"The Attunement of the Soul"
Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -Part 2
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This is offered in two parts and appears with permission.
We will recall that one of the motivations for Voegelin's philosophy — and for all philosophy — was the experience of political disorder and the desire to understand the nature of political disorder and, thereby, to search for the source of political order. In seeking to understand the political disorder that he experienced, Voegelin focused on the discovery made by Plato that the "state is man writ large." Voegelin called this the Platonic Anthropological Principle and developed Plato's insight by reflecting and meditating on what it means to be human. His meditations led him to focus on the nature of consciousness — as it is embodied in human beings who live in the metaxy, the In-Between. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin wrote that "the problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics."11
There he briefly outlined his studies of theories of consciousness, the phenomena of order, "the reduction of the phenomena of order to the logos of consciousness" and the results of these studies. "The most important result of these efforts," he continued,
was the insight that a "theory" of consciousness in the sense of generically valid propositions concerning a pre-given structure was impossible. For consciousness is not a given to be deduced from outside but an experience of participation in the ground of being whose logos has to be brought to clarity through the meditative exegesis of itself. The illusion of a "theory" had to give way to the reality of the meditative process; and this process had to go through its phases of increasing experience and insight.12
Thus, Voegelin's philosophy focuses on consciousness as the essence of human nature. Even if we call it the essence of human nature, consciousness cannot be reduced to a set of describable and objectively verifiable characteristics.
Voegelin's "double movement of empiricism" is very important not only for our study of literature through the lens provided by Voegelin's philosophy but also — and perhaps even more essentially — for the understanding of Voegelin's work itself. Only through "the dialogue that goes on among men about their nature and destiny" can philosophical findings on the order of those discovered by a Plato or a Voegelin be substantiated. And this substantiation can be accomplished only through the participation of "readers" in the reality adduced in the symbolizations of the philosophical works themselves.
In other words, the validation-confirmation of the results of Voegelin's meditative experiences, as well as the validation of his historical studies — whether of Plato's texts or the fragments of Heraclitus or the Gospels or Homer or the Pentateuch — is a potentiality in the consciousness of every human being who lives and reads. And so it is with the validation-confirmation of experiences that novels symbolize. It is in this context that the principles of Voegelin's literary criticism become important.
The bases for this validation-confirmation across the ages by readers of literary works lie in what Voegelin — arguing against historicism and relativism in a 1956 letter to Heilman — called "circumstanced equality." He asserted: "All men are on the same level of circumstanced equality" (letter 65, August 22, 1956, p. 158). While to be equally circumstanced obviously means that all human beings are "located" in the same set of circumstances, it is possible to describe with more specificity these circumstances that have been in fact discovered in Voegelin's own historical and personal search of order. The reader should be cautioned that the following characteristics are empirically, i.e., experientially, verifiable only through the reflective-meditative process of embodied human beings who, avoiding preconceptions, are open to the exploration of consciousness. Thus we present these "circumstances," in which all humans are equal, as "results" of the millennial "dialogue among men about their nature and destiny":
All human beings are born into an existence in time that is shared by "other" being things.
All human beings born into existence will cease to exist in time.
All human beings possess consciousness.
Consciousness participates in the nonexistent "ground of being."
All human beings possess bodies.
Bodies participate in the existent world.
The human body is the "location" of consciousness.
Human beings are composite beings.
To exist," as Voegelin observed,
means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) in the Apeiron as the timeless arche of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestation of the Apeiron in time. This dual participation of things in reality has been expressed by Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C.) in the terse language of the mysteries (B62):
Immortals mortals
mortals immortals
live the others' death
the others' life die.
Reality in the mode of existence is experienced as immersed in reality in the mode of nonexistence and, inversely, nonexistence reaches into existence. The process has the character of an In-Between reality, governed by the tension of life and death.13
Because human consciousness experiences reality through participation in the timeless (nonexistent) ground of being and because through the body human beings participate in the existent world of time, human beings live in and are conscious of living in the metaxy — the In-Between of reality. Like coming into and going out of existence, the experience of the metaxy is shared by human beings across time and space.
