Please note that these selections are in no sense a systematic survey of the literature. They are rather a collection gathered in the course of reading which may serve as a useful tool for others.
In adding cross-references between terms I have usually linked only one usage of a term in each extract. Voegelin uses some terms (for example, "beyond" and "search") in their ordinary senses but which also have special meaning in the context of his work. I have tried to distinguish between the usages, but the decision as to whether to link a term is sometimes a difficult judgement. If you see any cases where a cross-reference is in error or is misleading, please let me know.
Your comments and corrections are always welcome: please e-mail Bill McClain.
Return to the Eric Voegelin Study Page.
"The Good. In Plato, the good as such. A term for the transcendental pole of the tension of existence." [Webb 1981:277]
"Concerning the content of the Agathon nothing can be said at all. That is the fundamental insight of Platonic ethics. The transcendence of the Agathon makes immanent propositions concerning its content impossible."The vision of the Agathon does not render a material rule of conduct, but forms the soul through an experience of transcendence. The nature of this experience and the place of the Agathon in it is described by Socrates indirectly through the function of the `offspring' of the good, the sun, in relation to vision (Republic 506e ff)... The Agathon is neither intellect (nous) nor its object (nooumenon) (508c), but that what `gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower.' The Idea of the Agathon is `the cause of knowledge [episteme] and of truth [aletheia] as far as known' (508e). The analogical elucidation of the Agathon by means of what is most like it (eikon) is then carried one step further. The sun not only provides visibility, but generation, growth, and nurture to the visibles, though it is not itself generation (genesis). And likewise the Agathon not only makes objects knowable, but provides them with their existence and essence, though it is itself beyond (epekeina) essence in dignity and power. The epekeina is Plato's term for `beyond' or `transcendent'... [Voegelin OH 3:112]
"Cause." [Webb 1981:277]
"The term for ground, aition, occurs in the philosophy of Plato and in the philosophy of Aristotle. It has there three meanings which must be distinguished or one gets into trouble right from the beginning. One sense in which the term aition is used in philosophy is that which in physics we call 'cause': recognizable regularity between phenomena in time and space. We had better call that 'the cause' in order to distinguish it."There is a second meaning of the term aition, in Aristotle especially. Aition was translated into Latin and preserved through Scholasticism and into neo-Thomism as the doctrine of the four causae: the causa materialis, the causa formalis, the causa efficiens, and the causa finalis. These four causae--material, formal, efficient and final--are something different, of course, from 'the cause' in physics. They have as their model artifacts or organisms, but we are interested at the moment neither in artifacts nor in organisms.
"There was a third meaning of aition in classic philosophy: the ground of existence of man, first of all, then also of other things. The ground of existence, in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy--but especially in Aristotelian--is the nous: reason or spirit or intellect, whichever of these translations you prefer. Let's call it 'intellect,' or use the Greek word nous. Here the model is man and his experience of such a ground, hence reason is the ground of existence for man, and especially the ground for everything rational in his action. [Voegelin in O'Connor 1980:3-4]
"... the term aition, rendered in modern language as cause, does not have the meaning of cause which the modern reader associates with it. The aitia have nothing to do with cause and effect in the natural sciences; they refer to a relation in the hierarchy of being that we can neutrally term `derivation.' Aristotle can say for instance (Metaphysics 994a3ff.): `The hyletic generation of one thing from another cannot go on ad infinitum (e.g., flesh from earth, earth from air, endless series--man, for example, being moved by air, air by the sun, the sun by strife, and so on without limit.' Obviously Aristotle's etiology is still deeply embedded in the Ionian speculation on the cosmos, which in his turn is still close to the realm of mythical symbolization. The etiology, therefore, must not be understood as having anything to do with the chain of cause and effect in time, in the modern sense. The problem of the limit belongs strictly to the analysis of existence; it has nothing to do with the infinity or createdness of the world." [Voegelin, "On Debate and Existence" CW 12:46]
"Truth, that which is `unhidden' or `uncovered.' In Voegelin, especially `lived' truth, existential truth, the experienced manifestness of `existential consciousness.' Equivalent to episteme." [Webb 1981:277]
double meaning of Aletheia--reality and truth, close to being synonymous with Aristotle's ousia. [Voegelin Anam:160]
"Usually translated as ignorance, folly, rudeness, boorishness. Term used by Plato in the Laws to refer to voluntary ignorance motivated by aversion to truth (consequently a stronger term than `folly' in English). Voegelin says its symptom is an unwillingness to discuss, but its underlying cause is an unwillingness to be drawn into consideration of the transcendental." [Webb 1981:277]
"Literally, friendship. Aquinas's term for the mutual love between God and man." [Webb 1981:277]
