story of Genesis is hardly as intricate or diagrammatic as the
metaphysics of the Aristotelians and the Epicureans, but it was good enough for the
Jews. The Christians, on the other hand, hadn’t yet quite decided if they were Jews or
what, and what parts of Jewish tradition and scripture they should adopt. If nothing
else, creationism would need to be decided on, rather than assumed – and these
kinds of doctrinal decisions would prove surprisingly difficult for the early
Christians, who argued for centuries, for example, about the exact date of Easter.

When Christianity first began, a large part of its power and appeal was precisely the
absence of either an elaborate historical tradition or an elaborate theological
apparatus: you didn’t need the Laws of Moses or the spheres of Aristotle to
understand that Jesus was magic, you just had to believe. Christianity spread so
quickly and efficiently precisely because of one neat trick: it promised that faith,
rather than understanding or action, was the key to salvation. Early Christianity was
seen by the early Imperial Romans as a kind of peasant superstition, and stood in
diametric opposition to the heady, philosophized theology of Roman intellectuals.
But as Christianity spread to more and more places among more and more
ethnicities and across geo-political divides, it became subject to the struggles over
power, authority, and inclusion that inevitably accompany institutionalization; the
very simplicity of its tenets made it extraordinarily susceptible to schism and
factionalism. Because Christianity had neither a native polity nor a native theology,
doctrine became the terrain on which early Christian power struggles arrayed their
forces. The effort to explain and explicate the nature and miracles of Jesus Christ
became synonymous with the effort to determine which sects, cities, and strata
would hold power in the rapidly-growing Christian community.

One of the main narrative elements that Christian theology was called on to explain
was that whole thing about Jesus being human but also the Son of God. How was
that supposed to work, exactly? Here we run right back into the familiar problems of
metaphysics, which inquires into the relation between substantially distinct things –
but HOW? In Plato, we have material existents and Ideal Forms, and the problem is
explaining the relation between them; in Christianity we have the material and
mortal body of Christ, and the infinite divinity of God’s substance. How did God have
a baby with a human, exactly? If Jesus was God, how did he die? Does that mean God
can die? Some of these questions are still being debated.

Philosophy has always started from and ended up with abstract, slightly ridiculous
questions that are of no interest to most people. We’ve already seen that. But for the
first part of its history, philosophy’s abstractions had limited political and social
import. Philosophers taught and advised and wrote about ethics and laws, yes, and
certain thinkers, like Plato and Aristotle, directly influenced major leaders and
polities. But the link between Plato and politics was direct, not abstract, on the level
of civic organization and proscription; no political leader was going to start a war
because the people in the neighboring town were emanationists and not pure
Platonists. Christianity introduced a grim and grisly twist to the philosophical
pastime of speculating about abstractions: by making doctrinal arguments the
proxies of political and social power struggles, Christianity also gave rise to the idea
that people should be killed or exiled because of their doctrinal beliefs and for no
other reason. Nobody had ever really had the notion before of slaughtering other
people purely over ideas.

What most Christians eventually settled on was a doctrine called Trinitarianism,
which holds that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share a single substance or
nature (God), but are also three distinct persons. There are still non-Trinitarian
churches today, but for most Christians, Trinitarianism became established doctrine
at the Council of Nicaea, in 325. Even after this conclusion was reached, centuries of
strife followed over the exact nature of the relationship between these three
persons and their one substance, arguments that would have genuine political,
social, and intellectual implications, most dramatic of which was the Great Schism
between the Latin and Greek churches that continues to the present day.

The reason we took this detour through the history of Christianity is that Christian
theology has its own sense of the word “immanent.” We saw that the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy doesn’t have an entry for immanence. On the other hand,
the Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity does: it defines immanence as “the state of
being ‘within’ something else.” This is, obviously, a slightly different conception of
immanence than the one we saw with Epicurus; it’s also different than the Hegelian-
Marxist sense of ‘immanence’ we started with. This third sense of immanence,
Christian immanence, joins Hegelian-Marxist immanence and Deleuzian or
metaphysical immanence in our lexicon. In Christianity, “immanence” is closely
linked with the Trinity and its conceptual difficulties, like the idea of a single thing
actually being multiple things, or different things being “within” a single thing.