"God and Man, World and Society form
a Primordial Community of Being"
This simple declaration from "Introduction: The Symbolization of Order" in Israel and Revelation14 opens the first major theoretical statement of Voegelin's philosophical principles following The New Science of Politics. It expresses both the empirical results of his historical researches and the announcement of the philosophical project that ceased only with his death.
Human beings participate in all the levels of reality — the community of being — to which they are granted access by their composite human nature. Participation (methexis — the Platonic participation in the Idea — and metalepsis — the Aristotelian mutual human-divine participation in the Nous) in the community of being is an essential component in Voegelin's philosophy. Although in The New Science of Politics (1952) Voegelin understands this participation to be primarily cognitive, as early as 1943 he had written of the participation as more than cognitive. This earlier formulation would only be published in 1966 and is consistent with work written much later and included in Anamnesis. The two passages from 1952 and 1943/1966 follow. In The New Science of Politics we read that
science starts from the prescientific existence of man, from his participation in the world with his body, soul, intellect, and spirit, from his primary grip on all the realms of being that is assured to him because his own nature is their epitome. And from this primary cognitive participation, turgid with passion, rises the arduous way, the methodos, toward the dispassionate gaze on the order of being in the theoretical attitude.15
In "On the Theory of Consciousness" we read:
Human consciousness is not a process that occurs in the world in isolation, in contact with other processes only through cognition; rather, it is based on animal, vegetative, and inorganic being, and only on this basis is it the consciousness of a human being. This structure of being seems to be the ontic premise for man's ability to transcend himself toward the world, for in none of its directions of transcending does consciousness find a level of being that is not also one on which it itself is based.
Speaking ontologically, consciousness finds in the order of being of the world no level that it does not also experience as its own foundation. In the "base-experience" of consciousness man presents himself as an epitome of the cosmos, as a microcosm. Now we do not know in what this base "really" consists; all our finite experience is experience of levels of being in their differentiation; the nature of their connections is inexpe-rienceable, whether this nexus be the foundation of the vegetative in the inorganic, of the animal in the vegetative, or of human consciousness in the animal body. There is no doubt, however, that this base exists. Even though each level of being is clearly distinguishable with its own structure, there must be something common that makes their continuum in human existence possible.16
Reality-Language-Imagination
As he continued to study consciousness in the 1980s, Voegelin began to reflect on the complex of reality, language, and consciousness. In these reflections he identified "thing-reality" and "It-reality" as structures of reality that correspond to "intentionality" and "luminosity" in consciousness. That these structures "cannot be separated as entities but are together in the one structure of consciousness" he termed "the paradox of consciousness."17 In In Search of Order the paradoxes of consciousness continued to unfold in consciousness as "a subject intending reality as its object, but at the same time a something in a comprehending [It] reality; and reality is the object of consciousness, but at the same time the subject of which consciousness is to be predicated."18
Voegelin had articulated in "The Beyond and Its Parousia" (1982) "a further structure in consciousness: We can reflectively distance ourselves from the paradox in which we are involved and talk about it — and such talk is called philosophy. I call this structure of consciousness reflective distance. All philosophy is conducted in reflective distance within consciousness about consciousness." This observation led directly to the insight that "such talk" was only one of the "three levels of language, which are in conflict with [one another]: the thing-reality language, the It-reality language, and the reflective distance language."19
In his last work, Voegelin described imagination as part of the structure of reality. He argued that reality is imaginative and thus must be apperceived imaginatively. Here he discovered that "the paradox of consciousness governs imagination, too":
Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolized without man's imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination occur. Through the imaginative power of man the It-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth.20
Even though Voegelin does not use the term cognitive in this declaration about the imaginative structure of the It-reality and the corresponding imaginative structure of human consciousness, his emphasis upon the "truth" of the symbols as "cognitive" in the questions he asks himself in order to arrive at the declaration itself leads us to conclude that this structure might be named the "cognitive-imaginative." In his essay "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," Voegelin wrote that the "the truth of the symbols is not informative; it is evocative."21 Since "truth of the symbols" is "evocative," it seems apparent that the evocation of the truth of the symbols will necessarily involve the imagination. We feel justified, therefore, in naming this structure in consciousness and in the It-reality that makes evocation possible the "cognitive-imaginative."22 This does not seem to be inconsistent with Voegelin's understanding of symbolization, truth, and evocation.
