The lost space of “Secular Age”. Re-thinking Immanence and Transcendence with Phenomenology

How can philosophy provide the evidence of its own relevance and of the own quest of relevance? And how can phenomenology? They can do it at least in two ways, that is by putting itself at test 1- as a method facing and clarifying in a relevant way its philosophi- cal matters and 2- as a method that interprets both its time and its contemporary matters in order to offers it new keys for its interpretation. Among the topics that have characterised contemporary phenomenology there surely is the tournant théologique de la phénoménologie, which would have been carried out by some French philosophers (Paul Ricœur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Luis Chrétien). As it is renown, the sentence “tournant théologique” was formulated by Dominique Janicaud1 who scolded these authors for “l’embardée de la transcendance”2. Such “embardée” would have completely contradicted the strictness of the method by Husserl that, instead, through the epochè and the reductions, “put in brackets” any transcendence in favour of the immanence of consciousness. However, in Husserl the matter is far from being solved and in the thought of the founder of phe- nomenology immanence and transcendence are intertwined, which arises the relevance of the phenomenological method in facing such philosophical and phenomenological matter. Nevertheless, how can such a reason be relevant also to interpret and understand our contemporary time (and its contemporary matters too)? At first, in order to answer, we have to find at least a relevant matter of our time that has to do with the question of immanence and transcendence, about which phenome- nology can be relevant. This matter can be a querelle of our time that only at first sight is far from phenomenology but that instead can receive from this path of philosophy the greatest contribution. This is the querelle about secularisation3 that has been taking place in the philosophical debate for several years and that questions on the relevance that religions (enlivened by the research of transcendence) have in the social field (im- manent). In such a querelle, therefore, the same tension between transcendence and immanence is at stake, the same that is at stake in phenomenology. Here is then, the question that puts the relevance of phenomenology at test: can phe- nomenology offer some keys in order to interpreting the querelle about secularisation? Certainly yes, at least as far as it helps to rethink the relationship between transcendence and immanence by 1- going out from their juxtaposition and by 2- bringing new ways in order to rethinking both transcendence and immanence without turn up to the spa- tial classification from which they have been thought up to now (that is transcendence as what is “outside” and immanence as what is “inside”). In order to show if these new ways are at least possible, we will have to explain how, thinking on immanence and tran- scendence, phenomenology (in our case Husserl and one of the authors of the so-called “tournant théologique”, Jean-Louis Chrétien) can contribute to re-reading also the cur- rent querelle of secularisation. To do that, we need to restart just from this debate and the space that has been lost when this debate juxtaposes immanence and transcendence by thinking them in the light of the spatial adverbs inside/outside.