After taking my crash course in transcendence and immanence via Blog U I finally gave myself just enough time to reflect a little on what I was talking about. I came quickly and securely to the conclusion that there is no "outside" but of course many outsides. There are many boundaries to cross and many mysteries of many more boundaries.
I always wondered as a kid whether some astronaut would travel so far into outer space that they would encounter a wall. I pictured this wall overwhelmingly black and monolithic. The problem was that there was always an unconscious question of perspective when imagining this wall. If it was indeed a wall in the grand sense of dead-ends then to what extent did it spread out and how it could not have already been visible from every perspective in every place? It seemed to me that if you encounter this wall of immanence than you will at once be surrounded by it forced into the realization that there never really was any space. But if there is no immanence and no wall to encounter then we remain exploring the outsides of this great inside and the question of God sheds it coat and stretches its arms . . . outward.
And then of course there was the more pressing question for me as a child. If I encountered this wall was there anything with which I could dig through it?
To finally get back to one comment made by N.Pepperell from Rough Theory made below.
The debate then comes down to whether meaning can be grounded only by a reach "outside", or whether something immanent and relational is instead possible.
I can't imagine a non-relational possibility.
5 comments:
Very nice post. Just a quick reaction that "immanence" doesn't necessarily equate with "boundedness" or with a closed or finite system: something can be both determinate (in the sense that it isn't random or "chaotic" in the everyday sense of the term; in the sense that we can say that it has some characteristics, but not others, etc.), and yet infinite and boundlessly generative. When I write at Rough Theory about wanting to move past theories that talk about immanence in terms of a "totality", this is part of what I have in mind: that it is possible to think immanence, without conceptualising this in terms of a closed system whose possibilities are mechanistically fixed - without a wall.
The search for knowledge is hunter gatherer behaviour based on the ancient pre-civilized brain. It always leads to scapegoat and power rutuals which result in the inevitable destruction of the presumed centre.
What I understand you describing is the perpetual entrenchment of a center (though the content of the center may change). Did I misunderstand?
YES. That is what all of our searches for knowledge are really all about---a hedge around the fear based egoic centre.
Even our religious and spiritual searches have the same intent and effect.
Well I certainly do not agree that all spiritual searches are to hedge our egoic centre. I will hopefully post more on my above thoughts on death, which I think relate to what you are saying.
Post a Comment