"The Christian bending of God in grace toward the soul does not come within the range of these experiences--though, to be sure, in reading Plato one has the feeling of moving continuously on the verge of a breakthrough into this new dimension. The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, of amicitia in the Thomistic sense, of the grace which imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth. The revelation of this grace in history, through the incarnation of the Logos in Christ, intelligibly fulfilled the adventitious movement of the spirit in the mystic philosophers. The critical authority over the older truth of society which the soul had gained through its opening and its orientation toward the unseen measure [i.e., in Plato] was now confirmed through the revelation of the measure itself." [Voegelin NSP:78]
"the only language that can be used for mystery, and existence is intrinsically mysterious." [Webb 1981:123]
"Remembrance or recollection. In Plato's Meno, the conception that whatever one learns in this life is recalled from the memory of what was known in a former life. In Voegelin's interpretation, a symbol for the recognition that the explication of experience is the bringing into consciousness of what had previously been implicitly present but unconscious." [Webb 1981:277]
"It is improper, and fundamentally incorrect, they tell us, to separate knowing from being. Knowing is intimately dependent upon someone's particular way of being in the world, or, as Michael Polanyi would have it, upon the indwelling of a particular person, so that the emergence of new knowledge is understandable only as the expression of the history of his experiential background and concerns, is not immaterial nor inconsequential when it is a matter of determining what we and others are capable of knowing and how new awarenesses come to be. A person's knowledge, that is to say, his very capacity to discover the truth, is a function of his experiential individuality. This understanding of the intimate connection between knowing and being is, of course, the very heart of the Platonic message, the message that so fascinated Voegelin. Indeed, it is the reason for and the explanation of Voegelin's repeated focusing on recollection (anamnesis), which is but another way of speaking of the exploration of 'tacitnesses.'" [Poirier 1992:261]
"Oblivion and knowledge are modes of consciousness of which the first can be raised into the second through remembrance. Remembering 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. In the Enneads (IV, 3, 30) Plotinus has described this action as the transition from nonarticulate thinking to articulate thinking that perceives itself. Through an act of perceiving attention (antilepsis), the non-articulated knowledge (noema) is transformed into conscious knowledge; and this antileptic knowledge then becomes fixed through language (logos). Remembrance thus, is the process by which non-articulated (ameres) knowledge can be raised into the realm of language-images (to phantistikon) so that, through expression in the pregnant sense of becoming a thing in the external world (eis to exo), it will become linguistically articulated presence in consciousness."... I have analyzed how Plato's insight into remembrance changes, and gains in depth, from the early to the late dialogues: ... (c) In Timaeus-Critias, finally, remembrance raises the comprehending knowledge of human-social existence attuned to the order of history and the cosmos from the unconscious into consciousness. The remembrance expands into a philosophy of consciousness in its tensions of conscious and unconscious, of latency and presence of knowledge, of knowing and forgetting, of order and disorder in personal, social and historical existence, as well as to a philosophy of symbols in which these tensions find their linguistic expression. However, the knowledge of man concerning his tension to the divine ground of being remains the center of consciousness; what is remembered is the origins, the beginnings, and the grounds of order in the present existence of man." [Voegelin, "Foreword to 'Anamnesis'" in Lawrence 1984:38-39]
"Consciousness is not a self-contained process that apprehends itself and is able, by analyzing its insights, to arrive at a comprehension of its own nature. Conversely, consciousness is a material process that understands itself to exist in a body and in a world. It consequently understands itself to be part of a wider reality which comprises it..."The exercises in personal recollection in 1943 provided a path back to the manner in which his [Voegelin's] own mind was formed by his early experiences of the world's wider reality, thus the significance of rooting his investigations in a theory that acknowledged that consciousness is materially constituted.
"Consciousness is not able to become an object for itself. The only plausible starting point for a thinker is one's own consciousness, that is, all the prereflective experiences that have led one to pose questions about the nature of mind and the reality of which it is a part. These experiences may be described as moments of awareness that cause one to apprehend some part of reality as opaque, as something that calls for interpretation. A reflective individual's experiences of this type provide an openness to a diversity of questions about the nature of the world. These experiences are formative of a thinker's mind; they galvanize and provide direction to the process of thinking...
"In order to unravel one's own intellectual position, it seemed necessary to probe one's own consciousness in order to ascertain its constitution by the experiences of life if one desired to be mindful of his or her own cognitive presuppositions. This exploration had to begin with childhood to retrieve the formative experiences of life since they were vital elements in the current makeup of consciousness...
