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Reaching for A Bridge Between Consciousness and Reality: The Languages of Eric Voegelin

1. I Have No Choice

In a letter sent to Alfred Schütz on January 1, 1953, Eric Voegelin raised the following question regarding the parable of the cave in Plato’s Republic: “Who compels that man to undertake the conversion, the perioagoge?” And he added the comment: “You have here the problem of grace, on the Platonic level of a transposition into a parable or a myth.” The “compulsion” in the cave essentially is, in Voegelin’s view, the same act of intervening as the one that Christianity knows, by the terms “revelation” or “grace,” for an “effectively experienced ingression of transcendence into human life.” “As a theorist of politics,” Voegelin continued, “I have no choice,” for questions of this kind – “Who compels that man to undertake the conversion, the perioagoge?” – present themselves in the “historical material”: “Therefore I have to study them.”

The “material” is the judge, and certainly not the researcher. This, for Voegelin, was the supreme principle of all research. The researcher must be open towards everything in the mode of “experience” – the experience made, and the experience made conscious in the mode of articulation (that is the “material”). For he or she conveys to “consciousness,” through his openness, “reality,” namely the “reality” that manifests itself in the given experience, and be this the experience of an “ingression of transcendence into human life”. The “consciousness” of the researcher (or, to be precise, of any human being) has to build itself up, with regard to its formation, along “experiences,” that is along those experiences of reality from where it gains its own reality, as the consciousness that the researcher perceives (his or her consciousness). In another letter to Alfred Schütz, dated from September 17, 1945, Voegelin pushed the logic of this methodological approach still further in asserting: “Ideas, and in particular political ideas, do not represent theoretical propositions concerning reality, but are themselves components of this reality.”

Did Voegelin then assimilate “reality” and “consciousness”? No. For him the radicalism of his thinking always was a method and not an objective. He strove to see the problems that confronted him as clearly and as justly as possible. Ideas are components of reality. That’s what he thought. But they are perceived of course by consciousness only (at least in human experience). There is indeed a difference between, on one side, “consciousness” as the field – field within reality – where all that of reality is perceived which experiences transmit, and, on the other, the “reality” from where experiences emerge and to which they relate. It is this difference – or rather this movement unto knowing through which, within reality, the two spheres, namely “reality” and consciousness, are differentiated in a process of encounters – that constitutes the fundamental problem to which Voegelin gave all his thought.

Voegelin’s endeavors to fathom and to formulate the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness will be considered here at their decisive moments in Voegelin’s pursuit of his opus. The consideration therefore will be based on the following writings: Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, Plato and Aristotle, The Ecumenic Age, The Beginning and the Beyond, and The Beginning of the Beginning. The writing of The Ecumenic Age will be seen to be a major step: Voegelin then began progressively to differentiate his language concerning the two notions of “reality” and “consciousness”. In fact, language itself, as the field of the dynamics between consciousness and reality, became for him a central theme. In The Beginning of the Beginning he added to the notions of “reality” and “consciousness” the notion of “language” as a third notion in one and the same “complex”. It is through language, he maintained, that reality begins to speak to consciousness, to the consciousness that in response arises and takes form. The question concerning a knowing of reality then became the question concerning the way to enter into the “story” that reality is. In his quest for a sufficient theory of consciousness, the veritable acme of his theory of politics, Voegelin found himself compelled to develop a commensurable theory of language.

2. The Collective Unconscious: A “Widening of the Problem which at the Moment I Wish to Keep Away From”

The approach chosen for this consideration is strictly phenomenological. The intention is not to produce a description and general analysis of the problem concerning the notions of “reality” and “consciousness” in the thought of Voegelin.  The purpose rather is to discern the languages – and note the plural – Voegelin employed to perceive, to understand and to explain the movement unto knowing between consciousness and reality. Over the years Voegelin developed a whole particular vocabulary, and formed by means of that vocabulary a succession of languages to articulate his thought, in the best possible way, as it evolved. This vocabulary and these languages can be identified, phenomenologically, as to their constituent parts and their respective architecture. It is such a phenomenological identification that we propose to present here.

