Voegelinian Symbols, Principles, and Insights

Voegelin's late philosophical work with its meditative-anamnetic style and focus provides an excellent backdrop against which to read À la re­cherche du temps perdu.¹³ Even though it will be apparent to readers of both Voegelin and Proust that the meditative-anamnetic style of Voegelin's late philosophy supplies an excellent philosophical complement to Proust's novelistic-artistic style, it will be helpful for the reader if I briefly discuss several of Voegelin's more important symbol-insights.

Voegelin's philoso­phy centers around his historical discovery, or rather recovery, of the truth that reality–explored by man in search of the truth of his existence–has a quaternarian structure constituted of God, man, world, and society.

This discovery resulted from his researches into the history of humankind, first reported in Israel and Revelation, the first volume of his Order and History. The introduction to this volume, entitled "The Symbolization of Order," opens with the following paragraph:

God, man, world and society form a primordial community of be­ing. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.¹⁴

These historical findings were reinforced through the exploration of his own historical biography in a series of anamnetic experiments first conducted in 1943 during the time he was working on the first volumes of Order and His­tory. The exploration of the historical-biographical dimensions of his own consciousness operationalized and deepened the insights of earlier phi­losophers like Heraclitus ("I searched into myself") and Socrates ("Know thyself").

It is not surprising then that anamnesis became one of the central principles of his philosophy. In his book Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, he writes that "A philosophy of order is the process through which we find the order of our existence as human beings in the order of consciousness. Plato has let this philosophy be dominated by the symbol of 'Anamnesis,' remembrance."

"Remembering," he writes, "is the activity of consciousness by which the forgotten, i.e., the latent knowledge in con­sciousness, is raised from unconsciousness into the presence of conscious­ness."¹⁵ In the process, then, of searching for the truth of our existence and the order of our souls, we must remember what has been forgotten–both horizontally, back into the history of mankind, and vertically, down into the depths of our own souls.

This is an arduous task; Voegelin, as we have seen above, even thought that Proust's monumental novel was an expression of the penalty that must be paid for forgetting what should not be forgotten (and indeed never really was).

In 1970, Voegelin published an essay entitled "Equivalences of Experi­ence and Symbolization in History," in which he clarified his earlier and continuing work on his search of order with special reference to the con­stants in the historical experiences of human beings who search for the truth of their existence, the experiences that they undergo in this search, and the symbols that these experiences engender. He writes that

the flux of existence does not have the structure of order or, for that matter, of disorder, but the structure of a tension between truth and deformation of reality. Not the possession of his humanity but the concern about its full realization is the lot of man. Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension be­tween life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and im­perfection, time and timelessness.¹⁶

In the same essay, Voegelin asserts

To gain the understanding of his own humanity, and to order his life in the light of the insight gained, has been the written concern of man in history as far back as the written records go . . . . This field of experiences and symbols is neither an object to be observed from the outside, nor does it present the same appearance to everybody. It rather is the time dimension of existence, accessible only through participation in its reality.¹⁷

Following and amplifying Plato's work, Voegelin "locates" human con­sciousness in the metaxy; consciousness, paradoxically, is neither here (in the body) nor there (in physical reality outside the body), but instead is both here and there by virtue of its participation in both the inner spiri­tual world and the outer world of physical reality. It is in the metaxy that consciousness becomes conscious of itself as it experiences and thus par­ticipates in the spiritual dimension of reality, which he sometimes calls nonexistent or nonobjective reality, the invisible order that suffuses the visible-physical reality.