“Beyond” Immanence and Transcendence: Reflections in the Mirror of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev and Solaris

Abstract

The categories of immanence and transcendence are twins of the metaphysical tradition that is grounded in the classical bipolarity of Plato’s Idealism and Aristoteles’ hypomorphism (see Raphaël’s School of Athens). The ongoing postmodern cultural shift in the culture of immanence and transcendence goes far beyond the heuristics of the meaning of these two metaphysical categories. The study, presented here, researches how and why this shift goes beyond the different types of relations between both categories. The essence of the argument is to be found in the cultural process that can be called a silent revolution or a revolutionary evolution, of which the engine is the image culture in general and the art of cinematography in particular. At first sight, the art of cinematography is an instrument of the secular modern world, but when studied more profoundly, it is the medium that creates a new post-metaphysical paradigm in the postmodern era: that of the structural relation between humanity and the realm of life. The Life-paradigm not only ‘transcends’ the Being-paradigm of the immanence and transcendence-metaphysics in a philosophical way; it also dismantles the claim of transcendence by the institutional churches in the Western world. It opens a whole new field of experiences of the realm of Life that is open to everyone (the democratic dimension of cinematography). The cinematographical work of Christian motivated artists like Dreyer, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Godard and others, opens up a process of liberation (emancipation) of the universal religious experience of life in such a way that Nietzsche’s ‘Death of God’ (the post-metaphysical era) is not the ending, but a metamorphosis and thus a new beginning of religious culture.