"The recollection of childhood experiences is an effort to recall those archetypal episodes where the world made an impression on the psyche. The nature of these occurrences, though, cannot be ascertained only from these narratives, since such reminiscences can also be understood as creative acts that lead to experiences which inaugurate a search for understanding. Thus, philosophical reflection begins with the elucidation of one's own generative experiences, during which time questions about the nature of existence arise. In this state, one is able to bring rationality to bear on generative experience. It is through this type of reflective process that philosophical clarification of life is attained, and these types of experiences are constitutive of philosophical theories." [Keulman 1990:56-57]
"Philosophical anamnesis does not recover the memory of the events belonging to former lives, but of truths, that is, the structures of the real. This philosophical position can be compared with that of the traditional societies: the myths represent paradigmatic models established by Supernatural Beings, not the series of personal experiences of one individual or another." [Eliade 1963 p. 125]
"World soul. Latin term for Plato's animate cosmos in the Timaeus. One of the hypostases of Plotinus." [Webb 1981:277]
"the reality of the cosmos in depth" [Voegelin, "Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History" in CW 12:127]
"a philosopher's myth: It articulates neither the experience of the primordial field, nor the experience of the psyche, but achieves the imaginative fusion of insights gained by the two types of experience separately. That is not to say that the imaginative play does not express any reality at all. It is true, we have no experience of the depth of the Cosmos as psyche; and Plato himself is careful enough to claim for the psyche and logos of man no more than to be kindred (syngenes) to the divine psyche and logos of the Cosmos. Still, the imaginative play has its hard core of reality as it is motivated by man's trust (pistis) in reality as intelligibly ordered, as a Cosmos. Our perspectival experiences of reality in process may render no more than fragments of insight, the fragmentary elements may be heterogeneous, and they may look even incommensurable, but the trust in the underlying oneness of reality, its coherence, lastingness, constancy of structure, order and intelligibility will inspire the creation of images which express the ordered wholeness sensed in the depth. The most important of these images is the symbol cosmos itself, whose development runs historically parallel with that of the symbol psyche. The result is the eikos mythos whose degree of likeness will depend on the amount of disparate experiences it has achieved to unify persuasively in its imagery. But that is not yet the last word in the matter; for Plato lets Timaeus conclude his story with the assurance that, according to the likely myth, the Cosmos is a zoon empsychon ennoun in very truth (te aletheia). The earlier wavering characterizations of the myth as somewhat less than really true are now superseded by the assertion of its truth in the full sense. The statement is delivered with impenetrable seriousness but in its depth we can sense an ironic smile: The most intimate truth of reality, the truth about the meaning of the cosmic play in which man must act his role with his life as the stake, is a mythopoetic play linking the psyche of man in trust with the depth of the Cosmos." [Voegelin, "Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History" in CW 12:127-128]
folly. oblivion. Forgetfulness of one's partnership in the community of being and, consequently, the transformation of assertive participation into self-assertion. [Voegelin OH 5:43]
see Beginning
"Unlimited, indefinite, unbounded. In Anaximander, the 'unlimited' source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable. Voegelin uses it (especially in OH, vol. 4) to refer to the pole of the metaxy (q.v.) standing opposite the One (the Beyond). [Webb 1981:277]
"In the myth of the cosmos, which is the immediate background of Anaximander's pronouncements, the Apeiron of non-existence is not merely a negative dimension of the Whole but the reality that is the creative origin or Beginning of existent things, including the life and order of the 'things' called men. Hence, the trust (pistis) in the truth-reality of the Depth, symbolized as the cosmos whose undergirding and overarching order pervasively interpenetrates things in existence, is the mysterious source of than of their reality." [Sandoz 1981:198]
"Consciousness and the context in which it becomes intelligible to itself as life moves on--which it experiences as present both within and outside itself-arise from somewhere. But where? One answer returns for its substance to those who possessed the experience of their own consciousness emerging without a vast social and philosophical mechanism already in existence to `explain' the significance of the experience in mythopoetic terms.Reality was experienced by Anaximander (fl. 560 B.C.) as a cosmic process in which things emerge from, and disappear into, the non-existence of the Apeiron. Things do not exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they exist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In the Apeiron as the timeless arche of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestation of the Apeiron in time.[OH 4:174]"The motion from the darkness of nonexistence into the light of existence is the primary cycle that dominates all lesser cycles. This is brought out in Anaximander's statement:``The origin (arche) of things is the Apeiron... It is necessary for things to perish into that from which they were born; for they pay one another penalty for their injustice (adikia) according to the ordinance of Time.''"Voegelin contends that the Anaximandrian Apeiron--which he calls the `Ionian truth of the process'--is `present in the background of consciousness when the later thinkers explore specific structures for the case of societies in history.' [OH 4:175] The symbol of the Apeiron as the Boundless, the Depth, serves as a polarity both of the cosmos and the psyche. The opposite polarity, the One of Plato, stands as the noetically discoverable antipode of the Apeiron. It is the height as the Apeiron is the depth." [Keulman 1990:141]
