Immanence / Transcendence — A conceptual pair that structures much of Western metaphysics and theology. Immanence designates what remains internal to a system, process, or being, referring to nothing outside itself; transcendence designates what lies beyond, outside, or above whatever contains it. The terms derive from the Latin immanere (“to remain within”) and transcendere (“to climb over, to go beyond”). The classic question is theological: is God transcendent to the world, separate from and superior to it (theism), or immanent to it, identified with nature itself? Spinoza, in the Ethics, gives immanence its decisive formula by holding that “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things” (Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, non vero transiens): the cause does not act on its effects from outside but remains within them, since nothing exists outside the single substance (Deus sive Natura). In Kant one must distinguish the transcendent — what passes beyond the limits of possible experience, such as the Ideas of reason (soul, world, God) — from the transcendental, the a priori conditions that make experience possible and remain immanent to it. In the twentieth century, Sartre describes consciousness as pure transcendence, always thrown “beyond” itself toward the world, while Deleuze makes immanence the principle of a philosophy with no external ground, developing, out of Spinoza, the concept of a “plane of immanence.” The pair is closely bound up with the opposition between the finite and the infinite and with the notion of substance.
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