My mind recently tossed up the phrase “immanentize the eschaton” and I thought I’d see if the OED had it; it does indeed, and the whole entry (first published 2014) is quite interesting:
Originally Philosophy.
transitive. To make (something which is transcendent) immanent; to render (something abstract) real, actual, or capable of being experienced. Cf. immanent adj. 3.
1926 Gentile has merely immanentised the old transcendent Absolute by identifying it with each moment and act and, at the same time, with the whole process of experience, and has merely transferred to experience the mystery of the origin.
A. Crespi, Contemporary Thought of Italy iv. 1851952 The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.
E. Voegelin, New Sci. of Politics iv. 1201992 There we shared an experience the intensity of which immanentizes a certain quality of life aboard the vessel.
W. F. Buckley, WindFall v. 742005 The ideal of moral perfection, which in Christianity was rooted in the transcendent, was immanentized due to the parameters established by modern epistemology.
Journal Relig. Ethics vol. 33 71
Phrases
U.S. Politics (hyperbolical). to immanentize the eschaton: to attempt to bring about utopian conditions in the world; to seek to create heaven on earth (cf. eschaton n.). Frequently in negative contexts, as don’t immanentize the eschaton.
Apparently coined by William F. Buckley with allusion to the writings of Eric Voegelin (cf. quot. 1952). The phrase is commonly used depreciatively by conservative critics of progressive or utopian political ideologies, as communism, socialism, etc.[1952 The immanentization of the Christian eschaton made it possible to endow society in its natural existence with a meaning which Christianity denied to it.
E. Voegelin, New Sci. Politics vi. 163]1969 William F. Buckley, conservative writer and editor, is now becoming a television personality, albeit an unusual one. He used the phrase ‘immanentize the eschaton’ on the boob tube recently.
Des Moines (Iowa) Reg. 17 March 14/1
…2013 The significance of those jobs was not any value that Mr. Obama could add to them; it was simply that they brought him one step closer to the moment when he could ascend to the nation’s highest office and immanentize the eschaton (or, create heaven on Earth).
Orange County (California) Reg. (Nexis) 17 November
I love the “(hyperbolical),” and it’s nice to see the association with Buckley, mentioned in this 2010 post, confirmed.
I’m pretty sure I first encountered the “immanentize the eschaton” phrase back in the Eighties when reading Shea & Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and that is mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton. (It also says they misspelled the verb, which I did not recall – I was subsequently exposed to it in enough other contexts that I don’t have a problem with the spelling.)
I expect S&W got it either directly or indirectly from WFB.
We should use that for original abstracts taking on a concrete meaning.
Like JWB, I encountered it in the Illuminatus trilogy in the 1980s, and I’m glad to see my memory of “imminentize” wasn’t faulty.
“Immanentise the Eschaton Now!” would be a great slogan to put on placards for demonstrations.
“What do we want?”
“Immanentise the Eschaton!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
Almost as good as the UK university lecturers’ “Rectify the Anomaly Now!”, of happy memory.
I can’t say that the explanation is clear.
When you build a house, is that bad?
I’m pretty sure I’d encountered it in political discourse before reading Illuminatus! in the mid-70s, but memory is a slippery thing.
Buckley’s Watery Tail of Woe (a review of Windfall by Duncan Spencer):
“But he’s also the kind of dilettante sailor who makes ‘normal’ sailors (those who race or cruise for pleasure) grind their teeth in agony or rock with laughter at his highfalutin ways, goofy nautical blunders and pompous prose. I’m somehow always reminded of an incomprehensible Latin mass, rising and falling, sonorous and indecipherable, and always sounding important, when he writes.”
You’ve got to
Press the Red Buttón
Immanentize the eschaton
Don’t mess with Mr. In-between
(I blame my rough childhood.)
As a Brit, I did a bit of a double take at “boob tube”, having heretofore been blissfully unaware of its American English meaning. Here’s Wiktionary:
boob tube (plural boob tubes)
(US, informal, dated, derogatory) A television.
Synonym: idiot box
(Britain, informal) A type of woman’s upper body garment consisting of a taut band of cloth around the breasts and back.
Synonym: (US) tube top
As in “press the red butt on” or as in “bouton” (and what does the former mean?)?
(also: Baby, you immanentise my eshaton! (a compliment))
imminentize the eschaton
Imminence is eminently close to immanence. But you just have to wait, as the Supremes sang.
It’s just “button” with the stress adjusted so it scans right. “Eschaton” is hard to rhyme with.