Christian immanence and metaphysical immanence overlap in their histories; their
histories are not identical, but they are the same, just like the Trinity. We could even
say that the radicality of Spinozan immanence is that it breaks philosophy free at
last from the constraints of Christian theology and restores immanence to its full
metaphysical status. But at the same time, we can also note that Hegelian
immanence has more to do with this Christian concept of immanence than with the
kind of immanence we find in Epicurus or Spinoza. We saw that Hegel’s “immanent
critique” was a process of finding and resolving contradictions assumed to be
somehow “in” things (“being ‘within’ something else”). Let’s pause here to refine our
distinctions a little.

The first distinction I made was between Hegelian immanence and Deleuzian
immanence. But now other kinds of immanence seem to have popped up: Epicurean
and Christian. We can group these concepts of immanence with a new distinction
between hermeneutic immanence and pure immanence. Christian, Hegelian, and
Marxist concepts of immanence belong in the former category; Epicurus, Spinoza,
and Deleuze belong in the latter category. Both kinds of immanence are
metaphysical, in that they establish principles about the causal relations between
different kinds of things. The difference is that hermeneutic immanence assumes
that truth, or knowledge, or the principles of being, are somehow inside or hidden
behind existing phenomena, and that the process of inquiry is a process of digging
into things to see what’s behind them. Pure immanence assumes that things are
their own explanations; there’s no need to dig, because there’s only one substance,
and everything is equally that substance.

Hermeneutic immanence is a displacement and a sleight-of-hand. Creationism and
emanationism both say: we are in a finite world of generation and corruption, and
the cause and organizing principle of this finite world lie beyond its limits (with God,
or with an agent intellect, or whatever). Hermeneutic immanence inverts its gaze
and seeks its answer not beyond, but within, beneath or inside existing things. The
reason I call this a sleight-of-hand is that this inversion solves none of the
metaphysical problems of transcendence, it simply moves them somewhere else.
Now we seek metaphysical principles inside things and not above them, but we have
all the same problems that come with substantial distinction: we still have two
fundamental kinds of things, even if we call these things “manifest” and “latent”
rather than “existent” and “Idea.” How can two fundamentally different kinds of
things affect each other? How can one organize or cause the other? How can two
fundamentally different kinds of things interact?

The same questions appear again and again in the history of philosophy; what
differs is the way these questions are broken down into concrete problems, and the
ways in which technical solutions or diagrams are produced in response to them.

*

So now we’ve organized our field of inquiry into two broad kinds of immanence:
hermeneutic immanence, which seeks the principles of metaphysics behind or
inside things, and pure immanence, which seeks the principles of metaphysics in
existence itself. We’ve also reached the Council of Nicaea in 325.

At the very same time that Christianity was building the foundations of its
Trinitarian metaphysics and working its way towards the first-ever ecumenical
council at Nicaea, the Hellenic traditions that had dominated the Mediterranean
world since the age of Alexander were rallying for their last hurrah. In the first half
of the 3rd century, a man named Ammonius Saccas began bringing together the ideas
of Plato and Aristotle in what was later called “the Greater Synthesis.” Ammonius’s
student Plotinus would complete that project and herald the final major
development of non-Abrahamic Greek philosophy, which we now call Neoplatonism.
Like the Aristotelian philosophy from which it drew its cosmology, Neoplatonism
was an emanationist philosophy: Plotinus added quite a few more spheres and
agents between the Prime Mover and the earthly realm than Aristotle originally
described.

It is in this expanded Neoplatonic form that Aristotle’s cosmology would reach the
medieval philosophers, though neither late antiquity nor the middle ages
distinguished “Platonism” from “Neoplatonism”; that distinction was born later. A
hundred years or so after the Council of Nicaea, a man named Augustine of Hippo,
later known as St. Augustine, declared that what he called Platonism – what we
would probably call Neoplatonism – was the only “pagan” philosophy compatible
with Christian metaphysics, effectively sealing the fate of the Stoics and the
Epicureans, all of whose works are now lost. In City of God, Book VIII, Chapter 5 is
titled, “That it is Especially With the Platonists that We Must Carry on Our
Disputations on Matters of Theology, Their Opinions Being Preferable to Those of
All Other Philosophers”; in that chapter Augustine asks, “Why discuss with the other
philosophers? It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists.”

