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Knowledge in the Mode of Oblivion
The human, who lives in the metaxy, participates–methexis (in Plato) and metalepsis (in Aristotle)–in all the dimensions of reality with his body, soul, intellect, spirit, and imagination. In The New Science of Politics, we read that "Science [the philosophical science of order] 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."18
It is through his consciousness that man experiences himself as a member of and a participant in the community of being: God, man, world, and society. As a partner in the community of being, man participates in reality through his consciousness. This consciousness is cognitive-meditative (reflective) as well as imaginative, and the presupposition for this participation is the Consubstantiality of all being and the interrelatedness of all levels of reality.
Ellis Sandoz, in a clarification that furthers our understanding of the experience of participation, writes that "The participatory (metaleptic) experiences of human beings in the In-Between (metaxy), which are the constitutive core of human reality, are transactions conducted within consciousness itself and not externally in time and space; hence Voegelin sometimes calls the realm in which they occur nonexistent reality . . . , or the realm of spirit."19
When the symbols of the tensions of existence in the metaxy are not recognized as articulations of experience, the symbols lose their meanings and, as Voegelin says, become opaque to the experiences that engendered them. It is at this point that the difficult process of remembrance, anamnesis, must be initiated in order to recover that which has been forgotten– historically and individually–but which is not entirely beyond reach. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin writes:
The culpably forgotten will be brought to the presence of knowledge through remembrance, and in the tension to knowledge oblivion reveals itself as the state of non-knowledge, of the agnoia of the soul in the Platonic sense. Knowledge and non-knowledge are states of existential order and disorder.
What has been forgotten, however, can be remembered only because it is a knowledge in the mode of oblivion that through its presence in oblivion arouses the existential unrest that will urge toward its raising into the mode of knowledge.20
In his later work–volume 4 (The Ecumenic Age) and the posthumously published volume 5 (In Search of Order) of Order and History–Voegelin recognized, like Aristotle late in his life,21 the importance of myth and the foundational experience symbolized by myth and designated by Voegelin as "the primary experience of the cosmos."22
The primary experience of the cosmos manifests itself immediately in the experiences of wonder and awe found in Aristotle's Metaphysics and in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.23 Early on, Voegelin was guided in his anamnetic experiments to "recall those experiences that . . . opened sources of excitation," those "experiences that impel toward reflection and do so because they have excited consciousness to the 'awe' of existence."24
In his late work Voegelin argued that both philosophy and revelation as symbolic complexes are dependent upon the primary experience of the cosmos, and that instead of supplanting myth, philosophy and revelation must subsume myth into their own symbolic linguistic structures.
In the essay "Eternal Being in Time," Voegelin classifies Plato's Timaeus as "a myth," and later he writes that "Plato [in the Timaeus] is struggling for a language that will optimally express the analytical movements of existential consciousness within the limits of a fides of the Cosmos."25 The "fides of the Cosmos," is a linguistic equivalent to the term "primary experience of the cosmos. "26
In a late essay, "The Beginning and the Beyond," Voegelin comments that the "adequacy of the symbolism to the experience points to the miracle of a mythical imagination that can produce the adequate Tale."27 While this remark was focused on the analogical symbol of "the creational Beginning" and "the cosmogonic myth," it nevertheless points us to the problem of the symbolization of the timeless, that is of a Time out of time, that may be symbolized in what Voegelin called "the Time of the Tale."
In a passage from the same essay, a passage that could easily function as a description of In Search of Lost Time, he writes:
I shall begin . . . from the cosmos as it impresses itself on man by the splendor of its existence, by the movements of the starry heavens, by the intelligibility of its order, and by its lasting as the habitat of man. The man who receives the impression, in his turn, is endowed with an intellect both questioning and imaginative. . . .
In this experience of the cosmos, neither the impression nor the reception of reality is dully factual. It rather is alive with the meaning of a spiritual event, for the impression is revelatory of the divine mystery, while the reception responds to the revelatory component by cognition of faith.28
The impact of the diverses impressions bienheureuses left upon Marcel's/Proust's consciousness by the primary experience of cosmos (and its forgetting) lead to a Search for Lost Time in which Time has become (in Voegelin's lexicon) Proust's symbol for the experiences of meaning that happened to Marcel and that are resurrected with the impressions evoked by objects-fetishes.
