Immanence, as a literary concept, inhabits the same abstract domain as Transcendence, with the latter being, by far, that which is most closely associated with the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Effusively poetic, frequently philosophic and occasionally polemical, the range of literary and linguistic methods Emerson employs to constitute his universe of metaphor and symbolism is, itself, nearly “transcendent.” To achieve this, Emerson places divinity in ordinary things and grants powers to the Self — as solitary and collective being — to establish a personal universe unbounded by anything other than imagination, character and strength of mind. The result is a connatural state of being with humanity, nature and the divine existing in a singular state of natura naturans.

The Nature of Immanence

In order to engage Emerson’s relationship to Immanence we must consider two key aspects of the author: his religious beliefs and his working definition of nature qua nature. Despite his extensive education and participation in formal religion, Emerson outgrew his Unitarian roots to become indifferent towards the man-made religious institutions and formal practices that existed at the heart of 19th century American society [2]. As a result, it remained for Emerson (who retained a deep life-long faith and spiritualism) to rationalize God in terms that he was comfortable with, as well as which served his intellectual and artistic purposes.

For Emerson, the door to Immanence was perhaps opened less by the ancient concept of divine presence, and more by the transcendental leanings of the near contemporaneous thinking of the German Idealists:

“I think the Germans have an integrity of mind which sets their science above all other…They have posed certain philosophical facts on which all is built, the doctrine of immanence, as it is called, by which everything is the cause of itself, or stands there for its own, and repeats in its own all other; ‘the ground of everything is immanent in that thing.’ Everything is organic, freedom also, not to add, but to grow and unfold.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson [3]

In particular, Emerson’s application of Immanence into his writings seems to mirror directly the German concept of Naturphilosophie:

“In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) persisted into the 18th and 19th century as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel and Schelling. Naturphilosophie was associated with Romanticism and a view that regarded the natural world as a kind of giant organism, as opposed to the philosophical approach of figures such as John Locke and Isaac Newton who espoused a more mechanical view of the world, regarding it as being like a machine.” [4]

In the writings of Kant, Hegel, Schelling and others Emerson discovered quasi-secular intellectual underpinnings that resonated with his resistance to — and near alienation from — the historic teachings and institutions of the church. For Emerson, here was a modern, abstract, universal framework to capture his innate feelings of being “as one” with the material world around him.

“…within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.” [5]

Through his explicit declaration of the connaturality at the very foundation of human existence, Emerson grounds his belief system into what is generally considered to be a form of pantheism — Nature as divinity unto itself, and transcendent being expressed through an infinite array of temporal signs readily apprehended through the mind and physical senses that each of us possesses.

The Immanence of Nature

Immanence itself can be considered as simply an intellectual construct. Like our concept of God, Immanence has no directly perceptible qualities other than those we can intuit or imagine. Immanence can logically be positioned somewhere along the continuum that arches from transcendence (in which God is above and beyond all material being) to the purely secular (in which God has no defined participation in the world at all). Idealistically, Emerson places immanent concepts into a framework he variously labels (in his essay Nature) as “divine Nature” and the “indwelling Supreme Spirit.” Elsewhere, and somewhat differently, he encapsulates all human experience into what he calls the “Over Soul” or “World Soul.”

Although Emerson may attribute much of his idealist and transcendental thinking to the German thinkers, it is in the perspectives of Spinoza that he seems to find the richest source of reasoning with which to constitute his immanent worldview. Spinoza posits that if divine substance can only be conceived as being infinite, it is only a logical matter to resolve also that, “infinite quantity is not measurable and cannot be made up of finite parts.”[6] Further to this,

“Having established that Nature is an indivisible, infinite, uncaused, substantial whole — in fact, the only substantial whole; that outside of Nature there is nothing; and that everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by and within Nature with a deterministic necessity through Nature’s laws, Spinoza concludes that God and Nature — the substantial, unique, unified, active, infinitely powerful, necessary cause of everything — are one and the same thing.” [7]

Accordingly, Emerson seldom attempts to parse the fabric of metaphysical systems. His predisposition in addressing the rendering of a connatural ordering of the world founded in the self-reliance and individuality of the spiritual self seems to be more in the vein of Goethe. One specialist in Goethe’s literary methods presents the following perspective: