Why Do We Need Philosophy?

God and 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.

The perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality. It does not mean that man, more or less comfortably located in the landscape of being, can look around and take stock of what he sees as far as he can see it. Such a metaphor, or comparable variations on the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, would destroy the paradoxical character of the situation.

It would suggest a self-contained spectator, in possession of and with knowledge of his faculties, at the center of a horizon of being, even though the horizon were restricted. But man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is.

It is disconcerting even when a man accidentally finds himself in the situation of feeling not quite sure what the game is and how he should conduct himself in order not to spoil it; but with luck and skill he will extricate himself from the embarrassment and return to the less bewildering routine of his life.

Participation in being, however, is not a partial involvement of man; he is engaged with the whole of his existence, for participation is existence itself. There is no vantage point outside existence from which its meaning can be viewed and a course of action charted according to a plan, nor is there a blessed island to which man can withdraw in order to recapture his self. The role of existence must be played in uncertainty of its meaning, as an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and necessity.

Both the play and the role are unknown. But even worse, the actor does not know with certainty who he is himself. At this point the metaphor of the play may lead astray unless it is used with caution. To be sure, the metaphor is justified, and perhaps even necessary, for it conveys the insight that man’s participation in being is not blind but is illuminated by consciousness.

There is an experience of participation, a reflective tension in existence, radiating sense over the proposition: Man, in his existence, participates in being. This sense, however, will turn into nonsense if one forgets that subject and predicate in the proposition are terms that explicate a tension of existence and are not concepts denoting objects.

Man is Unknown to Himself

There is no such thing as a “man” who participates in “being” as if it were an enterprise that he could as well leave alone; there is, rather, a “something,” a part of being, capable of experiencing itself as such, and furthermore capable of using language and calling this experiencing consciousness by the name of “man.” The calling by a name certainly is a fundamental act of evocation, of calling forth, of constituting that part of being as a distinguishable partner in the community of being.

Nevertheless, fundamental as the act of evocation is–for it forms the basis for all that man will learn about himself in the course of history–it is not itself an act of cognition. The Socratic irony of ignorance has become the paradigmatic instance of awareness for this blind spot at the center of all human knowledge about man. At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole.

Man’s partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole, of which existence is a part. Knowledge of the whole, however, is precluded by the identity of the knower with the partner, and ignorance of the whole precludes essential knowledge of the part. This situation of ignorance with regard to the decisive core of existence is more than disconcerting: It is profoundly disturbing, for from the depth of this ultimate ignorance wells up the anxiety of existence.

The ultimate, essential ignorance is not complete ignorance. Man can achieve considerable knowledge about the order of being, and not the least part of that knowledge is the distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. Such achievement, however, comes late in the long drawn-out process of experience and symbolization that forms the subject matter of the present study.

The concern of man about the meaning of his existence in the field of being does not remain pent up in the tortures of anxiety but can vent itself in the creation of symbols purporting to render intelligible the relations and tensions between the distinguishable terms of the field.

In the early phases of the creative process the acts of symbolization are still badly handicapped by the bewildering multitude of unexplored facts and unsolved problems. Not much is really clear beyond the experience of participation and the quaternarian structure of the field of being, and such partial clearness tends to generate confusion rather than order, as is bound to happen when variegated materials are classified under too few heads. Nevertheless, even in the confusion of these early stages there is enough method to allow the distinction of typical features in the process of symbolization.

Participation in Being

The first of these typical features is the predominance of the experience of participation. Whatever man may be, he knows himself a part of being. The great stream of being, in which he flows while it flows through him, is the same stream to which belongs everything else that drifts into his perspective. The community of being is experienced with such intimacy that the Consubstantiality of the partners will override the separateness of substances.

We move in a charmed community where everything that meets us has force and will and feelings, where animals and plants can be men and gods, where men can be divine and gods are kings, where the feathery morning sky is the falcon Horus and the Sun and Moon are his eyes, where the underground sameness of being is a conductor for magic currents of good or evil force that will subterraneously reach the superficially unreachable partner, where things are the same and not the same, and can change into each other.