Time is capitalized in order to distinguish it from the time that passes and leaves its residue of age; it is Time in its true nature that is lasting, for it is timeless. This Time of Proust appears analogous to Plato's time as the eikon of eternity.29
In addition to the symbols–metalepsis (participation), metaxy (the In-between), anamnesis (remembrance), and the primary experience of the cosmos–and the experiences that they articulate, two assertions by Voegelin have also guided my reading not only of Proust's novels, but of great novels in general.
These two assertions are: "All art, if it is any good, is some sort of myth in the sense that it becomes what I call a cosmion, a reflection of the unity of the cosmos as a whole"; and "The truth of the symbols is not informative; it is evocative."30 
[This is part 1 of 3 parts. Part 2 may be read HERE.]
Charles Embry is also editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984 and The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature.
NOTES
1. I have used in this essay the Modern Library edition In Search of Lost Time, translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1999). All references to In Search of Lost Time will be from this edition unless otherwise noted. Kilmartin, in his 1981 note on translation, writes that this translation is a
reworking, on the basis of the [1954] Pleiade [Gallimard's Bibliotheque de la Pleiade] of Scott Moncrieff's version of the first six sections of À la recherche dn temps perdu. . . . A post-Pleiade version of the final volume, Le temps retrouve (originally translated by Stephen Hudson after Scott Moncrieff's death in 1930), was produced by the late Andreas Mayor and published in 1970; with some minor emendations, it is incorporated in this edition.
In my work I have compared the Modern Library translation with a later translation (known as the Penguin Proust) by seven different translators under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast also entitled In Search of Lost Time. Lydia Davis, translator of volume 1, Swann's Way, wrote in "A Note on the Translation" that the translation was
conceived by the Penguin UK Modern Classics series in which the whole of In Search of Lost Time would be translated freshly on the basis of the latest and most authoritative French text, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadie ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1987). The translation would be done by a group of translators, each of whom would take on one of the seven volumes. . . .
I chose to translate the first volume, Du Cote du chez Swann. The other translators are James Grieve, for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; Mark Treharne, for The Guermantes Way; John Sturrock, for Sodom and Gomorrah; Carol Clark, for The Prisoner; Peter Collier, for The Fugitive; and lan Patterson, for Finding Time Again. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, translated with introduction and notes by Lydia Davis, New York: Viking Penguin, 2003, xxi.
The Penguin translations are a bit leaner and include some texts that were not translated in Moncrieff's original. Moreover, for important passages I also juxtaposed the two translations to the latest and generally agreed most authoritative French edition under the general direction of Jean-Yves Tadie, À la recherche du temps perdu ([Paris]: Editions Gallimard, 1999)..
2. Charles R. Embry, ed., Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984,157.
3. When I Googled "Marcel Proust and In Search of Lost Time" I got 90,600 hits. Googling just "Proust," I got approximately (so designated by the search engine) 2,000,000 hits. Of course, there are limitations to this type of survey, but nevertheless one sees from these figures the enormous interest that Proust and his novel has generated in the century since the publication of the first volume in 1908. Also, when I searched Proust as a subject in the Modern Language Association Bibliography, I got 3,873 entries that are presumably scholarly treatments of Proust in some fashion or other.
4. Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage, 1998), 31-32.
5. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), xvii.
6. Terence Kilmartin, revised by Joanna Kilmartin, "A Guide to Proust" in Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright, volume 6, In Search of Lost Time (New York: Modern Library), 543. Perhaps it is a good guide for beginning readers of Proust, but as I indicate below, I did not choose to take the route of prepping myself before I began to read (or even during the reading) of the novel.
7. These numbers should not be considered absolutely accurate, for when dealing with the length of the text and the large numbers of characters, persons, places, and themes, there are sure to be inevitable and inadvertent omissions. The number of principal characters is based upon my own reading. One might note for comparison that Heimito von Doderer's The Demons includes 142 characters with 31 designated as principal, in a two-volume, 1,329-page novel set in Vienna.
8. For example, Patrick Alexander, in Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide (self-published), thinks that there are fifty main characters. Incidentally, this work is an excellent book-length overview and summary of the novel itself.
9. A book entitled Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), has just recently been published.
10. At www.tempsperdu.com, under "Summarize Proust," I found the following: "Monty Python paid homage to Proust's novel in a sketch first broadcast on November 16th, 1972, called The All-England Summarize Proust Competition. The winner was the contestant who could best summarize À la recherche du temps perdu in fifteen seconds, 'once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress.'