Even before Augustine, there were links and resonances between Neoplatonism and
Christianity. Among Ammonius Saccas’ other students was Origen, one of the most
important and learned early Christian scholars; another notable early Christian
Neoplatonist was John Chrysostomos, the one Joyce keeps mentioning in Ulysses. But
after Augustine, the parameters of European and Mediterranean philosophy were
largely set for the next thousand years: between the Fall of Rome and the Italian
Renaissance, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophy would be triangulated
between Platonic idealism, Aristotelian emanationism, and Abrahamic creationism.
Within these parameters, an astounding and endless array of positions and
arguments would be elaborated that drew from these three sources to varying
degrees, from the poetic ecumenicism of Boethius to the meditative epistemologies
of Anselm to the refined, aristocratic Aristotelianism of Ibn Rushd and the analogism
of Thomas Aquinas. But few ideas would break through from outside this triangle,
and not until the early Enlightenment would the triangle itself be finally broken.

In his essay “Zones of Immanence,” collected in English in Two Regimes of Madness,
Deleuze describes these metaphysical parameters:

A whole Platonic, neo-Platonic, and Medieval tradition is behind the idea of the
universe as a ‘great chain of being,’ as we have often been told. It is a universe
suspended from the One as transcendent principle, unfolding in a series of
emanations and hierarchical conversions. Entities have more or less being, more or
less reality, according to their distance from, or proximity to the transcendent
principle.

Inside this basic paradigm that would dominate philosophy for a thousand years,
the component ideas and problems of pure immanence were preserved in partial
and fragmentary ways, and various thinkers moved towards or seemed to earn for
pure immanence. John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan friar known in the Middle Ages
as “the Subtle Doctor,” is especially noteworthy in this regard, often mentioned by
Deleuze and famous for his doctrine of univocity, or unity of being, which insists that
the predication “It is” means exactly the same thing regardless of what it is
predicated of. But pure immanence, the kind posited by Epicurus, the kind that does
not require direct creation or substantial division, would not return to Europe for
many years.

The new learning that flooded Europe from Andalusia and the other Muslim lands
during the thirteenth century was still thoroughly Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, but
in the fifteenth century the Italian Renaissance brought Epicurean philosophy back
into circulation through the work of Lucretius. In the sixteenth century there would
be a wave of interest in Epicurus, spurred by the mechanistic approach of the new
experimental sciences. And in the seventeenth century we find Baruch Spinoza.

*

Pure immanence reaches its acme in Spinoza; this is why Deleuze calls him “the
prince of philosophers.” In Spinoza immanence is the nexus through which thought
finds expression: in ethics as a relation to the self, and in essence as a relation to
infinity.

Spinoza starts the Ethics by establishing the principle of substantial unity. Principles
are never given; they must be established. So from the initial definitions and axioms,
we arrive at the infinite and absolute unity of substance. But this is only one
possible starting point; we could start with the mind itself, we could start with the
physics of existing bodies, and wherever we started the geometric method would
leads us through all the same connections. The most generous of the theologians,
like Maimonides and Anselm, took for granted that divine knowledge is perfect, and
inferred down from that perfection towards mundane existence; at the same time,
they took for granted that human knowledge is built from fragmentary experiences
of the mundane world, and inferred up from that fragmentary knowledge towards
the heavens. But in between, where the two lines of argument would meet, there
was always a blurry grey area in the middle, requiring some kind of leap. No such
leaps are required with Spinoza.

We defined “transcendence” earlier as a break in the diagram of metaphysics, a
place where the technical explanation breaks down or is interrupted by a fixed limit.
Spinoza’s system is the acme of pure immanence because it never breaks down or
stops: it’s immanence all the way through. Even the differentiating clinamen of the
Epicureans is done away with in Spinoza. With Spinoza’s geometric method, we can
get all the way from infinity itself to the smallest actually existing particle without
any break, rupture, or contradiction. A single set of principles and definitions
governs the entire scale and hierarchy of existence, from the infinite to the atomic,
from the individual to the general and back.