The second typical feature is the preoccupation with the lasting and passing (i.e., the durability and transiency) of the partners in the community of being. Consubstantiality notwithstanding, there is the experience of separate existence in the stream of being, and the various existences are distinguished by their degrees of durability.

One man lasts while others pass away, and he passes away while others last on. All human beings are outlasted by the society of which they are members, and societies pass while the world lasts. And the world not only is outlasted by the gods but is perhaps even created by them. Under this aspect, being exhibits the lineaments of a hierarchy of existence, from the ephemeral lowliness of man to the everlastingness of the gods.

The experience of hierarchy furnishes an important piece of knowledge about order in being, and this knowledge in its turn can, and does, become a force in ordering the existence of man. For the more lasting existences, being the more comprehensive ones, provide by their structure the frame into which the lesser existence must fit, unless it is willing to pay the price of extinction.

A first ray of meaning falls on the role of man in the drama of being insofar as the success of the actor depends upon his attunement to the more lasting and comprehensive orders of society, the world, and God. This attunement, however, is more than an external adjustment to the exigencies of existence, more than a planned fitting into an order “about” which we know.

“Attunement” suggests the penetration of the adjustment to the level of participation in being. What lasts and passes, to be sure, is existence, but since existence is partnership in being, lasting and passing reveal something of being. Human existence is of short duration, but the being of which it partakes does not cease with existence.

Revealing Something of the Mystery

In existing we experience mortality; in being we experience what can be symbolized only by the negative metaphor of immortality. In our distinguishable separateness as existents we experience death; in our partnership in being we experience life. But here again we reach the limits that are set by the perspective of participation, for lasting and passing are properties of being and existence as they appear to us in the perspective of our existence; as soon as we try to objectify them we lose even what we have.

If we try to explore the mystery of passing as if death were a thing, we shall not find anything but the nothing that makes us shudder with anxiety from the bottom of existence. If we try to explore the mystery of lasting as if life were a thing, we shall not find life eternal but lose ourselves in the imagery of immortal gods, of paradisiacal or Olympian existence.

From the attempts at exploration we are thrown back into the consciousness of essential ignorance. Still, we “know” something. We experience our own lasting in existence, passing as it is, as well as the hierarchy of lasting; and in these experiences existence becomes transparent, revealing something of the mystery of being, of the mystery in which it participates though it does not know what it is.

Attunement, therefore, will be the state of existence when it hearkens to that which is lasting in being, when it maintains a tension of awareness for its partial revelations in the order of society and the world, when it listens attentively to the silent voices of conscience and grace in human existence itself.

We are thrown into and out of existence without knowing the Why or the How, but while in it we know that we are of the being to which we return. From this knowledge flows the experience of obligation, for though this being, entrusted to our partial management in existence while it lasts and passes, may be gained by attunement, it may also be lost by default.

Hence the anxiety of existence is more than a fear of death in the sense of biological extinction; it is the profounder horror of losing, with the passing of existence, the slender foothold in the partnership of being that we experience as ours while existence lasts. In existence we act our role in the greater play of the divine being that enters passing existence in order to redeem precarious being for eternity.

From Compact to Differentiated Symbols

The third typical feature in the process of symbolization is the attempt at making the essentially unknowable order of being intelligible as far as possible through the creation of symbols that interpret the unknown by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known.

These attempts have a history insofar as reflective analysis, responding to the pressure of experience, will render symbols increasingly more adequate to their task. Compact blocks of the knowable will be differentiated into their component parts, and the knowable itself will gradually come to be distinguished from the essentially unknowable. Thus, the history of symbolization is a progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols.

Since this process is the subject matter of the whole subsequent study, we shall at present mention only two basic forms of symbolization that characterize great periods of history. The one is the symbolization of society and its order as an analogue of the cosmos and its order; the other is the symbolization of social order by analogy with the order of a human existence that is well attuned to being.

The Microcosmos and the Marcoanthropos

Under the first form society will be symbolized as a microcosmos; under the second form as a macroanthropos. The first-mentioned form is also chronologically the first one. Why this should be hardly requires elaborate explanations, for earth and heaven are so impressively the embracing order into which human existence must fit itself, if it wants to survive, that the overwhelmingly powerful and visible partner in the community of being inevitably suggests its order as the model of all order, including that of man and society.

