Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness —Pt 1
by Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.
________________
M'amour, m'amour
what do I love and
where are you? That I
lost my center
fighting the world. The
dreams clash
and are shattered— and
that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
—EZRA POUND, THE CANTOS
The human mind is so constructed that moral issues, if we are honest with ourselves, cannot be resolved. The conflicts between ideality and practice, between love and justice, are everlasting, at least in finite intelligence.
HAYDEN CARRUTH, "THE TIME OF FALLING APART"
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THE MOST EFFICIENT way to approach Ezra Pound's artistic struggle with the problem of transcendence will be to use Eric Voegelin's philosophy of human existence and history to analyze some of Pound's guiding ideas about divine reality, history, language, and political order, especially as they shape and inform his epic poem The Cantos. To a reader familiar with both Pound and Voegelin, this might seem an odd pairing, not least because Voegelin's philosophical achievement and outlook contrast so glaringly with the trajectory and incoherences in Pound's poetic vision and personal life. In fact, though, some of Voegelin's basic theoretical principles regarding divinity, consciousness, and history have their reflections in Pound's deepest convictions.
If it is true that Voegelin's exploration of these principles and their implications leads to a coherent philosophy and a sound political realism (with a complete rejection of totalitarian aims and principles), whereas Pound's thought and work deriving from them wind up an inconsistent mixture of compelling vision and appalling oversight (symptomized by his support of Mussolini's Fascist government), still the range of their agreement on fundamental insights testifies to a certain shared brilliance. Furthermore, it makes Voegelin's philosophy an exceptionally useful instrument for explaining why Pound's is a mangled greatness.1
The aspect of Voegelin's thought most helpful for a critical appreciation of Pound pertains to Voegelin's portrayal of human existence as conscious participation in the metaxy, the In-Between of reality. We have been emhasizing the basic, ontological sense of metaxy as existence in-between immanent world and transcendent mystery, time and timelessness, finite and nonfinite reality. However, the metaxy of human existence is also, we remember, a cognitional in-between, as all of our understanding and deciding occur in-between complete ignorance and complete knowledge; an affective in-between, living continually as we do in the tension between longing and satisfaction, hope and fulfillment; and a moral in-between, in that we struggle between imperfection and perfection.
All of these pairs of "poles" in-between which existence unfolds are implied in the statement that the metaxy is the place of human-divine encounter. To be human is to be aware of, and to be drawn in tension toward, that divine transcendence (nonfinite and timeless, perfect in goodness, knowledge, and love) in which we understand ourselves to participate. The in-between or metaxy of human existence, then, is summarily the in-between of human-divine encounter, where a person's search for the ground of meaning meets the transcendent origin that moves the person to search for it, in a constant revelation of both their identity and their differences. "The In-Between," as Voegelin puts it, is "... the meeting ground of the human and the divine in a consciousness of their distinction and interpenetration."2
In Cosmological consciousness, we recall, divine reality is conceived in ways that do not with full critical clarity penetrate beyond the horizon of spatio-temporal imagination. When in various cultures the insights and symbols are introduced that conceptually separate reality into divine transcendence and worldly immanence, they bring with them, as we have seen, enormous problems both for speculative thought and for the informing of cultural and political institutions whose role is to promote the human good in light of a full awareness of human purpose and destiny. Especially — it cannot be emphasized enough— transcendence is misconceived as a faraway place or superpowerful entity. This in turn provokes the counter misconception that because there is indeed no such faraway place or superpowerful entity, the symbol transcendence must refer not to fact but to nonsense, to nothing at all.
To counter such misconceptions, Voegelin devotes many pages to the experiential origins of insights into transcendence, returning time and again to the crucial point that the terms transcendence and immanence do not refer to places or worlds or entities but are rather explanatory notations or "linguistic indices" that denote the structural elements of the In-Between of consciousness. The elements and the relationship indicated by the terms are essentially abstract, deriving from consciousness discovering the ontological conditions of its own questioning and intending. Such symbols are misunderstood when taken descriptively as referring to imaginable objects or places; as Voegelin emphasizes, they "are exegetic, not descriptive."3
However misunderstood, and however popular the misunderstandings, the differentiation between immanent world and transcendent ground is well established in cultural and linguistic horizons both East and West. And everywhere it poses the same challenge to people who must make sense of their existences in light of this differentiation: the challenge of not letting the discovery of transcendence cause one to lose one's balance in relation to the immanent and transcendent "poles" of reality. I have already, toward the end of the fourth chapter, mentioned Voegelin's diagnostic notion of "balanced consciousness." The "balance of consciousness" consists in not letting the discovery of transcendent meaning draw one into either (1) degrading immanent reality in light of the more perfect being of transcendence or (2) denying the fact or the implications of transcendence.
This balance of consciousness is not easy to maintain, as it requires admitting the permanent imperfection of finite existence — including all of our efforts to realize justice, order, and beauty in our lives — in relation to a perfection or fulfillment that is "beyond" all that we can know or imagine; at the same time it requires that we not despair of the meaningfulness of our efforts, as we seek to attune imperfect reality as best we can — through rational discernment, careful judgment, attentiveness to conscience, love, meditation, prayer — to permanently transcendent standards. One grows weary of this existential tension. Thus one is led to despise or ignore the world in favor of a perfection imagined to be elsewhere or later, or one impatiently seeks the realization of perfection in the here and now. In either case, the balance of consciousness is lost, and the vision of human existence as a movement in the In-Between of imperfection and perfection, of time and timelessness, of human and divine, is eclipsed and replaced by an image less troubling and mysterious.