Boiled down to its barest parts, Spinoza’s immanent metaphysics is not greatly
different from the atomic immanence of Epicurus. All of existence (the totality of
infinite substance, i.e., God) is the sole and sufficient cause of all of existence (the
totality of the infinite individual modes of substance, i.e., “things”). There is no
external purpose, no outside, no transcendent threshold beyond which lies the
Absolute Cause of all things. There are infinite things affecting infinite other things;
each thing has a cause. God is all the things that are God; God is not somehow
outside or above things, making things external to himself or different in kind from
himself. And history definitely doesn’t have a teleological purpose. After now comes
later, and after that comes more later.

Every philosopher, even the most wildly original and strange, is in a fundamental
way a product of their time. The ideas available to them, the text available to them,
the teachers available to them, the social value of intellectual activity and the
freedom to pursue it: all these things are determined beyond the individual mind.
This is true even for Spinoza, the greatest of all philosophers. In the beautiful and
typically compassionate opening chapter of Practical Philosophy, his second book on
Spinoza, Deleuze describes how the context and progress of Spinoza’s life drew him
towards pure immanence, and points to the link between immanence and life,
between immanence and ethos: “A life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms
of means and ends, but according to a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms
of causes and effects.”

Spinoza doesn’t suddenly invent from whole cloth an entirely new set of concepts
with no precedent – much of Spinoza’s thought can be traced to earlier antecedents,
because that’s how history works. But in Spinoza, an entire set of concepts and
arguments are arrayed in such a way as to suddenly unfold more fully and clearly
than anyone had ever been able to go before. It’s not just that the Ethics is bold and
original and exciting; it’s also a bulldozer, clearing away long-standing problems and
ossified conceptions. We just met Duns Scotus, whose best-known doctrine was the
doctrine of univocity. In his dissertation, Expressionism In Philosophy, Deleuze
explains the significance the leap from Scotus’s univocity to Spinozan immanence as
precisely a break with the creationist-emanationist-idealist triangle within which
philosophy had been confined between Augustine and the Renaissance:

With Spinoza univocity becomes the object of a pure affirmation. The same thing,
formaliter, constitutes the essence of substance and contains the essences of modes.
Thus it is the idea of immanence cause that takes over, in Spinoza, from univocity,
freeing it from the indifference and neutrality to which it had been confined by the
theory of a divine creation. And it is in immanence that univocity finds its distinctly
Spinozist formulation: God is said to be cause of all things in the very same sense (eo
sensu) that he is said to be cause of himself.

What Spinoza realizes more fully than any thinker before is that necessity alone can
be the organizing principle of causality. “Why are things as they are?” Well, because
how else could they be? Spinoza’s concept of How Things Work is that things work
the way they are determined to and in no other way. For Spinoza necessity is the
condition of existence, and the genius of his method is that the process of
streamlining philosophical inquiry is identical to the process of formulating
philosophical concepts. Spinoza clears away everything that isn’t strictly necessary:
the genius of the Ethics is that the method itself is immanent. You don’t need
anything to understand the Ethics except the Ethics: Spinoza starts with definitions
and first principles and builds a perfect philosophical system that is its own
meaning and its own end: the Ethics repeats on the textual (geometric) level what all
of existence does on the cosmic level. Metaphysics are ideas about How Things
Work, and the beauty and genius of Spinoza is that How Things Work in the text of
the Ethics is a fractal image of How Things Work in the metaphysics the text
describes. Immanence all the way down.

The Ethics is like an Escher painting. You always start at a particular point, whether
or not that point is the beginning of the text; but from that point you’re swept up in
multiple series of arguments, chains of propositions that are not always linear: any
given proof can send you back, forward, or sidewise, and many propositions are
proven multiple times, for different “series.” You can get to any part of the system
from any other part of the system, that’s part of what pure immanence means: no
breaks in the diagram. There isn’t one set of arguments about humans and ethics
and a different set of arguments about the sky and the stars, with no clear sense of
how the two relate or conform: rather, there is one expansive collection of
arguments that each leads directly to other arguments, zooming all the way in to the
individual mind and all the way back out to infinity itself, seamlessly, with no break
or rupture, and always according to a single method: the geometric method. In the
Ethics, categorical distinctions are not problems but merely conveniences.
Epicurus’s magnum opus was said to be a work in 30 books calls On Nature (a
common title) – that work has been lost, so there’s no way to know whether
Epicurus managed to construct a machine as seamless as Spinoza’s. But certainly in
the existing archive of philosophy there’s nothing comparable to the Ethics, which is
why the work sent such shockwaves through all of Europe when it was first
published and continues to exert such mysterious, powerful allure today.

