Transcendence and Immanence

There is a dichotomy that I am very fond of. Whether or not it is entirely accurate or suitable I think is less relevant than its power as a tool for approaching questions of existence. It is the opposed terms of transcendence and immanence. I first came across them in Simone De Beauvoir’s seminal feminist work – The Second Sex. Simply put, immanent activities are those that merely sustain life – cooking, cleaning, exercising for health rather than pleasure, that sort of thing – while transcendent activities are those that make life meaningful – working towards goals, for example, or traveling in a lot of cases, or socializing in intimate environments. In Beauvoir’s book these terms were used largely to describe the traditional roles of women, which were concerned with immanent activities, and those of men, whose roles typically involved transcendental activities. I am not particularly concerned with this debate here. What I more want to look at is how all of us, today, can maximize our ability to occupy ourselves with transcendental activities, and whether or not there is something inherently valuable in some imminent activities.

It seems to me that ideally, it would be in our best interests to be occupied, as much as possible, with the project of transcendence. As a result, it frustrates to me no end that in order to function at peak effectiveness, I need 10 hours of sleep per day. I feel like nearly half my life is spent doing nothing, when there are so many things I want to do. In order to remedy this situation I would really need to learn to enjoy sleep. I have a friend who loves to take naps. I envy her sometimes because she doesn’t feel like sleep is a wasteful thing, and she can even find it meaningful. I can do something similar with eating, which I find immensely pleasurable, and which thereby confers meaning on my cooking exploits.  But what about things like doing the laundry, or mowing the lawn? These are activities that are required to allow for other, more meaningful activities, such as beign respected by a peer group with which I would like to socialize, but the activities just seem like an enormous expenditure of time for which I am getting only minimal returns.

I should point out at this point that I think time is the ultimate resource, and its finitude is the most sharply felt. I love life and so I want as much of it as possible. I am aware that it will eventually end, and I want to make the most of what I have available to me. Hence I feel quite acutely the vacuity of doing the dishes. Unfortunately there is no way that I can avoid some immanent activities if I am to effectively undertake those activities that I experience as transcendental. Perhaps if I had children who were very important to me, I could find some joy in cleaning on their behalf, but at the moment, most household duties make me die a little inside.

It is for this reason that if I ever had enough money, I would immediately employ a maid, or preferably a cleaning robot, if such a thing were ever invented. If, through activities that I find meaningful, I could come across more money than the cost of employing a maid, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so. I’m not speaking here of the economic benefits of specialization. I am not talking about me being really damn good at legal advice, and so dedicating my time to that in order to make stacks of cash with which to pay a maid so that I can spend more time giving legal advice. The difference is subtle. I would like to do the things which I enjoy. I expect there to be a diverse range of things involved. I would not want to pay to get rid of something I dislike so that I can work more, or make more money. If I eventually become one of those fortunate people who works full time in something they find utterly fascinating, engrossing, and meaningful, then I will of course be overjoyed. But at present, I work in something that I find bearable, occasionally enjoyable and sometimes stimulating (tennis coaching and tutoring) in order to finance the things I really like (food, travel, reading, thinking, socializing, to name a few). A maid would allow me to do more of those things I really enjoy, rather than the work I find tolerable as an income source. At present, I end up doing quite a lot of housework, because a maid costs about as much as my hourly rate as a tennis coach.

The question I want to ask is whether my desire for a maid is O.K. I had a friend suggest to me recently that it is important for us not to get too distanced from housework, because it divorces us from an awareness of our waste and associated destruction. Is this true? There has always, but particularly since the hippies and the more modern sustainability movement, been this notion that man should not lose touch with his nature. On a certain level, I can agree with this. I love trekking. I like seeing new places, wildernesses in particular. I like to sit outside. I dislike processed food, I prefer water to soft drinks, and I’d rather eat fresh vegetables. But is there something natural about immanence? Is there something unhealthy about our quest to overcome our dependence on some immanent activities? Do I need to continue to do the dishes occasionally for the rest of my life or risk becoming unnatural and by extension, unhealthy?

I would think no. I can accept that life has some natural rhythms that we should not directly oppose ourselves to, but washing doesn’t seem to be one of them, in the same way that being exposed to the elements is also something we should try and avoid. Surely nobody would suggest that when it is cold we should not put on a jacket. But is the case the same with sun-screen? Shouldn’t I just stay inside when it is very hot and my chance of skin cancer is high? By applying this technological marvel to cheat nature, am I somehow distancing myself from natural rhythms? Again, I would say no. I want to go outside and experience the midday sun, because I find doing so meaningful, and I will not be caged by my fragile body.

How far does this principle extend? Much has been said about the un-sustainability and/or wastefulness of global supply chains recently, and many of my peers appear to be pro-commune. It is inefficient in terms of resource expenditure to ship bananas from Brazil to Australia, Coal from Australia to China, and Corn from America to everywhere. Instead, we should form into smaller, self-sustaining units to minimize resource expenditure associated with transport. This seems fine in theory, but there is the problem of critical mass. How are we going to get someone with enough free time to spend seven years in medical school if we are all occupied with immanent activities like growing food, sowing clothes, slaughtering farm animals and doing the dishes? Frankly, we aren’t; which means a massive decrease in the quality of living. Now some people would argue that this is precisely (though perhaps unfortunately) what we need from an environmental and economic point of view. I am not going to get involved in that argument. What I am interested in is the fact that all these global economic processes that improve efficiency in terms of cost and quantity of supply, mean that we have way more free time to spend on the things that we find really meaningful. If you find living on and with the land meaningful, then communal living might be right up your alley, but for many people, the activities involved in communal living are nothing short of banal.

In my view, we should be spending a great deal of time figuring out how we can continue to free ourselves of the debilitating weight of immanent needs in a sustainable manner. If we need to take on some more immanent activities in the short term I am fine with that, but I am not O.K. with adopting immanence as a way of life, which is very much how I view communal society. Furthermore, and this is a more contentious point, to my eyes, the efforts of what I would call ‘modern hippies’ to live more harmoniously and thereby meaningfully by inefficiently applying their economic potential seems downright silly to me. For example, I can work for less than five minutes, which allows me to buy a plentiful supply of quality bread, or I can spend nearly 30 minutes dumpster diving at throw out time by the Bakery’s skip bin to achieve the same outcome. What is more important, the money, or the time? In a similar vein, why clean your own car for hours, when you can work for 30 minutes and put it through a car wash? I understand that if you hate your job the situation is different, as it is when you can socialize while washing your car, or you are in love with your car, but consider a situation where you like your job, or you don’t find car-washing particularly stimulating.

What I’m really trying to say here is that people don’t seem as acutely aware of the value of time as I think they should be. Provided your income source doesn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon, I would suggest that whenever it is cost-effective to do so, you trade money for time, rather than persisting with a vague notion of living harmoniously with your natural rhythms, particularly when the history of man is in many way the history of his attempts to overcome natural limitations and inconveniences.