The Phenomenology of God
“The supposition of some, that I endeavor to prove in the Tractatus Theologico–Politicus the unity of God and Nature (meaning by the latter a certain mass or corporeal matter) is wholly erroneous.”
The Philosophical Foundations of Metaphysical Unity
Defining the world –asking in the most general manner, “What is?” — makes human beings distinctive as a finite species of organisms –as far as we know, within the confines of our answers to that most general question.
Each of us asks and answers this question, but in particular, at each moment of living, and it is only by abstracting from everyday living that the general questioning is brought into the frame. To ask “what is?” with the broadest applicability is to ask the question of ‘Being.’
All that is –the absolute, the infinite, the eternal — in synthesis, in unity, is indistinct from the notion of Being or Being-itself. There cannot be another sphere of phenomenology where the word “God” finds more appropriateness than in this synthesis –the original philosophic intuition that “all is one” is the origin of the notion of God.
Some atheists refuse all notions of God, and others who simply refuse the forms that ‘God’ has traditionally taken from institutional sources of religion.
The latter set of atheists should have no issue contending with this notion of God. After all, it is a notion that has its roots solely in thought and appears in a near-identical fashion across sectarian lines in the hearts and minds of philosophers, mystics, poets, and scientists.
Logically, such an intuition is constituted by a variable ‘x,’ and the history of philosophy has largely been an endeavor to fill this variable with inferences from there.
The Pre-Socratic philosophers filled this variable with basic elements (e.g., water, fire, earth, and air), followed by unifying them into pluralities –demarcated in their own respects but existentially in relation and strife. Force was the ultimate principle –though matter was a contender for Democritus.
In the modern scientific picture, the variable ‘x’ is filled in a twofold sense: force is primary, while matter is secondary.
The average Christian American is often left with an image of God that is explicitly, and thus excessively, anthropomorphic –where, in appearance, God is akin to Zeus, only without the lightning bolts. This colloquial imagery fatally obscures what is, in actuality, a far deeper notion.
God is not a being that stands utterly apart from or externally to the world but is instead the overarching principle (hypóstasis) that constitutes reality (physis) and all its varying conceptions (kosmoi). All that has definition has definition in virtue of definition-itself –God, or nature in action as determining.
Transcendence and Immanence in the Divine Nature
God is not other than Being –all is in and determined by God. Such a conceptualization of God cannot be a person, nor is it quite the totality of beings –it is the inanimate field of all possible determinations, thereby being (as an object of perception or intention) utterly indeterminate in its totality.
Insofar as our gaze sets itself upon the horizons of phenomenological determinacy, we can be said to be approaching God’s immanent manifestations through our own minds.
What is outside of our immediate sphere of presenting –i.e., focal and peripheral consciousness and perception — is not known from within it and thus takes on an indeterminacy that bears a likeness to God’s.
This becomes less indeterminate the more one traverses; for one, one begins to notice that these traverses are but the activity and movement of mind and body (Leibkörper) in a mode that expands one’s horizons of determinacy –i.e., God in microcosm, inasmuch as God can be seen through this microcosm.
For what these traverses entail is the accounting-for of Being-itself, in accordance with how Being-itself has determined one’s conduct; the intuitive impulse to account for the overarching principle that ‘all is one’ and the remarkable reliability with which the word ‘God’ comes to the fore as an exegetical symbol towards this end is something which arises out of that very defining principle.
God is not an entity, nor is God something that can be juxtaposed with any other entity. God is transcendent in the sense of being absolute, infinite, eternal, and unitary (one), as the ultimate ground and source from which all existing things derive and whither, they ebb and flow in their finitude.
Yet this transcendence is not otherworldly but manifests immanently within nature and experience, which are its modes known by us humans through its attributes of thought and extension.
God –as the Catholic philosopher Nicholas of Cusa says — is the non-aliud — the one undifferentiated essence or substance that is the natura naturans (to use Baruch Spinoza’s terminology), the active generating principle underlying all reality.
As natura naturans, God is radically transcendent, being unlimited, unconditioned, and eternal. Yet nothing exists apart from or outside of God, including the modes of extension and thought that constitute the natura naturata –the only realm where our understanding and sensation possess applicability.
This realm is what arises out of the active generating principle underlying all reality –out of the infinite and eternal comes and rests the temporally bounded. Only when the latter grasps the former does human activity –that is, human agency as per one’s moral and intellectual consciences — commence.
Therefore, this transcendence is thoroughly immanent within the world we know –the created world, the world of definitions. Because naturans encompasses the generation of all such definitions and the beings to whom they pertain, it is self-defined and self-caused –nothing exists outside of God which defines or moves.
Our human realm of existence is a mere slice of what exists within this realm of movement and definition — there is nothing “from without” in nature, only in our knowledge of nature.
Only dents are ever made at the outermost regions of natura naturata; then humanity becomes self-satisfied with the technological conveniences that incidentally derive therefrom, igniting a profound hubris. From this, the concept of naturans becomes increasingly obscure –one’s gaze refuses to advance upon the horizons of indeterminacy evermore.