If you’re not the kind of person who finds concepts and metaphysics fascinating,
there’s probably no way to convey to you why the Ethics is so fucking amazing, just
like there’s no way to convey to a first-time watcher of a TV show in its 6th season
why a particular minor cameo is so hilarious and on-point. That’s been our premise
this whole time, though – immanence matters to people who care about that kind of
thing. I don’t think we need an excuse or explanation for Deleuze’s love of Spinoza
beyond the fact that Deleuze loved metaphysics and Spinoza was better at
metaphysics than anyone before or since. Deleuze was a Spinoza stan. That’s it.

Spinoza’s pure immanence is joyous and seamless, but it’s also dizzying and even
terrifying. It has no natural limit: no “render unto Caesar,” no Ten Commandments,
no emanative division between the sublunar world and the perfection of the
heavens. Spinoza was accused of atheism, but this is wrong: God is everywhere in
the Ethics, in every page and every word. But Spinoza’s God is no help to anyone,
least of all to intellectuals, except insofar as they can help themselves. Spinoza
proves God’s existence beyond doubt – something has to be everything, after all,
what does it matter if we call that something “God” or “substance”? “God or
substance necessarily exists”: that’s Spinoza’s first principle. It’s not the absence of
God that terrifies the theist in Spinoza’s Ethics, but rather the fact that God does not
guarantee anything except his own nature. God’s existence does not guarantee
providence, or salvation, God’s existence doesn’t mean that everything has a reason
or will work out for the best. Nor yet does God’s existence offer a natural limit to the
human mind beyond that mind’s own limit; Spinoza’s God, unlike Maimonides’ God,
does not tell the human philosopher where to stop thinking, where to set the border
of rationality and inference (for their own good!), where to stop asking questions
and trust God’s plan. It’s up to you how far you want to go.

If Spinoza’s God is not a limit to space or time or rationality, still less can he serve as
the guarantor of individual morality. God disappears in Spinoza not only as a limit
and a totality, but also as a moral arbiter and a source of moral authority, and
perhaps more importantly, as a judge and limit on life itself: there is no afterlife in
Spinoza’s metaphysics, no spiritual prize to be redeemed for good works on earth,
no higher life of bliss to which this life compares only by dim analogy: life is the only
pleasure, and pleasure is the only value life asserts beyond its own continued
existence. To understand the shock and horror with which Europe greeted the
advent of Spinoza we must first put ourselves deeply in the lap of onto-theological
history and try to understand the sheer extent to which the triangle of emanation-
creation-idealism shaped every aspect of European thought, religion, law, and
natural science. Spinoza’s absolute rejection of scriptural authority throws all of
these into doubt, undoes every limit and ignores every safe word European thought
had agreed on with its earlier philosophers. Finally, after all our twists and turns, we
see why immanence is important: it “falls back on” every other kind of knowing,
every other kind of thinking and doing.

In Spinoza, transcendence and negation are absolutely rejected as selectors and
guarantors of value. Nothing is Good in itself; nothing is Bad in itself. “Nothing” isn’t
even a thing. Value is immanent: things are good or bad only insofar as they affect
our capacities, only as far as they compose or decompose the relations that are our
existence, and even these terms only have meaning through consciousness. That
doesn’t mean there’s no way to tell good from bad; Spinoza is a perspectivist, not a
relativist. But it does mean that the work of understanding and evaluating good and
bad rests solely with the living and conscious mind: by a strange, seemingly
paradoxical movement, Spinoza’s determinism restores to the living mind the full
weight of responsibility for evaluation, but not as humanism might, by adducing
humanity itself as a higher value. Spinoza’s philosophy has principles, but these are
“higher values” only in terms of their magnitude, only insofar as they exceed the
limit of the human individual: principles are “higher” than individuals in Spinoza
only because they express a great proportion of infinity, because they have a greater
intensive power of expression.