Voegelin undertook late in the pursuit of his thought the development of the vocabulary of which we speak. In 1958 still, in his epistolary dialogue with Alfred Schütz, he showed himself inclined to use for his own thinking about the problem of “consciousness” and “reality” a concept which he himself had not worked out. This was the concept of the “collective unconscious” introduced by Carl Gustav Jung. The Jungian term and also, and above all, the general term of the “Unconscious” had been, it seems, for a number of years, notions of theoretical value in the dialogue between Schütz and Voegelin. For instance, in a letter to Schütz dated from October 6, 1945, Voegelin alluded to the “excellent remarks” made by his friend on the “Unconscious in psychoanalysis”. By all evidence, Voegelin at that time was interested in the concept of the “Unconscious”. Why? Voegelin’s allusion to the “excellent remarks” of his friend is preceded in that letter by a long passage on the “analogy” (an analogy, by the way, of which Voegelin unhesitatingly states that it is really an “empirical fact”) between the “cosmic order” and the “sphere of political signification”. In Voegelin’s view, a “sphere of political signification” – the symbolic-mythical order by which the meaning of a human society is articulated and represented – reconstitutes the cosmic order in the realm of that society. It forms, he explained, a veritable “cosmic analogy”.

What is interesting for us is the vocabulary that Voegelin employed to describe the social and existential effect of the constitution of the “cosmic analogy” (which, in his letter, he also called “cosmion”). For this constitution, he said, creates a “quasi-nature” in the types of actions and institutions that people with its occurrence adopt. There will be a “preformed structure of the everyday world” which people will take “unquestioningly”. “At a specific place and at a specific moment in the course of history,” Voegelin wrote, “the political actor just finds himself born, floating in a river.” It appears quite logical that Voegelin made in his letter to Schütz, immediately after he has articulated himself in such a language, the allusion to the “excellent remarks” of his friend on the “Unconscious in psychoanalysis”.

Indeed, with the “Unconscious,” in particular as Carl Gustav Jung understood it, reality is present in the working of one’s mind without the latter being aware of it. For the unconscious, in Jung’s view, is common to all humanity. It comprises impersonal elements in the psyche of every human individual in the way of collective representations of past experiences, the history of which is identical with the total of human history. Therefore Jung also specifically used the term “collective unconscious”. He meant to denote by it the inborn and, historically and socially, universal nature of the unconscious. Human beings partake of it through their humanity; they share, in the mode of their experiences – in their dreams, their literary and artistic creativity, for instance – a sense of things with which they are all born. Jung’s notion of the collective unconsciousness, then, suggests a powerful, if not compelling formative force in the human mind. It pre-structures one’s life, in the personal as in the social dimension.

As the words of Voegelin just cited (“quasi-nature,” “preformed structure,” “empirical fact”) clearly indicate, the “Unconscious,” as understood by him at that time, owns a solid presence. Humans do float in the river; they do not need to look for it, to be concerned with the starting point and the point of arrival in their search for reality: it is the “Unconscious” that is their guide or, rather, in the Jungian and hence still more reified figuration, the “Collective Unconscious”.

In 1958, though, Schütz protested: “It is particularly difficult for me to follow you, when you try to make fast in the Unconscious the symbols that embody the experience of transcendence, in speaking even, sometimes, as Jung or Kerényi would do, of the Collective Unconscious.” In his response, Voegelin did not reject the criticism of his friend. Quite the contrary. He agreed and extended at once the field of inquiry, as he always did in scholarly conversations. Evidently the problem discussed between the two friends – the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness – presented itself in a context of reflection and study which was so extensive and complex that Voegelin – even Voegelin – receded in face of the immensity of the problem: “Concerning the difficulty posed by the `Unconscious´ you are right, perfectly so. However, if one needs this hypothesis as you call it (and I agree with you), one has to replace it, nevertheless, by another one: the one given by the variations of a manifestation of divinity in the soul . . . , as by the `logos´ of Revelation, for instance, or the `ratio´ of philosophy, or, probably, a whole series of others . . . . But then we have to deal with a widening of the problem which at the moment I wish to keep away from.”

3. The Tree of Speculation that Grows from the Heavenly Root

When he gave Alfred Schütz this answer, Voegelin was about to perform the great rupture through which he radically reoriented his work. He abandoned the project of writing a “History of Political Ideas,” and made that totally new start in the articulation of his thought that led to Order and History, his magnum opus, of which the three first volumes appeared in 1956 and 1957 respectively. With this epoch in his work Voegelin began, of course, to approach the problem of “reality” and “consciousness” differently too. He changed his language concerning the problem. In fact, he exerted his considerable culture in matters of language to develop a language of movement with the help of which the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness could be seized and articulated in the mode of a perfect correspondence. The idea seemed to be judicious and enticing. A linguistic movement would enter the movement unto knowing, follow it and produce there an equivalent language. This would lead to a language of movement through which the movement unto knowing could attain a state of direct evidence and transparency to a degree that, in the mode of language, “reality” would immediately be translated into “consciousness”.

