Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'immanent' functions as a pivotal philosophical operator, marking the presence of the divine, purposive, or transcendent within the created order rather than beyond it. The term surfaces across several distinct registers. In theologies of the Divine Feminine — as developed by Campbell, Harvey, and Baring — immanence is the counterweight to transcendence: the Mother who is simultaneously the infinite source and totally present in every blade of grass, every particle of matter. To collapse this polarity in either direction is, for these writers, a theological and psychological error. In Aurobindo, the immanent is the cosmic Self as universal Purusha, the silent witness resident in all things, upon whose foundational omnipresence the yogi builds cosmic consciousness. In the phenomenological biology of Jonas, as interpreted by Thompson, 'immanent purposiveness' names the constitutive teleology of life itself — purposiveness that belongs to the organization of the organism rather than being imposed from without or deducible from any single part. Louth's Orthodox theology mobilises the term to describe how transcendent Truth becomes interior in the Godman. Spiegelman's Jungian usage anchors it to psychological finality — the immanent striving of the psyche toward its own goal. Across all these registers, the term structures the debate between interiority and exteriority, between a cosmos animated from within and one governed from without.
In the library
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purposiveness is a constitutive property the whole system possesses because of the way the system is organized. Varela eventually came to believe that this notion of immanent purposiveness is not simply descriptive but explanatory
Thompson, synthesising Jonas and Varela, argues that immanent purposiveness is not a metaphor but an explanatory property constituted by the relational organisation of the living system itself.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
In the needful freedom of metabolism, according to Jonas, we find the immanent purposiveness of life... metabolism is immanently teleological.
Jonas's concept of immanent teleology locates purposiveness in the metabolic self-organisation of the organism, establishing a self whose being is entirely its own doing.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
totally immanent in her own creation, in every cat, mouse, fern, and stone... the temptation to make her purely transcendent and the temptation to make her purely immanent.
Campbell presents the Hindu Mother Goddess as the supreme case of divinity that is simultaneously transcendent source and fully immanent in every particular of creation, guarding against a onesided theological reduction.
Campbell, Joseph, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013thesis
totally immanent in her own creation, in every cat, mouse, fern, and stone... In understanding this transcendent and immanent presence of the Motherhood of God, the Hindu imagination protects all lovers of the Divine Feminine from the two main temptations
Harvey and Baring deploy immanence as one pole of an irreducible theological dyad, arguing that the Goddess tradition holds transcendence and immanence in necessary balance.
Harvey, Andrew; Baring, Anne, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996thesis
realising the pure Self or absolute Existence in its outgoing, immanent, all-embracing, all-constituting self-knowledge and self-creative power. The immanent, silent Self in all is the foundation of this cosmic consciousness
Aurobindo identifies the immanent Self as the omnipresent, witnessing Purusha whose foundational presence in all things grounds the possibility of cosmic consciousness for the meditating being.
transcendent of definition yet immanent in all things... since all personifications, forms, acts, and experiences make manifest the one transcendent-immanent mystery
Campbell formulates a universal mythological thesis in which the divine ground is simultaneously beyond all definition and fully immanent in every manifestation of the cosmos.
Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
The only solution is for the truth itself to cross the gulf and become immanent in humankind... In Christ, the Godman, transcendent Truth becomes immanent in man.
Louth presents the Incarnation as the unique ontological event in which transcendent Truth crosses its own gulf and becomes immanent within human existence in the person of the Godman.
Louth, Andrew, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentthesis
Jonas traces the immanent purposiveness of life back to what he calls the self-transcendence of the organism... Identity or self-production can be achieved only 'by way of a continuous moving beyond the given condition'
Thompson shows how Jonas grounds immanent purposiveness in the organism's structural self-transcendence — its necessity to continuously exceed its present state in order to maintain its identity.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
finality; this term refers to 'immanent psychological striving for a goal,' or for 'a sense of purpose.'
Spiegelman transmits the Jungian concept of finality as an immanent psychological teleology, an internal directedness of the psyche toward individuation and meaning.
Spiegelman, J. Marvin, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting
the philosophical system is itself conceived as an immanently propelled and ever evolving process of oppositions, reconciliations, and renewed oppositions, moving toward a final state
Abrams traces the Romantic and Idealist tradition's appropriation of immanence as the self-propelling dialectical energy within philosophical and natural systems, displacing external divine causation.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
By its omnipresence: there is nowhere where it is not; it occupies, therefore, all that is; at once, it is manifold— or, rather, it is all things.
Plotinus grounds immanence in the omnipresence of the One, which pervades all things without being exhausted by or identical to them, laying the metaphysical foundation for later depth-psychological treatments of the term.
all this order is but a representation of the higher: it must contain an untellably wonderful variety of powers... nothing that can have existence failing to exist within it... all of these have a hidden life
Plotinus articulates a vision of the cosmos as fully ensouled and animated from within, in which even apparently lifeless matter participates in a hidden immanent life.
there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a 'presence' which acts by changing the object... But there is also a 'presence' which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object
Plotinus distinguishes different modes of presence or indwelling, an analysis that implicitly differentiates types of immanence and anticipates later debates about how a higher principle can be 'in' the world without being altered by it.