The boldness, the power of the Ethics had no precedent in its capacity to open the
door between the strictures of European morality and the infinite joy of pure
immanence. Unwilling, unready to break with transcendence, Europe branded
Spinoza an apostate and a heretic and an atheist, a remarkable achievement for one
man. The curtain slammed shut on pure immanence, God quickly restored to his
position as master signifier and arbiter of morality. It would take 200 more years for
Nietzsche to stand up, cough, and point out that God was already dead. Nietzsche
claimed for his genealogy and his will to power an absolute novelty and originality,
insisting again and again that he was an unprecedented event in the history of
philosophy: but in his heart Nietzsche would always be resentful of Spinoza for
getting there first, which is why he saves for Spinoza some of his most bitter and
biting imprecations.



















So, Again: Why Does Immanence Matter?

We can go back now to our earlier question and ask it again with a slightly expanded
perspective.

Why does immanence matter?

The simplest answer remains – it doesn’t, unless you already care about this shit.
But now we have a clearer sense of why that has to be the case: we can’t attribute a
transhistorical significance to immanence as a concept without re-introducing
transcendence to it, without devaluing its power as a principle. Immanence, more
than any other philosophical principle, must be established, arrived at, constructed
– it can’t be taken for granted without itself becoming an external, artificially
imposed limit, a blockage of thought. The work of arriving at the principle of
immanence is necessary, in the metaphysical sense of necessity, the same necessity
that governs the whole of the Ethics.

Immanence matters only to the extent that you care about philosophy in general,
but if you care about philosophy in general, it matters a great deal. Pure immanence
reverberates through every aspect of philosophy: logic, ethics, metaphysics,
epistemology, ontology. But it sweeps through all these fields at once, bringing them
together into a seamless system in which even the limits of disciplinarity are
rejected as a mode of transcendence. It’s not that we can’t tell which propositions in
the Ethics are about Being and which are about knowledge; it’s just that we move
constantly and without interruption between these domains, with no reason to
assume that different principles will govern each one.

We could also ask this question a little differently, and say, Why does immanence still
matter? After all, it was arrived at once by Epicurus, and again 2000 years later by
Spinoza. Isn’t that enough? But by this logic you might as well ask why anyone did
philosophy after Aristotle, much less after Spinoza. We said earlier that questions
don’t have permanent solutions, only temporary answers, and that the history of
philosophy was a history of the way questions have been converted into problems
which can have solutions and not just answers. But the answers themselves remain,
and return again and again.

The work of immanence is never done, for two reasons.

First, we can never know what will change in the future, which will be added or lost,
how the conditions of knowledge would change. Nobody in 80 BC would possibly
have expected Epicureanism and Stoicism to vanish from the world for over 1000
years. If Spinoza’s work were to disappear forever tomorrow along with Deleuze’s,
immanence would still be the infinite horizon towards which philosophy yearns.

And second, the work of immanence is never done because finitude will always
continue breaking apart the continuity of immanence with the ruptures of
transcendence: not deliberately or with ill intention, but inevitably: because we are
finite; because our brains can only hold so much; because we can’t see everything
clearly; because eventually every book ends, because inevitably we have to stop
thinking to eat or sleep or piss, and when we pick the task of thinking back up again
there’s no reason to start from scratch.

Saying that we don’t need immanence anymore because Spinoza perfected the
concept is like saying we don’t need psychoanalysis anymore because one person
was cured: there will always be new neurotics, just as there will always be new
conditions, new realities, new questions to turn problems.





































Deleuzian Immanence: Life Itself


Philosophy is the creation, modification, and deployment of concepts, and a
philosopher is someone who creates, modifies, or deploys concepts.

We’ve already seen that a word can have more than one sense: “immanence” to a
Hegelian isn’t the same thing as “immanence” to a Spinozan. So there are other
possible definitions of philosophy, but that’s the one we’re working with.

To say that “Things are their own explanation” doesn’t mean that the explanation
for each individual thing lies entirely and solely within that individual thing – that
would take us right back to hermeneutic immanence. Rather, it means that things in
general are the explanation for things in general; you still need to look at relations
between things to understand them. It’s only through the study of the relation
between things that we can even arrive at an adequate conception of things as they
are in themselves; hence the importance of “common notions” to Deleuze’s reading
of Spinoza as a gateway to the understanding of essence.