"Imperishability. The characteristic of the gods as symbols of perfection of being. An aspect of the transcendental pole of the tension of existence or metaxy (q.v.)." [Webb 1981:277-278]
"Certain or necessary. Used to refer to knowledge of what must be, as compared with what can be (and may even be)." [Webb 1981:278]
"Leibniz's term for the introspective or reflective apprehension by the mind of its own inner states. Contrasts with 'perception,' which is awareness of something external. Used by Voegelin to refer to self-awareness, a combination of immediate and mediated, reflective self-awareness." [Webb 1981]
"Beginning, principle. Especially ultimate undemonstrable principle, or ultimate underlying substance." [Webb 1981:278]
"About the first of these: The Ionic attempt leans on the figure of cosmogonic speculation and borrowed from it the form of the myth in the sense of a story or narration about events in the cosmos. The arche of the Ionians is not any longer a member of the society of gods, but it stands at the beginning like a god from whose initiative a chain of events passes right down to the being that is experienced here and now. The form of the mythic story imposes on the being of the Ionians the character of becoming, the mythical genesis." [Voegelin Anam:76]
"To immortalize. See 'immortalizing' and 'exodus.'" [Webb 1981:278]
"Voegelin's term for the precarious awareness of the conditions of existence in the metaxy, easily lost when the experience of being drawn toward the transcendental pole becomes sufficiently vivid to tempt one to expect escape from the metaxy and from the existential tension that characterizes it." [Webb 1981:278]
"The balance of consciousness is what might be called the primary virtue of differentiated consciousness. It consists in not letting the discovery, or the suspicion of the existence, of transcendent being disorient and frighten one in such a way that it lead one to devalue or reject either the immanent or the transcendent pole of being. In other words, one does not let the world as it is be degraded into 'an untruth to be overcome by the truth of transfigured reality'; but neither is the fact and the perfection of transcendent being denied. Rather, one accepts that the meaning of the finite cosmos is incomplete, but fittingly so, as well as that a transcendent fulfillment of that meaning is really discerned in human consciousness. And one accepts, therefore, the life of reason and spirit as that of mediating, of being intermediate between, the truths of finite and of transcendent being, and consequently one accepts also the task of understanding and sanctifying the conditions of finite existence that make it possible to fulfill this function." [Hughes 1993:102]
"It is in the soul of the `thing' man that the struggle between It-reality and thing-reality goes on, symbolized as the pull of the Beyond and the resistant counterpull of the chora--the divine, immortal Beyond and the `mortal beyond.'" [Paul Caringella, "Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence" in Sandoz 1991:191]
"The Classical philosophers' postulate of balance arises, then, from their discovery of the paradox central to reality: reality is a 'recognizably structured process that is recognizably moving beyond its structure.' While the structure is sufficiently static to outlast the philosophers and to endure over the millennia to the present, it is nonetheless 'dynamically alive with theophanic events which point toward an ultimate transfiguration of reality.' The task of the philosopher, in executing the requirement of balance, is 'to preserve the balance between the experienced lastingness [of reality] and the theophanic events in such a manner that the paradox become intelligible as the very structure of existence itself.' This is the definition of the postulate (OH, IV, 227-228)."This task can be discharged, for instance, by stressing that the differentiating theophanies that constitute meaning in history are exoduses within reality and not exoduses from It; that the God of the Beginning whose creative act established the cosmos and maintains its order is the same as the God of the Beyond whose presence moves the philosopher's quest of the Ground in the process of differentiation climaxing in the discovery of the divine Nous; that the differentiated consciousness--whose reality of reason is both human and divine in the mode of participation (but not identification)--arises in the reality of the cosmos and its lasting order from the Beginning, not the cosmos and its order from consciousness." [Sandoz 1981:234]
"As Voegelin puts it, 'The cosmos of the primary experience... is the whole, to pan, of an earth below and a heaven above--of celestial bodies and their movements; of seasonal changes; of fertility rhythms in plant and animal life; of human life, birth and death; and above all...it is a cosmos full of gods.' The last point is essential. What it means in philosophical terms is that the ground, the purposive origin of things, is perceived or experienced not as 'beyond,' but as contained within the spectrum of spatiotemporal existences. Reality is saturated with divine presence, because the very origins of things are manifest in the cosmos. Divine presence is experienced as 'the gods,' manifest entities, encountered in powers, elements, and regularities in the cosmos, through which they reveal themselves and with which they are more or less convertible. As a result, for the member of ancient society, nature is never encountered as a neutral, impersonal 'It,' but as a 'Thou,' alive with purpose and emotion [OH 4:68]."It is difficult for us to perform the leap of imagination needed to appreciate the 'intracosmic gods' as signifying something other than naive poetic fancy and superstition, or perhaps a kind of personality-projection or even wish-fulfillment. We may be helped, Voegelin's analysis suggests, by approaching the ancient compact consciousness from the direction of the question of the ground.