First put your weskit on.
Being a Russian speaker, I’m afraid, I will pronounce it as “S-hat on”.
I know, I must expect /k/ for Greek ch in English, but it is difficult to get used to [it].
“Watch yourself with him, pal. He’s the kinda guy never saw an eschaton he didn’t wanna immanentize.”
I also first encountered the phrase in Illuminatus!. I don’t remember any misspelling, and this is confirmed by searching an e-book version of the trilogy.
Btw, who is Robert Shea? Is he even a real person, or someone R. A. WIlson made up? Wilson wrote a number of similar works, and I suspect that even if Shea existed, his involvement beyond lending his name as a co-author was minimal.
I thought I’d see if эсхатон had ever been used in Russian, and so it has, though not often; the first occurrence in the Национальный корпус русского языка is from митрополит Антоний (Блум). Дом Божий. Три беседы о Церкви (1990-1991): “Это слово опять-таки греческое, тон эсхатон, и обозначает две вещи: или совершившееся, или решительно случившееся.” A forum post from 2012.11 suggests that the Buckleyan sense has percolated over there: “А вот тянущие Мир в эсхатон — это современное либеральное сообщество.” [But those who are dragging the World into the eschaton are the modern liberal community.]
Bloom of all Russians was familiar with English eschaton.
___
Fucking liberals are making the world better:(
I don’t think he had a choice there. Cursus est enim honorum.
Btw, who is Robert Shea? Is he even a real person, or someone R. A. WIlson made up? Wilson wrote a number of similar works, and I suspect that even if Shea existed, his involvement beyond lending his name as a co-author was minimal.
Robert Shea at Wikipedia and at his posthumous website by his son, Mike Shea, which contains most of his books (there are some at PG and the Internet Archive, too). He sounds pretty convincingly
realimmanentized to me.i wouldn’t be surprised if RAW (including shea, for authorial purposes) was very deliberate in when he talks about immanentizing and imminentizing – it’s exactly the kind of joycean shenanigans he liked (and i suspect enjoyed even more when it could be mistaken for a typo), especially wrapped around a likely pretty obscure reference to someone he despised. and also some of his characters want to do each of the two to the eschaton, but i don’t know that any of them want to do both.
he’s also why the phrase lives in my mind (along with “ewige blumenkraft” and “heute die welt, morgen das sonnensystem” [spelling by memory {apologies actual german-writers}, RAW probably didn’t use a dictionary so i’m not, and all i know for sure is הײַנט די װעלט, מאָרגן די זונדידטעם]).
@rozele
Your Hebrew ‘s/z’ letters in “-system” are displaying as daleth in my browser 😊.
all correct except for the capitals
rozele doesn’t do capitals. If that was good enough for Jacob …
I had not known this but it turns out that in addition to immanent, imminent, and eminent, the English lexicon (in one of its more technical corners) also boasts “immanant.” That one’s a noun and I don’t know if there’s a verb derived from it … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanant
Also “emanant”.
Immamentize reminds me of instantiate and some philosophical texts I didn’t understand.
“Intensional” is the philosophical technical term most prone to trip me up. (First I have to realise that I haven’t just read “intentional”, and then I have to painfully retrieve whether it means “connotation” or “denotation”, and then I have to go and lie down for a bit until the headache eases off.)
Immanentize is a cousin to reify, a useful concept actually, but I can’t use the word without sounding like a fool.
I had not known this but it turns out that in addition to immanent, imminent, and eminent, the English lexicon (in one of its more technical corners) also boasts “immanant.”
OK, that’s just stupid and obviously created to be maximally confusing and annoying. Littlewood can fuck right off if you ask me.
Jinx! John Cowan, who is not a fool, used “reify” in another thread, a few hours before my comment.
The application of punny names to generalization of the determinant was already established before Littlewood. It started in the nineteenth century, with the permanent. That one was probably less bad when it was introduced in French, but English-speaking mathematicians embraced its humorous sound. I think alternant is also older. Moreover, I wonder whether D. E Littlewood would have especially likely to find confusing names like that amusing, since he spent his entire mathematical career as “the other Littlewood.”
(Britain, informal) A type of woman’s upper body garment consisting of a taut band of cloth around the breasts and back.
I had no idea!
then I have to painfully retrieve whether it means “connotation” or “denotation”
For whatever reason, it is evident to me that extension is tied to denotation, and so intension is the other one. I am of course the other John Cowan.
displaying as daleth
oy.
