Idiot wisdom and the intimate universal: On immanence and transcendence in an intercultural perspective

© The Author(s) 2016. This book chapter focuses on what I call the “idiocy of the intimate universal.” The idiocy of the intimate universal offers an analysis of a dimension that exceeds determination in more normal generalities. In relation to the ontology of the human being, this chapter discusses the “inter” of intercultural relations, that is to say, “the between” as I have conceived of it throughout my work. I focus in particular on how the intimacy of this idiotics is communicated in art and in our sense of the sacred. I also draw on some of my thoughts from my book God and the Between, where, in the chapter entitled “the Idiocy of the Mystic God,” I connect the sense of intimacy with a variety of forms of mysticism-again a theme that has the promise of something more universal, though not in a merely rationalistic sense, something that has to do with the intimate universal. This approach will address the question of immanence and transcendence through my argument that the intimacy of being entails holding in equipoise both a radical immanence and an irreducible transcendence.

ISBN:9783319430911

Publication year:2016