"In order to do so, the following distinction should be kept in mind: the question about the ground of something is not that about its temporal or mundane 'beginnings' (although, in archaic consciousness, these two questions are not well distinguished). To ask where a tree 'comes from' in term of vegetative reproduction is not the same as to ask where it ultimately, primordially 'comes from'--that is, what its metaphysical or divine origins are. The reproductive explanation can--as Aristotle takes pains to point out--be stretched out ad infinitum with no rational contradiction [Metaphysics 1071b6-10; Physics 206a9-206b1, 208a5-25, 250b11-252b7]. But the question of the originary 'coming-to-be,' the question about the very fact of existence, carries with it an intrinsic rational demand for an explanation affirming a first beginning, a primary origin, or a first principle. The meaning of traditional mythic thinking is incomprehensible to us unless we distinguish these two types of question and see the latter of them, that of primal emergence, to imply the terminus of a ground, however that ground may be symbolized. As Voegelin writes in his exegesis of Aristotle's understanding of the issue, 'The knowledge that being is not grounded in itself implies the question of the origin, and in this question being is revealed as coming-to-be, albeit not as a coming-to-be in the world of existing things but a coming-to-be from the ground of being.' [Anamnesis, 86. For detail on the distinction between the two types of question, see ibid., 83-88, and Voegelin, "In Search of the Ground," in [O'Connor 1980:3-5]. In ancient societies the myths of origins answer the questions about the ground through creation narratives, which must not be confused with stories about mundane events. 'Through its time of the narrative, which is not the time of becoming in the world, the myth expresses the coming-to-be from the ground of being.' With this distinction between mundane beginnings and primordial beginnings in mind, it is possible to situate compact mythic thinking by stating that it takes place in the conceptual horizon of an imputation of the Beginning of things to other things represented as in or belonging to the cosmos.
"Voegelin has approached the self-understanding of ancient societies, as he has all others, in terms of the manner in which they explain and symbolize order in reality. The compact myths of Beginnings are ways of telling how things became ordered. The way they do this is to describe the derivation of certain cosmic things--such as humans--from other cosmic things--such as the gods. Since all of reality is, for ancient mythic imagination, contained in the finite cosmos, there can be no means of explaining the derivation or meaning of anything other than through reference to some other finite reality. Therefore there flourish, in ancient mythic society, what might be called cross-referential explanations of reality." [Hughes 1993:44-45]
"The mystery of origins is, from the differentiated perspective, the mystery of the How and Why of the emergence of a finite, conditioned universe from a non-finite, unconditioned ground. As Voegelin convincingly argues there is no escaping the question of the ground itself, the question of what it is we ultimately 'come from'; and differentiated reason demands that the presence of finite reality be accorded a non-finite origin or cause. The ultimate purpose of the coming-into-being, therefore, and the manner of its creation, are unknowable to us, transcending finite powers of comprehension. Even the general notions of 'origination,' 'coming from,' 'creation,' 'causation,' and formation' can be applied to the relation between finite being and its transcendent ground only analogically; for the meanings of these terms derive from our understanding of relations between finite beings." [Hughes 1993:90]
"The creational Beginning as an analogical symbol will denote therefore not a beginning in the time dimension of the world, but a beginning in the analogical time of a creation story, the time out of time, as I called it, is the Time of the Tale, of the cosmogonic myth in the bewildering variety of its manifestations in history. By the analogous Beginning, the cosmogonic myth expresses the experience of a lasting cosmos permeated by the divine mystery of its existence, and articulates the truth of a cosmos that is not altogether of this world. The reality of things, it appears, cannot be fully understood in terms of the world and its time; for the things are circumfused by an ambience of mystery that can be understood only in terms of the Myth. Since the divine Beginning, though experienced as real, is not an event in the time of the world, the imaginative creation story is the symbolism necessary for its expression. Moreover, the adequacy of the symbolism to the experience points to the miracle of a mythical imagination that can produce the adequate Tale. We are touching on the problem ... of an imagination and a language that is itself perhaps not altogether of this world." [Voegelin, "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth" in CW 28:174-175]
"The causal series cannot begin in time because we have no experience of a beginning 'in time'; more precisely, one could say that because we have no experience whatsoever of a time in which something might begin--for the only time of which we do have experience is the inner experience of the illuminated dimension of consciousness, the process that drops away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness..."A mythical symbol is a finite symbol supposed to provide 'transparence' for a tranfinite [sic] process. Examples: a myth of creation, which renders transparent the problem of the beginning of a transfinite process of the world..." [Voegelin Anam:21]
"...[In OH IV] Voegelin began to use the symbols 'beginning' and 'beyond' as a substitute for his earlier distinction between 'myth' and 'revelation,' the terms he employed in the first three volumes. He did this perhaps to avoid the connotations that 'myth' and 'revelation' carry in the topical debates. 'Beginning' refers to the primary experience of the cosmos which historically found expression in creation myths, while 'beyond' alludes to the revelatory awakening of divine presence in the soul in mystic experience, to the transcendent realm that gives history and the soul and eschatological direction." [Morrissey 1994:283]
"Because of this dual structure [of intentionality and luminosity], consciousness inevitably yields a symbolization of reality in the conceptual form of being-things, when in fact what it knows in the mode of luminosity is the nonthing beyond of things. The beyond can only be experienced through its parousia, its presence. This presence of the beyond is a formative presence that pervades the whole of reality in the form of things. In itself this beyond is nonexperientiable, but since experience somehow reveals the beyond of experience mysteriously present in experience, this beyond needs to be evoked. But in conjuring this beyond, consciousness must inevitably image it in the ambiguous and limited form of being-things, that is, 'objectively' through symbols and concepts, even thought these symbols and concepts refer to no object."Reality itself is structured by the being-things of the cosmos and the beyond of things beyond the cosmos. The comprehending reality that includes the thing-reality of the cosmos and its nonthing ground, Voegelin calls the 'It-reality.' The It-reality denotes the reality that comprehends the partners in the community of being: God and the human being, world and society. And so the It-reality is a subject that takes as a predicate the bodily located consciousness called 'the human being' that is a participatory event in the comprehending It-reality...