(could be a typo, could be a keyboard error. too late to edit, but intended as samekh…)
capitals
i did think about them, but decided against.
and wow! DM et al, whatever you’re doing works (someone tell The Economist!)!
@rozele
Was Ok, only I am to blame if I look for a spurious D(Y)DT-M 😊.
As compensation, “zoensysteem” would mean something quite different in Dutch.
…what am I doing? ~:-|
I too was curious about the referent of that ecstatic exclamation.
I just noticed that the period in rozele’s “i did think about them, but decided against.” is a link to Calvin and Hobbes. Right after that comes the “and wow! …” sentence. The mystery deepens.
DM (et al, i hasten to add) has apparently been teaching me proper german orthography by osmosis!
^_^
As always: Wohl den Dänen und denen, denen die Dänen wohl sind.
When in doubt (in terms of spelling or otherwise) about any Germanic language, just ask https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Muppet_Show#Der_d%C3%A4nische_Koch to straighten you out.
Last night I went across the Hudson to see a performance by the space(y)-rock band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualized, and found myself at one point during the set thinking “Heute Jersey City, morgen das Sonnensystem.”
What makes the Germans see the Swedish Chef as Danish?
The indecipherable stream of indistinguishable sounds?
@Keith. I first encountered the German-dubbed version of The Muppet Show more than four decades ago, when I was 17, and the Swedish->Danish switcheroo was one of the more unexpected details. It might be as simple as “American culture has more comical stereotypes about Swedes than about Danes, but maybe German culture is the other way around”?
“Heute Jersey City, morgen das Sonnensystem.”
“Ewige Blumenkraft!”
I’m not aware of any stereotypes about Swedish or Danish culture – except “Danish is a throat disease”.
Same as DM. There is some set of stereotypes about Scandinavians in general (tall, blond, taciturn Vikings, nature-loving, socially liberal, loose sexual morals) that doesn’t differentiate between the individual nations. So maybe it was a case of “Swedish chef? Danish chef? Same difference”.
It doesn’t seem like it would be a prosodic thing – “dänische” no different in syllable count than “schwedische,” and I assume the same stress pattern?
Correct
AJP: “In Norway they love the Danes, the people, but are slightly wary of the Swedes. Swedes think Norwegians are nouveaux riches and tasteless, that Norway is the Texas of Scandinavia.”
A joke I heard once:
A Dane, a Norwegian, and a Swede are sentenced to the gallows. Each gets one last wish.
The Dane says, “I would like a fine dinner.”
The Norwegian says, “I would like to give a speech.”
The Swede says, “Please kill me before the Norwegian speaks.”
The only Swedish-specific stereotypes I know of in America are, in fact, linguistic. Swedish is viewed as a particularly silly-sounding sing-song speech. If the German stereotype is that Danish sounds funnier, then it makes more sense to make the Chef Danish in the German dub. (He has to be Scandinavian though, if only for the sake of the joke before the pigs sing “In the Navy” while performing as Viking raiders, which is normally considered one the top five Muppet sketches of all time.)
There are also Ole and Lena jokes.
From Henry Farrell’s (very interesting) What OpenAI shares with Scientology:
It is indeed interesting,
Not too cynical at all: though as Farrell says, the pushers of this rhetoric have powerful incentives to actually believe it themselves (on some level.)
Surely any scammer is more convincing if they believe their own bullshit.
… if they believe their own bullshit.
To the contrary — if their conscious objective is to scam. They need to think themselves into the critical awareness the scamee is bringing to the investment, and anticipate objections/try to deflect those objections from getting on the agenda.
The scammer needs only to believe they can pull it off.
I’m still trying to figure out whether Sam B-F believed his own b-s. There was plenty critical awareness long before it all went belly-up. Somehow the alarm bells didn’t ring in the right places. Perhaps the scamees so wanted to believe, the scammer’s behaviour/attitude didn’t have any bearing?
If they believe it, it’s not bullshit anymore. The most successful bullshitters just say whatever they want their audience to believe in the moment; whether it’s true isn’t a question that even occurs to them.
Yes, sub specie aeternitatis. But convincing yourself of something, even just temporarily, is an excellent strategy for preparing to convince others. (If you can’t convince yourself, after all, who can you convince?) This is especially effective face to face or on video; it is one half of Orwell’s doublethink.
Lots of other people – if you have any acting skills.
@DM: the existence of method acting suggests that at least some actors find it best to begin by convincing themselves
…kinda…? Or just to get into the habit of behaving as their character.