At any rate, the civilizations of the ancient Near East that will be treated in part 1 of this study symbolized politically organized society as a cosmic analogue, as a cosmion, by letting vegetative rhythms and celestial revolutions function as models for the structural and procedural order of society.

The second symbol or form–society as macroanthropos–tends to appear when cosmologically symbolized empires break down and in their disaster engulf the trust in cosmic order. Society, in spite of its ritual integration into cosmic order, has broken down; if the cosmos is not the source of lasting order in human existence, where is the source of order to be found?

The Soul as the Model of Order

At this juncture symbolization tends to shift toward what is more lasting than the visibly existing world–that is, toward the invisibly existing being beyond all being in tangible existence. This invisible divine being, transcending all being in the world and of the world itself, can be experienced only as a movement in the soul of man; and hence the soul, when ordered by attunement to the unseen god, becomes the model of order that will furnish symbols for ordering society analogically in its image.

The shift toward macroanthropic symbolization becomes manifest in the differentiation of philosophy and religion out of the preceding, more compact forms of symbolization, and it can be empirically observed, indeed, as an occurrence in the phase of history that Toynbee has classified as the Time of Troubles.

In Egypt the social breakdown between the Old and the Middle Kingdom witnessed the rise of the Osiris religiousness. In the feudal disintegration of China appeared the philosophical schools, especially those of Lao-tse and Confucius. The war period before the foundation of the Maurya empire was marked by the appearance of the Buddha and of Jainism. When the world of the Hellenic polis disintegrated, the philosophers appeared, and the further troubles of the Hellenistic world were marked by the rise of Christianity.

It would be unwise, however, to generalize this typical occurrence into a historical “law,” for there are complications in detail. The absence of such a shift in the breakdown of Babylonian society (as far as the scantiness of sources allows the negative judgment) sug­gests that the “law” would have “exceptions,” while Israel seems to have arrived at the second form without any noticeable connection with a specific institutional breakdown and subsequent period of trouble.

A further typical feature in the early stages of the process of symbol­ization is man’s awareness of the analogical character of his sym­bols. The awareness manifests itself in various ways, corresponding to the various problems of cognition through symbols.

The order of being, while remaining in the area of essential ignorance, can be symbolized analogically by using more than one experience of partial order in existence. The rhythms of plant and animal life, the sequence of the seasons, the revolutions of sun, moon, and constel­lations may serve as models for analogical symbolization of social order.

The order of society may serve as a model for symbolizing ce­lestial order. All these orders may serve as models for symbolizing the order in the realm of divine forces. And the symbolizations of divine order in their turn may be used for analogical interpretation of existential orders within the world.

In this network of mutual elucidation concurrent and conflicting symbols inevitably will occur. Such concurrences and conflicts are borne, over long periods, with equanimity by the men who pro­duce them; contradictions do not engender distrust in the truth of the symbols. If anything is characteristic of the early history of symbolization, it is the pluralism in expressing truth, the generous recognition and tolerance extended to rival symbolizations of the same truth.

The self-interpretation of an early empire as the one and only true representative of cosmic order on earth is not in the least shaken by the existence of neighboring empires that indulge in the same type of interpretation. The representation of a supreme divinity under a special form and name in one Mesopotamian city-state is not shaken by a different representation in the neighboring city-state.

And the merger of various representations when an em­pire unifies several formerly independent city-states, the change from one representation to another when the dynasties change, the transfer of cosmogonic myths from one god to another, and so forth, show that the variety of symbolizations is accompanied by a vivid consciousness of the sameness of truth at which man aims by means of his various symbols. This early tolerance reaches far into the Greco-Roman period and has found its great expression in the attack of Celsus on Christianity as the disturber of the peace among the gods.

An Early Tolerance for Competing Symbolism

The early tolerance reflects the awareness that the order of be­ing can be represented analogically in more than one way. Ev­ery concrete symbol is true insofar as it envisages the truth, but none is completely true insofar as the truth about being is essen­tially beyond human reach. In this twilight of truth grows the rich flora–luxuriant, bewildering, frightening, and charming–of the tales about gods and demons and their ordering and disordering influences on the life of man and society.

