The Philosophy of Life as the Field of Immanence

Abstract

The philosophies of life that emphasize life as a plane of immanence, in which there is no outside and no transcendence beyond the world, have expressed a modern non-dualism that is compatible with contemporary developments in neuroscience, social cognition, and evolution. A strong philosophical claim is that the immanence view expresses a truth about life itself, supported by science, against which the history of religions can be measured. A weak claim is that modern articulations of life itself are no more adequate than those of tradition, but the modern view is simply another approximation in expressing the field of immanence. The chapter argues for the weak view.