IMMANENCE

Immanence is a term with a variety of meanings. It means 'in-dwelling' or internal to and is opposed to dwelling without. It has been used by some to claim that God dwells within-in the created world. A trascendent argument on these lines is that God dwells-outside the world or is external to it. The term immanence has been used to show how an argument must entail its own conclusions.

Adorno explored the 'torn halves' of a cultural dialectic through the dialectic of immanent and transcendent criticism. An immanent criticism must proceed from within the text or artistic corpus while a transcendent one operates from without, e,g. by exploring art thorugh another body of thought such as marxist literary criticism. As Adorno puts it:

Criticism retains its mobility in regard to culture by recognizing the latter's position within the whole. Without such freedom, without consciousness transcending the immanence of culture, immanent criticism itself would be inconceivable: the spontaneous movement of the object can only be followed by soeone who is not entirely engulfed by it.Prisms p. 29

An immanent method of criticising, or indeed researching, starts from the text and does not move outside it. A transcendent crique by contrast aims to get outside the test or culture to explore it and to develop critique. The transcendent theorist or critic is outside looking in or down and therefore we have the problem of the 'superior' commentator. The immanent theorist operates from within experience or culture but has no means of seeing what the object or theory looks like from outside or from another viewpoint.

Gadamer and style of argument in Plato

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