In looking at the introduction to Israel and Revelation we can observe the first steps towards the accomplishment of this project. In speaking there, in exegetic terms, of man’s condition of existence and of reality’s nature, Voegelin attributed to both a state of movement. “Man,” he said, “is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being.” The nature of reality is movement and therefore the expression “drama” is the adequate term to denote the existential situation in which man is placed. And as to man the same type of language – a language translating movement – is to be applied: there is this “actor” in the “drama of being” and there is this “part” which he “plays” in it. All is movement, and the consciousness which man acquires concerning reality then forms itself in a process of movement. It is this process that Voegelin named by the word “participation”. And let us recall that “participation” is the central term in this first volume of Order and History, as it is in the four volumes that followed. Man (the actor placed in a movement) is making experiences of reality (of the drama that is all movement) that represent, at each time an experience occurs, an experience of movement (“an experience of participation”). All is movement. Consequently, whatever man can seize in the movement unto knowing between the reality that is the objective of his quest for knowing and the consciousness that reveals itself to him in this quest, will be an “experience of participation”. In Order and History, Voegelin sought to explore such an experience: its architecture, its elements, its dynamics. In his view, this is the only thing man really can know.

One could conjecture that the logic of Voegelin’s thought derives from the language of his interpretation. If to reality and, within that, to man, so one could say, notions are applied which represent both, man and reality, in a state of movement, then they both appear of course in such a state of movement. An objection of this kind could not be refuted, except in the case of an experience, which by its absolute quality as a fact or an empirical event is irrefutable. And, indeed, from there precisely Voegelin’s logic started. He always assumed a predominance of experience and therefore the fact of a thought under guidance. In the cave of Plato’s myth man is compelled (Voegelin’s term!) to turn around, and to orientate himself towards the opening above. There is the fact of an experience being made, and it is an experience, notably, of an intervention. A movement occurs, the turning around (periagogē), and there is the movement (who “compels” that man?) that incites a movement (to undertake the periagogē). It is quite logical, Voegelin thought, to turn towards that movement (the one that “compels”), to follow it and to explore what seems to reveal itself in it. To understand and to interpret the dynamics between reality and consciousness surely is a question of language. But it is first of all a question of openness towards a revelation of reality, that is, a revelation by which the fact of an experience is forming itself. The revelation of reality constitutes the primary event; subsequent to that comes the interpretation: the reception rendered by man to the revelation in a language.

But the expression “in a language” is still too imprecise. We have said that Voegelin had, for the articulation of experiences, an equivalent language in mind. To formulate this or that experience one always needs, in his view, the language that accords as perfectly as possible with the subject of the experience made. In The World of the Polis he gave an exemplary demonstration of this idea.  For the purpose of presenting there his interpretation of the primary experience that constitutes a revelation of reality in human experience, he chose a mystic-poetical language: “That which comes into grasp through the Nous does not come into grasp in the manner of an object for discourse. The progress on the way toward the light culminates in an experience of a supreme reality that can only be expressed in the exclamatory `Is!´” (Voegelin refers here to Parmenides). Philosophy, strictly speaking, is “the tree of speculation that grows from the heavenly root.”

In its state of highest intensity, a revelation of reality halts for a moment the process of movement (the “participation,” in Voegelin’s language) through which man acquires a consciousness of reality and within which this consciousness takes form. The experience of supreme reality is made, as the Parmenidean “Is” shows, in the mode of an enrapturing vision; it is entirely absorbing. Human consciousness of reality is filled with reality; from being an event of movement, consciousness has changed into the event of coalescence. In this stupendous moment, there is reality, in and by itself, and there is not any difference, in that moment, between reality’s presence and the consciousness of man making the experience of that presence. The exclamation of Parmenides forms in this regard an expression in perfect correspondence with reality and the experience made by man: it is perfectly logical that Voegelin took it up for his own work of interpretation.

But the participation – the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness – is a process guided by two impulses. The man in the cave in Plato’s myth is instigated to turn around. However, he did make the motion of turning around also by himself, and then he undertook a movement upwards, attracted by the shining of light coming from above. There is, Voegelin said in The World of the Polis, a “force in the soul” which “urges the thinker on,” a force he later calls, in the language of philosophy, the “Eros of the philosopher”. “Man is an actor playing a part in the drama of being,” Voegelin stated. Yes, but how can man know this drama and the role in it that is his? He will know it through his “soul” or his “psyche” or his “consciousness,” three equivalent terms in Voegelin’s vocabulary. It is by his soul that man hears the call of reality: the appeal to him, that it issues, to take from it his directions and to make it the subject of his existential quest. And it is by his soul that man catches that impulse that incites him to go on in a pursuit of knowledge and thus to respond to the call he heard.

