Immanence and Transcendence

Reflections on The Plane of Immanence

Throughout the history of philosophy, there has been a key distinction between transcendence and immanence. For us here, transcendence refers to a sense of outsideness or going beyond. To the phenomenologists and the existentialists, there are two notions of transcendence. The first is to be outside subjectivity into some objectivity, such as in Sartre's for-itself and the look. The second notion is to go beyond one's facticity, to make a discrete change. This is similar to Deleuze's notion of producing subjectivities in his notion of schizoanalysis, the only difference is that this notion of transcendence necessarily involves a break in the flow to a new state. Deleuze instead emphasizes a becoming with no stratification, as to stratify is to be machinic which to Deleuze is artificial. As Beauvoir observes, Heidegger and Sartre have a dichotomy of these notions of facticity and transcendence, critiquing the notion for her own existentialist idea of ambiguity. Both of these notions of transcendence in contemporary philosophy rely on this sense of extending outside of immanent processes. Immanence is the opposite of transcendence, it involves being or becoming within the process. This modern notion of immanence that we are using here comes from Spinoza's monism. To Spinoza, the entire universe is composed of god or nature and thus everything is imminent to that substance. Deleuze takes this further and states that immanence itself is substance and thus it is immanent to itself. This is a notion of absolute immanence, immanence not to any transcendent objects but only to itself. To Deleuze transcendence is entirely artificial, as it requires a recognition of stratification.

This notion of absolute immanence led Deleuze to the notion of the plane of immanence, which he developed with Guattari in their final collaborative work What is Philosophy? The plane of immanence is a plane of consistency for which all concepts lie at different intensities upon the plane. All divisions, all dualisms, all stratifications, etc become purely immanent and eliminate their divisions. It is this complete freedom of movement that defines the plane, there are no restrictions to flow. In this sense, the plane of immanence is to concepts as the body without organs is to desiring machines. Both are purely immanent to themselves and hold that all stratification is artificial. This is the main point that we can take from the plane of immanence, that transcendence is artificial. Immanence and transcendence are seen by most approaches to be a dichotomy, one we can discard just as much as we rejected the dichotomies of subject/object and mind/body. Yet just as objectivity is artificial, which we will expand upon further using Stirner's commentary in Art and Religion, transcendence is artificial and constructed. The seeming essentialism behind putting immanence as some basis is in assuming immanence has a particular conceptual content, as that is to be immanent to a transcendent object. But, as we have seen, immanence here is pure immanence to which it is immanent to itself. This is not a descriptive proposition, as that would be to posit some stratified object as a foundation to philosophy, but rather the rejection of all transcendent restrictions at the basis of philosophy. The plane of immanence posits that transcendence is artificial and illusory, realizing complete freedom of movement about concepts.

While Deleuze may posit that transcendence is an impossibility, we still experience a transcendent mode of being within our lives. This is what Deleuze identifies in phenomenologists as the transcendent subject that experiences phenomena. This transcendent experience found in phenomenology in its object-oriented approach doesn't need to be regulated to some readily defined subject but rather can be viewed in how we have defined the being of subjectivity. Subjects are subjectified by power, as Foucault realizes, it comes as a machinic transcendence out of the immanence of subjectivity. The potential transcendent space coming out of this immanent space is the conceptual space that was outlined in a previous work. The conceptual space is not a conceptual space, which is a specific system of concepts. Some arbitrary conceptual space is the same as how Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy identify different created planes by which different transcendent philosophers posit their philosophy. The conceptual space is a space by which concepts operate, but in a way that they transcend the space. The existence of the conceptual space relies on the recognition of the space, without it it is merely the plane of immanence. Conceptual space doesn't exist as a basis, it is created by the recognition of concepts as stratified entities.

Stirner in his lesser-known essay Art and Religion gives us the tools to identify the way in which these transcendent concepts are created. Of course, Stirner gives in his notion of the creative nothing the process of creation, which of course involves concepts. But how does this nothingness go on to create everything? How can a transcendent object come from the process of subjectivity? To Stirner the basis of the fixed idea, the object held above oneself, comes from art. Art in its process involves the creation of the ideal. The art of a society reflects the ideals the society posits, it creates in its process religion and idols. Religion, whether in the form of institutional religion such as Christianity or in the pious atheism of humanism, is created in the process of art. These fixed ideas that become concrete idols are what create the transcendent concept. Stirner realizes that this process of the creation of idols through art is reflective of the process of the creation of objectivities out of subjectivities. The recognition of these stratified transcendence objects is thus resulting from the process of art and the idols art creates. A conceptual space, whatever that may be, residing upon the conceptual space, must thus become recognized as property in the Stirnerite sense. It must become able to be freely exercised just as the concept is able to freely move about the plane of immanence. Thus the conceptual space becomes reduced back to the immanence of subjectivity, regardless of how one recognizes concepts as stratified. Conceptual space does not exist, it is only out of our recognition that it becomes a reality. We out of egoism can freely move through thought, make concepts property, and be free from boundaries.