"This structure of things and their beyond is what constitutes the tensional structure in human existence. Indeed, this dual isomorphism of consciousness and reality must lead one to say that reality is constituted by consciousness while consciousness is constituted by reality, with the provision of course that the primacy always lies with the prior-forming reality [cf. Tillich's ontological structure of reality]. Reality precedes and outlasts any embodied consciousness that participates in its mystery in the mode of existence; and in this formative reality, consciousness always finds itself moving, but only in consciousness can reality 'appear.'
"It is within this formative reality that the concrete consciousness called Eric Voegelin found itself moving in two directions: toward the beginning and toward the beyond. In his zetemic search for order in history he discovered that divine presence is experienced in these two directions and these two only, for no other direction is possible." [Morrissey 1994:119]
"What would then emerge in this search for the beginning is the comprehending reality of the beyond. The beginning of all things points to their beyond. And this search for the true order of the cosmos reveals the quest itself as the 'place,' the bodily located event, when and where reality becomes luminous for its truth. The consciousness of the human being is the site of incarnated truth. It is moving toward the unflawed order beyond the disorder of thingliness. It tells the story of this movement in the flawed language of things. The final upshot of all this is that the quest for truth is ultimately penultimate, for there is always the greater truth whose story needs to be told but can never fully and finally be told. The story of the quest, no matter how luminous, can never put an end to Mystery; it can only deepen the insight into its paradoxic penultimacy." [Morrissey 1994:148]
"The struggle in classic philosophy becomes the quest to unite the God of the beginning who creates an imperfect cosmos with a God of the beyond who orders the human psyche and saves us from the cosmic disorder. Is the creator-god the same as the savior-god?" [Morrissey 1994:158]
"...Voegelin's treatment of the mystery of origins contains a further set of insights that marks a major contribution to the theoretical appreciation of the issue. These are the insights formulated in his analysis of the 'Beginning' and the 'Beyond.'"Conscious existence, Voegelin explains, discovers through differentiating experiences that it receives its 'formation' not merely through physical processes but also through the nonmaterial presences of nous and pneuma. For the seeker of origins, this discovery refracts the originating ground, as far as human existence is concerned, in the two 'directions' of (1) the transcendent Beginning of cosmic structure (from which human consciousness arises) and (2) the transcendent Beyond of Intelligence or Spirit (which differentiated consciousness recognizes, in the immediacy of presence, as the fullness of its own rational and spiritual identity)...
"Both 'models' of the ground of reality are 'required' by differentiated consciousness; but that simultaneous requirement can prove troublesome. The two, the cosmic ground of things and the 'immediate' ground of consciousness, can appear to be in conflict. That is, once the invisible center of personality is differentiated, it is possible to speculate as to whether one' being as physical, as physically rooted in the cosmos, is not in conflict with one's being as beyond the physical, as moral or spiritual." [Hughes 1993:90-91]
"...it is this struggle for existential order in light of the knowledge of transcendent being that for Voegelin raises the most radical question of all concerning the overall structure of the process of reality. Why, he asks, has the one divine ground formed a finite cosmos that included the human questioner, only to require that questioner to seek, in resistance to existential ignorance and disorder, the ground itself beyond the finite cosmos, and find his or her 'salvation' in increasing degrees of participatory attunement with its truth? This question has been touched upon already... in the discussion of Voegelin's question about why a cosmos formed from its divine Beginning should be moving, in a transfigurative process whose medium is human consciousness, toward a divine Beyond of itself. The human struggle represents a conflict in the very structure of being." [Hughes 1993:103]
"Voegelin later clarified his analysis of the different symbolisms of philosophy and myth by distinguishing the two modes in which man experiences divine reality; the theotes of Colossians 2:9. There is the immediate experience of the divine in the opening of the soul to transcendent being; this can only be expressed in the language of revelation, of which the representative symbol is Plato's Beyond, epekeina (Republic, 509b). There is also the mediated experience of the divine presence as the source of order within the cosmos; this can only be expressed by a cosmogonic myth, describing the creation and maintenance of the cosmos from the Beginning, as in Genesis I:I. The two directions in which divine reality is experienced are a constant, and they must both attain adequate symbolization." [David Walsh, "Philosophy in Voegelin's Work" in Sandoz 1982:146]
