No philosopher of the 20th Century, perhaps in history, approaches an understanding of the etiological problem posed by Aristotle, “that man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality.” A review of Anamnesis.
Anamnesis
by Eric Voegelin (translated by Gerhart Niemeyer)
Reprint; University of Missouri Press, 1990.
Bibliographical references, pbk., index, 217 pgs.
ISBN: 0-8262-0737-5
MISERIA HUMANAE CONDITIONIS
Mankind has spent an inordinate amount of his time on this planet mucking about in a social, cultural, and philosophical disorder whose end result has more often than naught been war, famine, and pestilence. On the other hand, our bipedal species has also experienced periods of ordered social construct. Unfortunately, these periods of intellectual or spiritual “illumination” are of fairly short duration and are typically followed by the “misconstruction of reality by disoriented human beings.” Indeed, life is challenging!
Today, in the postmodern, or as some would have it, the pseudomodern world, where there is a plethora of disoriented human beings, we are engaged in a period of intellectual and moral decline that tends to aggravate and aggrieve those individuals who seek the truth of reality and who, in frustration, end up mumbling profanities at sophists, Gnostics, and obscurant academics. However, as bad as the current condition appears there is hope both spiritually and intellectually.
Survival in the postmodern world, for those whose faith permits an existence within Plato’s metaxy or William James’s “pure experience,” is obviously possible within the reality of the “consciousness of participation.” Thus, it is also possible within the Judeo-Christian worldview; by participating in the reality of the process established within the tension “of the world and the beyond,” i.e. the life of the church, in prayer and meditation; in a self-abnegation best expressed in a willingness to open oneself to the will of God. It is, in and of itself, a successful course of action that deflects modernity’s desire to engage in the egophanic revolt, to distort and discredit the fundamental philosophical exercise, the understanding of man’s relationship to “the divine ground,” to God!
However, as Thomas Aquinas via Aristotle has shown, man is also a thinking creature, a being with intelligence and the ability to reason, to act rationally. Reason is his intellectual meat and he demands, or at least some do, to be fed. He yearns for the truth of reality. He seeks the openness to the Question.
The Greeks had two terms for reason, nous and ratio: nous, then, seeks not only knowledge but knowledge attracted toward the divine ground, the transcendent, while ratio (reason) is the “directional factor in the tension of consciousness “as the quest for the ground” which orders it and thereby gives it structure as open inquiry.” Together, these divinely ordained intellectual attributes inherent within man compliment each other, where ratio “is the existential response of nous to the Question.”
Thus, the intrinsic desire in man, derived from this merger of reason and revelation (the Logos), in his existential experience of the tension between the immanent and transcendent, is to inquire, to ask the Question.
In his essay, "The Soul and the Transcendence of the Human Person" (Christian Faith and Human Understanding, CUA Press, 2006) Msgr. Robert Sokolowski argues,
It is not the case that spiritual things are given to us only through introspection or through self-consciousness or feelings. To say this would be to speak in a Cartesian way: everything spiritual would be inside. Rather, spiritual activity is present whenever we do things that escape the confinements of space, time, and matter . . . We do this all the time and we do it in a public way.
The existence of the “spirit,” or as the Greeks say, the pneuma, is ably defined by the philosopher, Eric Voegelin, who said that spirit is the “presence of the transcendent pole of the tension of existence as a force ordering the soul from within.” Consequently, we see that the “spiritual” is both external and internal to man. Then, we might argue that the condition of being wholly human is an apperception of the communion of intellect and spirit. And so, to exclude either element (reason or spirit) is to present a being not quite human, a being malformed, grotesque and alien, even to itself.
No philosopher of the 20th Century, perhaps in history, approaches an understanding of the etiological problem posed by Aristotle, “that man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality,” then does Eric Voegelin.
To begin the process of understanding Dr. Voegelin (and it is a process) I was advised by a very kind philosophy professor to read a collection of essays he’d written titled: Anamnesis. Foolishly, I did not take her advice and began to read his book, The Ecumenic Age. I read nearly 100 pages before admitting defeat.
In many ways Anamnesis provides a foundation for Voegelin’s thinking on the question of human consciousness but it is within the context of his sundry disquisitions that the intrinsic questions related to God (the divine ground), man, law, politics, psychology, and history are addressed. In reading the essays in Anamnesis there occurs the almost pure pleasure of illuminated irruptions, like shooting stars on a clear summer’s night, that convey the delight of understanding some aspect of his work. These little intellectual victories are important because they provide the impetus to continue the arduous trek up the linguistic mountain Dr. Voegelin has placed before the reader.
In these essays we encounter the consciousness of the concrete human being, forever challenged by the temptation of egophanic revolt; the deformation of “school-philosophies” that cannot abide the question nor permit debate, and the problem of a restrictive and “deformed” contemporary existence.
Perhaps his most important essay is, "Reason: The Classic Experience." Here Voegelin explores, analyzes, and examines (1) The Tension of Existence; (2) Psychopathology; and (3) Life and Death in a perspicacious disquisition that can take the reader’s breathe away. Voegelin brilliantly explicates the emergence of the nous, which was the result of the Greek philosopher’s efforts to thwart “the social disorder of their age,” and instilled an understanding of self consciousness, arguing that this was an epochal event “that constituted meaning in history” and gave birth to the concept of the “philosopher.”
To have raised the tension of order and disorder in existence to the luminosity of noetic dialogue and discourse is the epochal feat of the classic philosophers. This epoch has established the life of reason in Western culture in continuity to our own time; it does not belong to the past, but is the epoch in which we still live.
To be honest, Voegelin is very difficult to read and it is best that you have access to a “Voegelin” dictionary just in case you’d care to know what nous, noetic, metaxy, and pneumatic differentiation happen to mean. The good professor does not write for the reader; he writes for the truth of things!
He is not only open to criticism but invites it, and on more than one occasion his work was “undermined” by new findings. He abhorred ideology and never sought to construct an iron bound “system” that would be impervious to criticism; his only objective was to “. . . look(s) ahead to a new opportunity for discovery and explication.” Eric Voegelin spent his life seeking the truth of things.
No philosopher, certainly of this century, better explicates the pernicious deformations inherent in the ideological derailments of the postmodern era, and no collection of essays is better prepared to present to the curious reader the essential Voegelin, a man who grasped the significance of alienation, “. . . the turning away from the ground toward a self that is imagined to be human without being constituted by its relation to the divine presence,” a concept that established the foundation for the disorders of man.
Anamnesis is a collection of very important essays that analyzes the existence of man in the reality of the divine ground. It is an intellectual tool employing a reason, a noetic differentiation, capable of lifting the reader toward a spiritual awareness of the ground; to the truth of being.
Anamnesis is available on Amazon.com.
robertcheeks@core.com
Read more articles by Bob Cheeks
I read this and it appears that there is a single thread one can take to the truth. More on what truth is would have been nice. The other thing I would have liked to read about is the other paths which lead to untruth. In all I liked the article.
Comment by fbaginski | March 2, 2007