There’s no arguing the importance of immanence as a concept to Deleuze: the very
last thing he wrote before his death was called “Immanence: A Life.” In an interview
for the French Magazine Littéraire from September 1988, collected in the English-
language volume Negotiations under the title “On Philosophy,” Delezue gives what
might well have been his clearest and most direct summary of immanence and its
place in his work; I think this answer is worth quoting at length.

You’re always invoking immanence: what seems most characteristic in your thought is
that it doesn’t depend on lack or negation, systematically banishing any appeal to
transcendence, in whatever form. One wants to ask: Is that really true, and how can it
be? […]

Setting out a plane of immanence, tracing out a field of immanence, is something all
the authors I’ve worked on have done…Abstractions explain nothing, they
themselves have to be explained: there are no such things are universals, there’s
nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes,
sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same.
There processes are at work in concrete, ‘multiplicities,’ multiplicity is the real
element in which things happen. It’s multiplicities that fill the field of immanence,
rather as tribes fill the desert without it ceasing to be a desert. And the plane of
immanence has to be constructed, immanence is constructivism, any given
multiplicity is like one area of the plane. All processes take place on the plane of
immanence, and within a given multiplicity: unifications, subjectifications,
rationalizations, centralizations have no special status: they often amount to an
 impasse or closing off that prevents the multiplicity’s growth, the extension and
unfolding of its lines, the production of something new.

When you invoke something transcendent you arrest movement, introducing
interpretations instead of experimenting…And interpretation is in fact always
carried out with reference to something that’s supposed to be missing. Unity is
precisely what’s missing from multiplicity, just as the subject’s what’s missing from
events (“it’s raining”). Of course things are sometimes missing, but it’s only ever
abstractions, a transcendent viewpoint, perhaps just the Self, that prevents one
constructing a plane of immanence. Processes are becomings, and aren’t to be
judged by some final result but by the way they proceed and their power to continue,
as with animal becomings, or nonsubjective individuations. That’s why we
contrasted rhizomes with trees – trees, or rather arborescent processes, being
temporary limits that block rhizomes and their transformations for a while. There
are no universals, only singularities. Concepts aren’t universals but sets of
singularities that each extend into the neighborhood of one of the other singularities.

Deleuze was an inarguable, unutterable genius, but just like Spinoza he was a
product of his time and his place: his interest in immanence always existed in
relation to the dominant paradigms of his time. In his introduction to the volume
Pure Immanence, John Rajchman writes that “it was through his logic and his
empiricism that Deleuze found his way out of the impasses of the two dominant
philosophical schools of his generation, phenomenological and analytic, and
elaborated a new conception of sense, neither hermeneutic nor Fregean.”

In the post-war West when Deleuze was a student there were three kinds of
philosophy: phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and existentialism, which was
influenced by phenomenology. Deleuze had an early brush with both Sartre and
Heidegger, but quickly turned away from the existing paradigms. Phenomenology
and existentialism were dominated by the dour, detached solipsism of the Cartesian
ego’s bourgeois evolution, while analytic philosophy was dominated by the cold,
sterile logic of pseudo-mathematical abstractions. Neither Freud nor Marx offered a
path free from the influence Deleuze detested more than anything: Hegel. Instead
Deleuze turned to epistemology, including the work of Martial Gueroult, whose
work on Spinoza greatly influence him. In Spinoza, in Nietzsche, in Hume, Deleuze
located a rich tradition of philosophy oriented towards action and ethics, away from
the abstractions of the existing paradigms. All three of these thinkers shared the
same desire to establish philosophical principles from life, and to apply
philosophical principles to life in a way that affirms life and promotes thought.

We’ve said repeatedly that metaphysics transforms questions into problems,
diagrams, and concepts. In Deleuze’s work we see many of the same questions that
motivated his contemporaries: What is a subject? What is the relation of the subject
to power? What sources of moral authority are there after God is dead? What comes
after modernity? What is desire? What is the unconscious? Deleuze is not detached or
dissimilar to his time and place. What makes his work so distinctive is that he
marshaled a unique and unfamiliar conceptual language through which to turn
these questions into philosophical problems. Because he uses such distinctive
sources to arrive at his principles, the principles themselves, as well as the concepts
they shape and generate, are equally distinctive. Pure immanence isn’t just a central
concept for understanding Deleuze, it’s also a central concept for understand what
makes Deleuze so different from the post-Hegelian, post-Lacanian speculations of
virtually every other major “French theorist.”