"Though the divine reality is one, its presence is experienced in the two modes of the Beyond and the Beginning. The Beyond is present in the immediate experience of movements in the psyche; while the presence of the divine Beginning is mediated through the experience of the existence and intelligible structure of things in the cosmos. The two models require two different types of language for their adequate expression. The immediate presence in the movements of the soul requires the revelatory language of consciousness. This is the language of seeking, searching, and questioning, of ignorance and knowledge concerning the divine ground, of futility, absurdity, anxiety, and alienation of existence, of being moved to seek and question, of being drawn toward the ground, of turning around, of return, illumination, and rebirth. The presence mediated by the existence and order of things in the cosmos requires the mythical language of a creator-god or Demiurge, of a divine force that creates, sustains, and preserves the order of things. If however the oneness of divine reality and its presence in man is experienced with such intensity as it is by the author of the gospel in Christ, even an extraordinary linguistic sensitivity may not guard him against using the two languages indiscriminately in his articulation of the two modes of presence. And that is what happens in the Gospel of John when the author lets the cosmogonic `word' of creation blend into the revelatory `word' spoken to man from the Beyond by the `I am.'" [Voegelin OH 4:17-18]
"not an object, but a context of order in which are placed all experienced complexes of reality after the dissociation of the cosmos." [Voegelin Anam:135]
"The field of being ... arises in the symbol-forming consciousness as an expression of experience, in its most comprehensive reach. The mode of this comprehensive and fundamental experience is implicit in the term community. Being is no mere abstraction, but the concretely apprehended divine Ground; nor is being a thing. Neither abstraction nor thing the term community of being expresses the content of man's inner experience of conscious participation in a whole greater than himself, both like and unlike himself. This embracing whole finds its resting point in the divine Ground, which encompasses all that is. The experienced whole is symbolized as "being" (ousia) in philosophical language. The core of the experience forms as the sense of mutual interpenetration, sameness, and oneness of all that falls within the purview of consciousness."This essential oneness, or consubstantiality, is not, however, perfect homogeneity. It is articulated by tensions within the field of consciousness that are identified as distinct polarities. These tensional poles are designated by the symbols that define the structural boundaries of experienced reality. Hence, experienced consubstantiality of being differentiates itself as a community in which man participates as a polarity and member. It is precisely the tension of this partnership that man--and this means the concrete consciousness of each man--experiences and knows as the essence of his being." [Sandoz 1981:147]
"At the beginning of philosophy there is thus the dissociation of a cosmos-full-of-gods into a dedivinized order of things and a divinity whose relations to the newly discovered character of the universe is still unclear. The Hellenic thinkers named that which revealed itself to their differentiating experience being; and ever since then being has been for philosophers the subject of all propositions about order and nature."The tremendous problems of the constitution of being that were raised by the act of differentiation could not be mastered on the first try. The Ionic attempt to identify the nature of being by a material arche was no more than the beginning of a process of thought, which is as yet incomplete. We shall briefly characterize its hellenic development in terms of the three main complexes of problems. They have to do with (1) the dependence of philosophy on the myth and its separation from the myth, (2) the relation of the divine to being, and (3) the relation of man and his cognition to being.
"About the first of these: The Ionic attempt leans on the figure of cosmogonic speculation and borrowed from it the form of the myth in the sense of a story or narration about events in the cosmos. The arche of the Ionians is not any longer a member of the society of gods, but it stands at the beginning like a god from whose initiative a chain of events passes right down to the being that is experienced here and now. The form of the mythic story imposes on the being of the Ionians the character of becoming, the mythical genesis [see: beginning]. Since, however, being is experienced not only as a stream but also reveals constant and recurring forms that abide in the midst of flux, the nature of being as a becoming must necessarily be supplemented by its characterization as abiding and recurrent form. Experiences of this kind motivate the speculation about being as eternally immutable. When they are reinforced by the experience of transcendence, they can elevate the character of permanence of being to the point of the truth of being before which 'coming-into-being is quenched' (Parm. B 8 21). This truth, if not logically compelling but still a compelling vision, indeed results in an inclination of philosophy toward form as the true being. Since the original insight into the nature of being as a coming-to-be goes back to the primary experience of the cosmos and its expression in the myth, one can define metaphysics, inasmuch as it narrows the insight to the form-matter pattern, as the extreme anti-mythical form of philosophizing.