Imagination in both of its dimensions — as a structural human capacity and as a structural element of It-reality — is the key to the literary critic's enterprise. As part of the structure of reality, imagination characterizes the nonexistent dimension of the It-reality that is experienceable through the imaginative dimension of the consciousness of embodied human beings in the metaxy, because the human imagination is related to the imagination of the It-reality. Through imagination, man participates in the imaginative dimension of the It-reality and hence of the community of Being. As a human capacity, imagination enables a particular human person, an embodied historical consciousness, to experience the imaginative dimension of reality and to find a way to symbolize that experience in order to articulate and to communicate that experience to others.23
. . . .The truth of the symbols, of course, is not always readily apparent. Sometimes, in my own experience at least, the truth of the literary symbols must be actively pursued through the various dimensions of reading. I think thatVoegelin invested vast cognitive-imaginative-meditative energies into his reading of literary texts. Athanasios Moulakis, in his introduction to The World of the Polis, argues that, like Marsilio Ficino, who enjoined the readers of Plato's dialogue Parmenides "to adopt a Platonic frame of mind" in approaching it, Voegelin "invites his reader to a pia interpretatio of the decisive documents, which does not mean the recognition of external authority or verities to be accepted on faith, but an inner preparation, a participatory disposition of the interpreter."24
Only when the reader-interpreter 'participates in the Literary Symbolization does the symbol yield up its truth, for the symbolization embodied in the literary work exists, not in the "external world," but in the "existential movement in the metaxy" of the human being from whom it mysteriously emerged.25 Thus the meaning of the symbolization lies, not at the level of semantic understanding, but only in the reenactment of the symbolized reality in the "existential movement in the metaxy" of the human being who "reads" the text. If the reading succeeds, the truth of the symbol has thus evoked the reality symbolized and has thereby drawn the reader into "the loving quest of truth." 
[This is the second of two parts. Part 1 may be read HERE. We plan to offer further excerpts from this book in the near future.]
NOTES
(for full citations see the bibliography in Professor Embry's book)
11. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 33.
12. Ibid.
13. Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, 233. Sandoz points out in the Glossary of Terms Used in Eric Voegelin's Writings that he often used the apeiron — meaning the boundless or depth — "to refer to the pole of the metaxy standing opposite the One, or the Beyond." See Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 151.
14. Voegelin, "Introduction: The Symbolization of Order," in Israel and Revelation, 39.
15. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 91-92. Emphasis added.
16. Voegelin, "On the Theory of Consciousness," in Anamnesis, 75-76. Even though this passage was written in 1943, it would not be published until 1966 in Anamnesis. Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik.
17. Voegelin, "The Beyond and Its Parousia," in The Drama of Humanity, 398-99.
18. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 30-31.
19. Voegelin, "The Beyond and Its Parousia," 399.
20. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 52. And just as there are no free-floating consciousnesses, unmoored from specific human bodies with specific, biographically (i.e., historically) formed personalities, there are no imaginations floating free of specific, embodied persons.
21. Voegelin, "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," 344.
22. In the context of his discussion of Plato's "true story" in book I of the Laws, Voegelin writes: "The truth of reality, answering and questioning, arises in consciousness through the interaction of vision and noesis" (ibid., 337).
23. See "Imagination" in the glossary.
24. Moulakis, Editor's Introduction to The World of the Polis, 24.
25. I want to emphasize that this mode of reading does not depend upon nor does it advocate a methodological stance such as the suspension of disbelief or an a priori procedural assumption of belief, but rests upon an existential stance that is consequent to the primary cosmic experience of an embodied human consciousness that experiences a cosmic order preceding the search for an understanding of order.