Thus, in the realm of the finite, we see entropy –but when the rare, sage-like individual can excuse themselves from the excessively worldly impulses of others (aliud) and their alterity — which includes the others that inhabit oneself in an ostensibly intrinsic sense — they may then begin to swim once more towards the other shore, where God and they meet face-to-face. An imparting of information ensues in that moment.
A pressure for decision is bestowed upon one –their finitude (i.e., their Being) is brought to the forefront of their consciousness by fixing their gaze toward the infinite (i.e., Being in general), putting into perspective the future-directed paths one is currently projecting upon, as well as their innumerable alternatives.
This innumerability is God’s ultimate scintillation in the human mind and body, for it is the manifest coherence of utter opposites –finitude and infinitude, temporality and eternity.
The fundamental unity of reality is not opposed to its diversity but is its underlying ground (its hypóstasis.) All that occurs in the finite realm in which we reside does so in virtue of the activity of infinite and eternal principles of defining and grounding beings in their Being.
This means God’s transcendence cannot be the transcendence of a personal deity located in a supernatural realm. Rather, it is the determining transcendence of unity over multiplicity, infinite over finite, eternal over temporal, the unbounded over the bounded.
The absolute unity and singularity of the divine substance necessarily manifests in the infinite diversity of modes that make up the actual world. God is the Being of all beings –God is Being-itself.
The one manifests as the many, and the transcendent expresses only immanently –that is, it cannot express itself [to us] in terms of the fullness of its transcendence.
Buddhists have the term ‘emptiness’ for when the fullness of God is focal –it is, as an ‘object’ of perception or intentionality, all of the concepts and senses at once, which is inexplicable to minds as bounded as our own. Thus, what is before one’s eyes is empty –but it is before one’s eyes (a clear slate, in the face of the ultimate nullity of all time –for by necessity, eternity has no beginning or end.)
The future is thus at one’s disposal as the source of manifest fullness in the present, which is merely the unfolding of our Being into what is only ostensibly the future and only ostensibly from the past.
All is but a “web of relations,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson says –extending out boundlessly, and God is nothing other than the spinning, self-destruction, and re-spinning of the said web.
We thus unfurl God with each thought, with each step –and we become more like God inasmuch as we remove our thinking and acting from the average everyday babble and incentives of contemporary culture and society and turn to art & philosophy, pure & kindred friends, and oneself for exclusive counsel.
There are clues of such kindredness in the realms of commonality, but not enough to be like most others, who worship commonality, thus walking a path of deep insecurity and benefactorship.
Phenomenological Encounters with the Divine
With the nature of transcendence and immanence established, our focus shifts to the phenomenological realm, where these divine attributes manifest in human experience and understanding.
In our phenomenological experience, we only encounter God as expressed immanently through created things — physical objects, ideas, or the laws of nature. We do not perceive any transcendent reality outside of or distinct from the world but instead have intuitive ideas regarding such a reality that we use to explain our world.
The laws of motion, for example, while representable through physics and its effects in the motions of phenomenological space, are but representations of what is fundamentally unrepresentable –all representations of Being-itself, of God are empty, for humans cannot represent anything in all of its sides or profiles, let alone all of the sides of all potential representations of things.
For phenomenology, God is not one object among others within the world but the ontological condition for anything whatsoever to exist and appear. God, thus, has no body and takes no form but is the ground of all potential bodies, forms, and embodied forms.
God as absolute transcendental ground is always already implicitly present in the immanence of phenomenal experience. Through a reflexive turn, phenomenology seeks to clarify this transcendental ground and our participation in its essence.
God contains both a radical transcendence beyond the world and an immanent manifestation within the world. As natura naturans, the divine is the absolute unity and infinite power that transcends all modes of extension and thought.
In this aspect, God is utterly unconditional, uncreated, and eternal. Yet this transcendent divinity also expresses itself immanently as the totality of determinate beings that constitute reality.
The non-aliud or natura naturans is the non-immanent dimension of God. In itself, the divine essence exists transcendentally beyond space, time, and contingency –as a single “substance,” it is “unparticled,” as Edgar Allen Poe says in his Mesmeric Revelations.
No categories derived from created things can describe this transcendent infinity and unicity. It remains always unconditioned and anterior to any possible experience or cognition. At the same time, this transcendent essence necessarily manifests through the aliud of created things.
The non-aliud gives rise to the modes of thought and extension that compose the natura naturata. Here, divine transcendence is present immanently within worldly experience.
This immanence encompasses the multiplicity of natural forms and the ideas, minds, and experiences that encounter them. For phenomenology, the transcendent non-aliud is nowhere present as an object or visible form. Yet its reality is evident in the eidetic structures of experience — things only appear because of infinite giving conditions and finite receiving.
Through creative form-engendering, phenomenology intuits the absolute ground, which alone explains the appearance of phenomena. Phenomenology thus considers transcendence and immanence together, respecting divine mystery while seeking meaning in its worldly expression.
The becoming of beings presupposes the Being of the absolute, and the unconditional imparts itself fragmentarily in the conditional. By reflectively excavating its conditions, phenomenology can gain insight into the metaphysical source from which each phenomenon arises.