When Voegelin wrote the third volume of Order and History, Plato and Aristotle, it was not any more the “actor playing a part in the drama of being” upon whom all his attention was concentrated but rather the analysis of the soul. He wished to study that “element of seeking” in man – the zetesis, in the language of Plato, a term Voegelin appropriated for his own vocabulary – through which grows in man his soul. “The illuminating inquiry, the zetema, is not carried from the outside to the initial experience, as if it were a dead subject matter, but the element of seeking (zetesis) is present in the experience and blossoms out into the inquiry.” Man in quest of reality encounters reality in his experience of participation. It is therefore this experience of the responsive soul in the encounter with reality which man has to study above all. For his soul, in responding to reality, becomes the soul that is response: open to reality, it is growing unto itself. This soul makes man discover in his own existence the movement of reality, the “logos” that he seeks. Voegelin observed: “We still can hear behind Plato the Heraclitus who could simply say: `I explored (edizesamen) myself´ (B 101); and who could compress the result of the inquiry, the growth of the soul into its own stature, into the sentence: `To the soul is peculiar a Logos that augments itself´ (B 115).”

4. Structures and Directions

The third volume of Order and History, Plato and Aristotle, was published in 1957. It was in 1974 only, hence seventeen years later, that the series of Order and History was continued, with the publication of a fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age.  With this work Voegelin continued and at the same time did not continue his “history” of “symbolisms,” the symbolisms he said would express and represent, one after the other, and along side one another, the experience humans have made of their participation in the process of reality. In the first three volumes of Order and History Voegelin had assumed a reality of a history of symbolisms extending along linear time in which philosophy, for example, succeeded mytho-cosmological thought and replaced it. In The Ecumenic Age Voegelin revoked this assumption and introduced instead the idea of a “field” of symbolisms within which those symbolisms, while being phenomena in the dimension of time, intersect with each other, evolve along parallel courses, disappear and reappear. All of Voegelin’s thought was rethought by Voegelin, the author of The Ecumenic Age, in a language which is entirely renewed too, in particular with regard to our topic: the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness.

In examining this “new” language one will be struck, at first sight, by two things: (1) First of all, Voegelin practically ceased to adopt notions and expressions coined by others (by Plato, for instance), and when he does adopt one, it is clearly used in an auxiliary function only. (2) Second, his vocabulary, from which poetical or mystical notions were now removed, had resolutely become technical. There appear instead key analytic terms like those emphasized in the following phrases: structures of meaning, meaningful structures in history, plurality of centers of meaning, field of history, pluralistic field of spiritual outbursts, structure of experiencing consciousness, direction in which divine reality is experienced, movement toward the Beyond, patterns of meaning, web of meaning, plurality of nodal points.

With The Ecumenic Age Voegelin performed a linguistic leap. This new technical vocabulary structured Voegelin’s reflections not only in The Ecumenic Age but also in his later writings, notably in the fifth and last volume of Order and History, In Search of Order. In fact, this vocabulary made up the architecture of all of Voegelin’s thought, from The Ecumenic Age onwards until his death. Voegelin’s decision to change his language must have been motivated by a fundamental reason. However, while he spoke at length, in the introduction to The Ecumenic Age, about the shift from the idea of a diachronical succession of symbolisms to the new idea of a synchronic plurality of symbolisms, Voegelin said nothing at all about the fact that this perception rested on the architecture of a new language, nor did he say anything about the reason or, rather, the reasons for the development of this new language.

Yet, a choice had been made, deliberately. We know it through a letter Voegelin wrote, in July 1960, to Donald R. Ellegood, director of Louisiana State University Press and publisher of the three first volumes of Order and History, who was still waiting for the next volume in the series. In this letter Voegelin reported, first, on the methodological problems that had impeded the continuation of Order and History, and, then, on the event – the `miraculous´ event, we could say – that had unblocked the opus.

Voegelin maintained that he had discovered, in his field of studies, the equivalent of the theory of relativity, and he alluded of course to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that had revolutionized the fields of physics and astronomy. Instead of an unilinear succession of symbolic orders, (the absolutizing principle of composition for the first three volumes, a principle the “material” increasingly resisted), and of precedent philosophies of history assuming such a unlinear succession (like those of Voltaire, Comte or Hegel), Voegelin had now before him a field of study comparable to the relativistic space of physicists and astronomers, within which time is not an absolute factor, but one related to space (as space is related to time).