It’s important not to reduce immanence to materialism, an easy and common
mistake. “Pure immanence” does not reduce causality to what can be grasped and
seen, because Spinozism recognizes ideas as Things, that have being, in keeping with
the principle of univocity: everything that is “is” in the same way. Things do not
grow more immanent the more concrete they are: a diamond isn’t “more immanent”
than a cloud. To eliminate transcendence means to eliminate Hegelian Spirit, but it
doesn’t mean eliminating the abstract or the intangible, the general, the conceptual,
or the imaginary. All of these things have being, for Deleuze. The cornerstone of
immanence are the twin properties of substance, infinity and univocity: these are in
themselves abstract ideas. We can’t measure infinity to prove it’s real. Neither
materialism nor mechanism can account for pure immanence or make its
significance legible.

In “Immanence: A Life,” Deleuze writes:

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not
immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the
immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete
bliss.

In defining immanence as “a life,” Deleuze restores to ethos, to lived habit, its full
weight as the condition of all ontology and metaphysics. Spinoza teaches us that
substance is its own cause, or the “cause of itself” (causa sui). Established within the
parameters of consciousness, life becomes the cause of itself when it takes itself as
its own sufficient cause. Why are we alive? Because we have life. This is not a
tautology but a rug with two sides, one forming a coherent pattern and the other a
mess of dangling threads and loose ends. Obviously there are causes to any
particular life that extend beyond it: you’re alive because your parents were alive
before you, and we’re all alive because of evolution, and so on and so on. That’s the
messy side of the rug. But a life, both general and singular, needs no justification
beyond itself. It “is” many individual threads, but in itself it is simply a duration of
consciousness – this is the Bergsonian spin Deleuze gives Spinoza’s immanence.
What is ethos but the way life is lived? That is to say, ethos is life as it actually is – life
“in itself.” Just as substance is the only existent which is the causes itself, life is the
only thing that affirms itself – I am, therefore I am is the Spinozist’s eternal response
to Descartes. An ethics which understands life as its own justification, in parallel
with a metaphysics that understands existence as its own adequate cause.

Pure immanence only make sense in a philosophy of joy; that’s what Nietzsche
helped Deleuze understand about Spinoza. Spinoza’s philosophy is a philosophy of
pure joy – in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra we find the dark mirror of immanence, the
pathos and agony of a mind straining to grasp the infinite beyond its own mortal
finitude. What Deleuze helps us see by reading Spinoza and Nietzsche together is
that immanence must bring joy that surpasses the weight of immanence as a
principle, otherwise what’s the point? The affective ethology of Spinozan pleasure
affirms the necessity of pure immanence, and the principle of pure immanence
affirms the priority of Spinozan pleasure.

Pure immanence is everything, but it isn’t The One in the totalized Platonic sense,
insofar as it is Absolutely One to everybody but to each one of us uniquely. To
imagine pure immanence you have to imagine everything together, all the things:
but each one of us has a different concept of “all the things,” so that pure immanence
is every life but is different to every life; each life has its own immanence, hence
Deleuze’s emphasis on the difference between the determinate and indeterminate
article ( the / a ). A tricky but vital aspect of this oscillation between the infinity of
pure immanence and the finitude of the finite mind is that the movement beyond the
limit of the mind’s finitude can’t be grasped as an expanded concept of the self.

We can’t grasp immanence by imagining a limit or a border, because then we’re
immediately imagining something other than everything: a concept of infinity can’t
be reaching by thinking, “Me, but a lot more.” Pure immanence is everything; infinity
grasped in its intensities and expressions. But of course we can never grasp infinity,
never fully see it, which is why pure immanence remains a concept and a light and a
beacon, rather than an individual state. Immanence is not Nirvana. Deleuze insists
on distinguishing the “a consciousness” of pure immanence from the specific
consciousness of individual subjectivity, but we should not therefore confuse
immanence with the unconscious, the pre-subjective, or the pre-linguistic;
immanence is not hidden in the cracks behind the façade of life, it is life itself, each
and every life as a singularity requiring no further justification.