Other 'academic' attempts have been made to summarize the novel in as few words as possible. Here are the winners (thus far): Gerard Genette in Figures HI: 'Marcel devient ecrivain' ('Marcel becomes a writer') [and tied for second] Vincent Descombes in Proust: philosophie du romain: 'Marcel deviant un grand ecrivain' ('Marcel becomes a great writer')." Thanks to the Internet, one can now watch the Monty Python spoof in its entirety.
11. Only on two occasions in volume 5 of the Modern Library edition does Proust supply the name of the narrator. In The Captive, we read: "Then she would find her tongue and say: 'My __' or 'My darling ___' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be 'My Marcel' or 'My darling Marcel'" (5:91). In a letter from Albertine, also in The Captive: "What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine" (5:203).
12. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (Gallimard, 1999), 2266. While "diverses impressions bienheureuses" is generally and widely translated as "various happy impressions," I prefer the more metaphysical or spiritual translation of "various blessed impressions," for these impressions are more than just happy. This translation, I think, is closer to both the nature of the experiences themselves and to the spirit of Proust's meditation in the final volume.
13.1 would even go so far as to surmise that Proust's novel had a significant, if unspecifiable (as in Michael Polanyi's "unspecifiable particulars of perception"), impact upon the development of Voegelin's work. That Voegelin was familiar with Proust's novel we know from multiple references to him in various places in The Collected Works.
In Autobiographical Reflections, he remembers that while he was in France during his Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the final volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu were being published (Albertine Disparue was published in 1925 and Le Temps Retrouve in 1927), that he acquired a complete set, and that "Proust, like Flaubert, was an inestimable source for enriching my French vocabulary." Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (hereinafter cited as CW) 34:63.
References to Proust also occur in a 1928 essay entitled "The Meaning of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789," in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1922-1928, ed. Thomas W. Heilke and John von Heyking (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), CW 7:323; in a 1930 lecture entitled "Max Weber," in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1929-1933, ed. Thomas W. Heilke and John von Heyking (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), CW 8:131; and in his 1967 Walter Turner Candler Lectures, "The Drama of Humanity," delivered at Emory University, in Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity and other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-1985, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), CW 33:183.
In a 1964 letter to his friend Robert Heilman, he drew a connection between Proust's symbols and myth. There he wrote: "Think for instance of Proust's temps perdu and temps retrouve as times which correspond to the loss and rediscovery of self, the action of rediscovery through a monumental literary work of remembrance being the atonement for the loss of time through personal guilt–very similar to Cosmological rituals of restoring order that has been lost through lapse of time." See Embry, Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin, 223.
Moreover, in 1977 he entitled a specially written chapter 1 for Gerhart Niemeyer's translation of Anamnesis. Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik, "In Remembrance of Things Past." See Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, translated and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978, 1990), 3-13. In that introductory essay, he writes that his "own horizon was strongly formed, and informed ... by the impact of Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and James Joyce" (5).
14. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume I, Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice P. Hogan (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), CW 14:39.
15. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, ed. David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), CW 6:37. This was first published in 1966 as Anamnesis. Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik.
16. "Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History," in Published Essays, 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), CW 12:119.
17. Hannah Arendt, writing about the twentieth-century novels, asserts that the modern novel "confronts . . . [the reader] with problems and perplexities in which the reader must be prepared to engage himself if he is to understand it at all." Arendt, introduction to Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap [1965]), v-vi.
18. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), CW 5:91-92.
19. Sandoz, introduction to Published Essays, 1966-1985, CW 12:xx.
20. Voegelin, CW 6:37
21. Ibid., 356.
22. Insofar as I can discern, he first uses the expression "primary experience of the cosmos" in The Ecumenic Age in the section on Existent and Nonexistent Reality. He also uses the phrase in two late essays, "What Is History?" and "Anxiety and Reason," which are found in What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), CW 28.
23. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982bll-982bl4, 692: "It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters . . . . And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth [philomythos] is in a sense a lover of Wisdom [philosophos], for the myth is composed of wonders)." Immanuel Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Quoted in William Barrett, Death of the Soul (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986), 90.
24. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 85, 84.
25. Ibid., 328; Voegelin, Order and History, Volume V, In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), CW 18:108.
26. This "fides of the Cosmos" is especially important in understanding Proust and points toward what Marcel lost when he lost Time. Marcel remembers: "I had lost my belief in the world and in people" and "the faith that creates."
27. Voegelin, "The Beginning and the Beyond," in What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), CW 28:175.
28. Ibid., 177. Emphasis added.
29. Plato, Timaeus, 37d.
30. Voegelin, "In Search of the Ground," in Published Essays, 1953-1965, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), CW 11:240; Voegelin, "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," in CW 12:344.