There is a magnificent freedom of variation on, and elaboration of, fundamental themes, each new growth and supergrowth adding a facet to the great work of analogy surrounding the unseen truth; it is the freedom of which, on the level of artistic creation, still can partake the epics of Homer, the tragedy of the fifth century, and the mythopoeia of Plato.

This tolerance, however, will reach its limit when the awareness of the analogical character of symbolization is attracted by the problem of the greater or lesser adequacy of symbols to their purpose of making the true order of being transparent. The symbols are many, while being is one. The very multiplicity of symbols can, therefore, be experienced as an inadequacy, and attempts may be undertaken to bring a manifold of symbols into a rational, hierarchical order.

In the Cosmological empires these attempts typically assume the form of interpreting a manifold of highest local divinities as aspects of the one highest empire god. But political summodeism is not the only method of rationalization. The attempts can also assume the more technical form of theogonic speculation, letting the other gods originate through creation by the one truly highest god, as we find it for instance in the Memphite Theology, to be dated in the early third millennium B.C.

Such early speculative outbreaks in the direction of monotheism will appear anachronistic to historians who want to find a clear progress from polytheism to monotheism, and since the facts cannot be denied, the early instances must at least be considered “forerunners” of the later, more legitimate appearance of monotheism, unless, as a still further effort at ratio­nalization, a search is undertaken to prove a historical continuity between Israelitic monotheism and Ikhnaton, or the philosophy of the Logos and the Memphite Theology.

The early outbreaks, however, will appear less surprising, and a search for continuities will become less pressing, if we realize that the rigid difference between polytheism and monotheism, suggested by the logical mu­tual exclusion of the one and the many, does in fact not exist. For the free, imaginative play with a plurality of symbols is possible only because the choice of analogies is understood as more or less irrelevant compared with the reality of being at which they aim. In all polytheism there is latent a monotheism that can be activated at any time, with or without “forerunners,” if the pressure of a historical situation meets with a sensitive and active mind.

In political summodeism and theogonic speculation we reach the limit of tolerance of rival symbolizations. Nevertheless, no serious break need yet occur. The theogonic speculation of a Hesiod was not the beginning of a new religious movement in opposition to the polytheistic culture of Hellas, and the Roman summodeism, through Constantine, could even draw Christianity into its system of symbolization.

A Horror of Falling Leads to Intolerance

The break with early tolerance results, not from rational reflection on the inadequacy of pluralistic symbolization (though such reflection may experientially be a first step toward more radical ventures), but from the profounder insight that no symbolization through analogues of existential order in the world can even faintly be adequate to the divine partner on whom the community of being and its order depend.

Only when the gulf in the hierarchy of being that separates divine from mundane exis­tence is sensed, only when the originating, ordering, and preserving source of being is experienced in its absolute transcendence beyond being in tangible existence, will all symbolization by analogy be understood in its inadequacy and even impropriety. The seemliness of symbols—if we may borrow the term from Xenophanes—then will become a pressing concern, and a hitherto tolerable freedom of symbolization will become intolerable because it is an unseemly indulgence betraying a confusion about the order of being and, more deeply, a betrayal of being itself through lack of proper attunement.

The horror of a fall from being into nothingness motivates an in­tolerance that no longer is willing to distinguish between stronger and weaker gods, but opposes the true god to the false gods. This horror induced Plato to create the term theology, to distinguish between true and false types of theology, and to make the true order of society dependent on the rule of men whose proper attunement to divine being manifests itself in their true theology.

When the unseemliness of symbols moves into the focus of atten­tion, it seems at first glance that there has not been much change in human understanding of the order of being and existence. To be sure, something is gained by the differentiating emphasis on the area of essential ignorance as well as by the consequent distinction between knowable immanent and unknowable transcendent real­ity, between mundane and divine existence, and a certain zeal in guarding the new insight against backsliding into renewed accep­tance of symbols that in retrospect appear as an illusion of truth may seem pardonable.