Before turning to Pound's work, let us clarify and expand upon the relevant elements in Voegelin's analysis, bringing together a number of points made in previous chapters. First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning, which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, affirm it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it. Ancient peoples experienced this presence as "the gods," manifest entities encountered in the forces and regularities of the natural universe; increasing clarity about the transcendence of divine presence gradually "dedivinized" nature, and forced the resymbolization of the divine as a presence simultaneously more recondite (in not being perceivable by the physical senses) and more universal (in being everywhere and, of course, nowhere).
It should be stressed that this dedivinization of nature that accompanied waning belief in the Cosmological gods involved an emotional or experiential, but not a philosophical, removal of divine presence from finite reality. Indeed, the logic of the discovery of transcendence even more thoroughly irradiates both consciousness and nature with divine presence, because that presence is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth. Human beings, then, always "remain in the 'in between,' in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present. This flow [of divine presence] cannot be dissected into a past, a present, and a future of world-time, for at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time."4
Second, we recall the consequence of this for a proper understanding of history. History as it is generally conceived, as a linear course of events unfolding through time, is a jejune simplification that ignores the fact of timeless presence. The essential data of history, the significant events and patterns of events worth remembering, include, above all, human struggles to attune social and personal life to timeless divine truth; of particular significance are the breakthroughs in that struggle on occasions of the discovery of transcendence.
History, then, takes its meaning first of all from the epochal events of divine-human encounter — one might list the names of Lao-tzu, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Plato, and Mohammed — that have ramified over centuries and millennia into personal lives and into the fields of social and political institutions and relations. Also, the fact of timeless presence means that history is not something that is merely "past." History is a "web of meaning" in which all humanity is implicated through the common flow of divine presence, and in which humans at all times and places are linked in a contemporaneity through participation in and orientation toward timeless meaning.5
History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes in human communities, progress oscillating with decline in a historical process whose ultimate meaning and outcome remain a mystery.
This understanding of history in turn implies that a respect for tradition and earlier wisdom, a willingness to explore and preserve the insights and achievements of our predecessors, is a central civilizing impulse, insofar as we must use it to take our bearings in relation both to our position in history and to our situation in the In-Between of existence. Of course, the intellectual, artistic, political, and spiritual achievements of earlier persons and cultures found expression in symbolic forms peculiar to their times and places. However, the ultimate human contemporaneity in the struggle for attunement, grounded in our common participation in timeless meaning, assures us that the recovery of the meanings of those symbolic expressions of various types of truth is possible and worthwhile — and even necessary, if we are to respond with utmost effectiveness to the civilizational challenges of our own place and time, because the best of our cultural inheritance articulates the high points of insight into the human struggle for meaningful existence in the In-Between.
A final implication of Voegelin's analysis concerns the origins of true order in political and social life. Society becomes well ordered, that analysis reveals, only through the insights, decisions, and influence of individuals who have attained a clear understanding of what is possible and worthwhile in human affairs. Such individuals find their evaluative standards in the transcendent perfection that they accept as the measure of their own actions and goals. Thus, true order may be said to flow into society through the wisdom of individuals attuned to transcendent truths. This, of course, is the principle reflected in Plato's account of the philosopher-king in the
Republic, which, Voegelin reminds us, is not so much an argument for or against specific types of government as it is an exposition of the insight that order or disorder in society reflects the order or disorder in the souls of its leaders, and of the fact that the wise are few and the foolish many
story. 
NOTES
1. We will not address here the vexed topics of Pound's trial for treasonous broadcasts during the Second World War; his notorious, at times rabid, anti-Semitism; or his mental instability and incarceration at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. For a plausible psychological sketch exploring how Pound's famous generosity, his aesthetic principles, his economic views, his anti-Semitism, and his political stance during the war may have been linked in his imagination, see Lewis Hyde, "Ezra Pound and the Fate of Vegetable Money," chap. 10 in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 216-72.
2. Voegelin, "On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 233. On the human-divine metaxy as situated between various sets of "poles," and on Voegelin's warning that these "poles" in-between which consciousness moves must not be misconceived as objects independent of the tension within which they are experienced, see esp. Voegelin, "Equivalences of Experience," 119-23, and "Reason: The Classic Experience," 279-82, both in Published Essays, 1966-1985; and "Eternal Being in Time," 320-33, and "What Is Political Reality?" 373-81, both in Anamnesis. Voegelin is aware that this analysis results in the term human becoming fundamentally ambiguous, insofar as it must refer both to the finite creature who apprehends himself or herself as distinct from the ground of being and to the "in-between" where immanence and transcendence, "world" and "divine," interpenetrate. This ambiguity of the term human is inevitable, deriving as it does from the paradox of consciousness as participation in the divine ground, as the experienced simultaneity of human nonidentity and identity with the ground of being. Voegelin suggests that we may keep the two meanings of the term human clear by distinguishing between human consciousness as (1) the time-bound, finite "sensorium" of experience and (2) the "site" of the experienced interpénétration of immanence and transcendence: "[W]hen man discovers his existence in tension, he becomes conscious of his consciousness as both the site and the sensorium of participation in the divine ground. As far as consciousness is the site of participation, its reality partakes of both the divine and the human without being wholly the one or the other; as far as it is the sensorium of participation, it is definitely man's own, located in his body in spatiotemporal existence. Consciousness, thus, is both the time pole of the tension (sensorium) and the whole tension including its pole of the timeless (site)" ("Immortality: Experience and Symbol," in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 90).
3. Voegelin, "Beginning and Beyond," in What Is History? 185.
4. Voegelin, "Eternal Being in Time," in Anamnesis, 329.
5. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 106. pp127-133
