Immanence

Immanence occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning less as a settled theological category than as a live tension against transcendence that organizes the soul’s relationship to world, body, and divinity. Hillman is the most insistent theorist here: for him, the soul’s native orientation is precisely immanential — God in the soul, the soul in the body, the soul in the world — in pointed contrast to spirit’s upward, detaching thrust toward transcendence. This Hillmanian axis runs through archetypal psychology’s rehabilitation of the anima mundi: if world-soul inheres in each particular thing, then service, attention, and ethical seriousness toward objects are the practical consequences. McGilchrist extends the problem into theology proper, arguing that pantheism delivers immanence but that only panentheism can hold immanence and transcendence together without sacrifice of either. Simondon approaches immanence from an ontological angle, treating it as one of two incomplete symbols through which thought attempts to reconstruct a wholeness that individuation has already divided; neither pure immanence nor pure transcendence reaches the pre-individual real. Armstrong’s account of Lurianic Kabbalah frames the same paradox as the classical Jewish mystical problematic: how can infinite divinity be simultaneously transcendent and immanently distributed within a finite creation? Across these voices, the corpus consistently refuses to resolve immanence into mere materialism; it remains charged with the sacred even as it grounds the psyche firmly in the sensible, relational, and particular.

In the library 11 passages

Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence: God in the soul or the soul in God, the soul in the body, the soul in the world, souls in each other or in the world-soul.

Hillman establishes immanence as soul’s defining orientation, directly opposed to spirit’s transcendent aspiration, and traces its structural consequence in the intrinsic, a priori nature of dialogue and relationship.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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Theology calls this distribution of the divine within all things the theory of immanence, and, sometimes, pantheism. Whether God is right here in things, whether each thing has its own God… these theological questions may fascinate but they are not immediately relevant to the practical point.

Hillman names the theory of immanence explicitly as the theological basis for anima mundi while deliberately bracketing its metaphysical questions in favour of the ethical imperative of service to particular things.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis

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Both the search for transcendence and the search for immanence aim to recreate the whole being with one of these two symbols of the incomplete being that individuation separates.

Simondon diagnoses both immanence and transcendence as philosophically incomplete compensations for the split that individuation introduces, pointing toward a pre-individual reality that precedes and exceeds both.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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The divergence of spirituality’s transcendence and immanence is not a divergence within the transindividual itself but a divergence with respect to the individuated individual alone.

Simondon locates the transcendence/immanence opposition not in reality itself but in the limited perspective of the already-individuated being, suggesting the transindividual dissolves this duality.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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Isaac Luria… tried to explain the paradox of the divine transcendence and immanence more fully with one of the most astonishing ideas ever formulated about God.

Armstrong situates the transcendence-immanence tension as the central paradox driving Lurianic Kabbalah’s distinctive cosmogonic speculation, connecting depth-psychological and mystical traditions.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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If they are the world as the powers within its variety, how can they be separated from it? Are they not the immortality, the athnetos, of the world, giving every item of this world its inherent transcendence, its sublime enchantment and beauty

Hillman articulates an immanentialist theology of the gods as powers inherent within worldly variety, making divine absence logically incoherent and every thing intrinsically ensouled.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Information expresses the immanence of the set in ea

Simondon extends the concept of immanence into information theory, treating information as the immanent resonance through which a system’s internal subsets express their belonging to the whole.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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idealism and realism, the former by making the external world immanent in me, the latter by subjecting me to a causal action, falsify the motivational relations existing between the external and internal worlds

Merleau-Ponty invokes immanence critically to characterize idealism’s error of absorbing the world into the subject, distinguishing this from a phenomenological account of genuine perceptual motivation.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside

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