Nevertheless, man cannot escape essential ignorance through intolerance of unseemly symbolization; nor can he overcome the perspectivism of participation by understanding its nature. The profound insight into the unseemliness of sym­bols seems to dissolve into an emphasis, perhaps exaggerated, on something that was known all the time and did not receive more attention precisely because nothing would be changed by becoming emphatic about it.

And yet, something has changed, not only in the methods of sym­bolization, but in the order of being and existence itself. Existence is partnership in the community of being; and the discovery of imper­fect participation, of a mismanagement of existence through lack of proper attunement to the order of being, of the danger of a fall from being, is a horror indeed, compelling a radical reorientation of existence.

Not only will the symbols lose the magic of their transparency for the unseen order and become opaque, but a pallor will fall over the partial orders of mundane existence that hitherto furnished the analogies for the comprehensive order of being. Not only will the unseemly symbols be rejected, but man will turn away from world and society as the sources of misleading analogy. He will experience a turning around, the Platonic periagoge, an inversion or conversion toward the true source of order.

And this turning around, this conversion, results in more than an increase of knowledge concerning the order of being; it is a change in the order itself. For the participation in being changes its structure when it becomes emphatically a partnership with God, while the participation in mundane being recedes to second rank.

A Qualitative Leap and the New Community

The more perfect attunement to being through conversion is not an increase on the same scale but a qualitative leap. And when this conversion befalls a society, the converted community will experience itself as qualitatively different from all other societies that have not taken the leap. Moreover, the conversion is experienced, not as the result of human action, but as a passion, as a response to a revelation of di­vine being, to an act of grace, to a selection for emphatic partnership with God.

The community, as in the case of Israel, will be a chosen people, a peculiar people, a people of God. The new community thus creates a special symbolism to express its peculiarity, and this symbolism can from then on be used for distinguishing the new structural element in the field of societies in historical existence.

When the distinctions are more fully developed, as they were by Saint Augustine, the history of Israel will then become a phase in the historia sacra, in church history, as distinguished from the profane history in which empires rise and fall. Hence, the emphatic partnership with God removes a society from the rank of profane existence and constitutes it as the representative of the Civitas Dei in historical existence.

Thus, a change in being actually has occurred, with consequences for the order of existence. Nevertheless, the leap upward in being is not a leap out of existence. The emphatic partnership with God does not abolish partnership in the community of being at large, which includes being in mundane existence. Man and society, if they want to retain their foothold in being that makes the leap into emphatic partnership possible, must remain adjusted to the order of mundane existence.

A New Tolerance for Human Imperfection

Hence, there is no age of the church that would succeed an age of society on the level of more compact attunement to being. Instead there develop the tensions, frictions, and balances between the two levels of attunement, a dualistic structure of ex­istence that expresses itself in pairs of symbols, of theologia civilis and theologia supranaturalis, of temporal and spiritual powers, of secular state and church.

Intolerance of unseemly symbolization does not resolve this new problem, and the love of being that inspires intolerance must com­promise with the conditions of existence. This attitude of com­promise can be discerned in the work of the old Plato, when his intolerance of unseemly symbolization, strong in his early and mid­dle years, undergoes a remarkable transformation.

To be sure, the insight of conversion, the principle that God is the measure of man, far from being compromised, is asserted even more forcefully, but its communication has become more cautious, withdrawing deeper behind the veils of the myth.

There is an awareness that the new truth about being is not a substitute for, but an addition to, the old truth. The Laws envisage a polis that is constructed as a cosmic analogue, perhaps betraying influences of Oriental political culture; and of the new truth there will be infiltrated only as much as the existential vessel can hold without breaking.

Moreover, there is a new awareness that an attack on the unseemly symbolization of order may destroy order itself with the faith in its analogies, that it is better to see the truth obscurely than not at all, that imperfect attunement to the order of being is preferable to disorder.

The intol­erance inspired by the love of being is balanced by a new tolerance, inspired by the love of existence and a respect for the tortuous ways on which man moves historically closer to the true order of being. In the Epinomis Plato speaks the last word of his wisdom–that every myth has its truth.

This excerpt is from Order and History (Volume I): Israel and Revelation (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 14) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001)

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