Suddenly, it became clear how the opus could be taken up again, both in terms of material and the language: the “order” of the “field” to be ascertained is comprised of lines, nodal points, structures, directions, and movements that emerge from the material composing the field and that show themselves to the observing scholar. The language through which this order has to be seized is the language that these lines, nodal points, structures, directions, and movements indicate precisely by themselves. Voegelin, the physicist, as it were, of the cosmos of human thought, took up a stance of detachment and coolly reported what he saw: “The `thing´ that is called man discovers itself as having consciousness; and as a consequence, it discovers man’s consciousness as the area of reality in which the process ofreality becomes luminous to itself. Moreover, as the field of noetic consciousness unfolds in time through a succession of thinkers, the field itself comes to be recognized as belonging to the structure of reality” (author’s emphasis).

5. The Language in Which Experience Becomes Articulate

In Voegelin’s thought there appeared from now on, alongside consciousness and reality, a third great subject: language. Naturally, as a result of his discovery of the “field” of symbolic orders, notions corresponding to this field – like “structure,” “space,” “movement” and the others we have enumerated – came to the fore. These notions formed the nucleus of the new language and also charted the path to be taken to explore human experience – that “area of reality where the revelatory appeal from the divine side meets with the questioning response from the human side” – in the mode of a search for the language by which human experience, in all its breadth and dimensions, “becomes articulate”.

There was the need to follow, Voegelin explained in The Beginning and the Beyond, the “movements of the soul,” when it explores, in the conscious act of participation, the experience of divine reality and “tries to find the language that will articulate its exegetic movements.” In The Beginning of the Beginning, he put forth the problem again: “What is this structure in reality that will induce, when experienced, this use of the term `language´?” For, in Voegelin’s way, a language that could be applied to the “movement” between “appeal” and “response” did not actually exist. And the difficulty of finding an adequate language was all the more acute in the 20th century, as this was a time without generally accepted models of discourse in which to pose the linguistic problems that Voegelin had identified.

The linguistic work to be done required a fundamental search for a truly new language. It had to begin with a true beginning. A certain number of principles for the inquiry’s course needed to be made explicit. Voegelin formulated three. (1) The language to be found will be that language – and indeed that only – which emerges from an actual process of participation. (2) Its terms will be exegetic and not descriptive. (3) It will not fully express the reality of things, if it is made only of terms of the world and its time.

In the process of participation, the soul explores the experience of divine reality. Consequently, the conclusion has to be drawn that the language which man seeks to articulate his experience of divine reality “is itself perhaps not altogether of this world.” In the process of participation man apprehends what is revealed to him, and, by this revelation, he comprehends the divine terms of reality. Then, man understands that “reality is a story spoken in the creative language of God” – a formulation that is as extraordinary as it is apparently conclusive.

The encounter of consciousness and reality happens on the “bridge” of language. Surely, when, in the twilight of his life, Voegelin wrote The Beginning and the Beyond and The Beginning of the Beginning, he did not recede any more in face of the immensity of the problem presented by the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness. For he knew now that this movement essentially is a movement of language. A human response to the divine appeal (that is the appeal to open oneself to reality) is possible, in a conscious and articulate way, because man can seize the appeal through a distinct language. This is the language that he apprehends by reality when the latter, in the event of an appeal and a response, reveals itself.  In The Beginning and the Beyond, Voegelin asserts, “The language of noetic philosophy is the language that emerges from the response to the divine movement”. And in The Beginning of the Beginning, he writes, “The language symbols [by which the experiences of participation are expressed] unfold as part of the unfolding truth of reality.”

Voegelin’s assertion that “reality is a story spoken in the creative language of God” seems to have the status of a conclusion. But this is not the case. For the “field” – the whole field of human experiences made and articulated, the very subject of Voegelin’s opus – opens itself again through the assertion. In fact, that field had become both wider and structured in a new way by the discovery that language, alongside consciousness and reality, is the third component of one and the same “complex,” and the decisive component, besides, in many regards. Reality is an event in and through language.  And consciousness forms itself by participating in this event. (Human) languages, however, do not suffice to penetrate Reality.

At this stage of his opus Voegelin continued to use parts of the different languages that he had adopted in the course of the development of his work, notably the notions relative to the “field” and its “structures”. But from now on he concentrated his quest upon language itself in the mode of being the language of the event. He wished to understand, as The Beginning of the Beginning shows, how a tale begins, how it is structured, how it has to be received to know its truth. A firm linguistic empiricism became the expression of his desire to seize the truth of reality, that is, the “divine movement”.

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Tilo Schabert is a Board Member of VoegelinView and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg. He is the author of several books, with the latest being How World Politics is Made (Missouri, 2009) and The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence (Chicago, 2015).

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