"Second, when the order of being no longer comprises the polytheistic gods, the relation of the divine to being remains in that suspension which can still be sensed in the fragments of Anaximenes... The state of suspension is broken only through the experiences of transcendence, especially that of Parmenides; in it there is a recognition of the divine as the Beyond in relation to a world which in turn, through this insight, becomes immanent, i.e., this-side-of-God. Only after this separation there is no more need for the divine mythically and genetically to send off being into its becoming, and the divine can be related to the appearance of the world as the transcendent-creative, the demiurgic reality. Experience of being and experience of transcendence thus are closely linked with each other, inasmuch as the implications of the still compact experience of being of the Ionians fully unfold through the experience of transcendence. Only in the light of the experience of transcendence, God, as well as the things of the world, obtains that relative autonomy that makes it possible to relate them to the common denominator of being.
"When the gods, having become homeless through the dissociation of the cosmos, are again found in the truth of God, and thereby the relation of the divine to the world has become clear, this clarity still leads to new problems, as soon as the relationship is interpreted in the language of being. The difficulties are caused by a slowly vanishing obscurity on a number of points. In order to avoid extended historical investigations, we prefer to formulate them as theses:
"(1) The being of philosophical experience is not a newly discovered entity to be added to the things that are already given in the primary experience of the cosmos.
"(2) The experience of being differentiates the order of things (a) in its autonomy, (b) in the relation of things with each other, and (c) in its relation to the beginning. It discovers the order of the cosmos.
"(3) The divine ground of being is not an existent thing of the type of things existing in the world.
"(4) Things existing in this world, in addition to the order of their autonomous existence and that of their relations to each other, also have a dimension of order in relation to the divine ground of being. There are no things that are merely immanent.
"(5) The world cannot be adequately understood as the sum total of relations of autonomously existing things. That is not possible even when the directly experienced relations are extrapolated into infinity, for the indefinite progression is itself a world-immanent event. The mystery of a world permeated by divine activity is not eliminated by dissociating the transcendental experience of the cosmos into God and world. The impossibility of construing the world as a purely immanent complex of experiences is even today a central problem of theoretical physics.
"The historical-concrete problems will become more understandable in the light of these theses.
"The cosmos is dissociated by the experience of being, but all that it formerly comprised in a compact way, which includes the gods, must now be interpreted in the language of being. In other words, the now world-transcendent God must philosophically be included in the order of being. This is a philosophical necessity--for where and what would be the world's order of being if it issued not from the divine presence as its creative source?--which runs into the difficulty that divine being and worldly being are not things on either side of a spatial dividing line. Rather, they are indices that are placed on being when the cosmos is definitively dissociated by the experience of transcendence. Now being is nothing but a network of relations of order under the primary experience of things given in the cosmos (not in the world), in the right understanding of which we are interested. Hence as we are thinking about being, which itself is no thing (thesis 1), the prephilosophical, cosmic things have a tendency to suggest themselves as models of being. When, as in Parmenides, God is the model of being, then the being of the world is demoted to doxa, in comparison with the eminently-being being of truth; when the nondivine things provide the model for being, the predicates are derived from immanent existence, and even the predicate being itself can apply to God only by way of analogy. The aporia of this type are not soluble on the basis of objectivizing thought about being. In order to solve them, the philosopher must acknowledge that the figures of cosmic primary experience are still present in his thinking about being, and he must include the truth of the primary experience of a divine-worldly cosmos in his philosophy. For the cosmos may indeed by dissociated into divine and worldly being, by the experience of being, but that dissociating knowledge does not dissolve the bond of being between God and World, which we call cosmos...
"Third, and finally, the experience of being confronts us with the problem of the relation between the order of being and the knowing human being. Contrary to the possibility that the order of being might be unknowable for man or that man with his capacity for mental order might confront a being without order, reality demonstrates a remarkable agreement between order of the mind and order of being... The experience of being activates man to the reality of order in himself and in the cosmos... The background of the experience of being is the primary experience of the cosmos in which man is consubstantial with the things of his environment, a partnership that in philosophy is heightened to the wake consciousness of the community of order uniting thought and being...
"The survey has shown that the dissociation of the cosmos began with the Ionic experience of being but was completed only through the experience of transcendence on the part of later thinkers. The partners in the cosmos separate into an immanent world of relatively autonomous things and a transcendent divine ground of being. Between them is man as that being in whom the dissociation occurs, in whom, however, God and world again are united in the manifold of experiences that elicits the rich vocabulary of philia, pistis, elpis, eros, periagoge, epistrophe, etc., as the corresponding manifold of expressions. Where the question is about the autonomous nature of existing things in the world, there is also the question of the nature of God, without whom, understood as transcending the world, there could not be any this-worldly immanence of things with autonomous natures; and wherever God and world are separated by the experience of being, there is also the question of man, who experiences the order of being and himself as an experiencing being. Man enters into the known truth of his own order, i.e., of his nature, through the experience of himself as one who is experiencing order. This ontological complex makes sense only as a whole. Philosophy becomes senseless if it isolates one of its parts without regard to the others." [Voegelin Anam:75-81]
"It is improper, and fundamentally incorrect, they tell us, to separate knowing from being. Knowing is intimately dependent upon someone's particular way of being in the world, or, as Michael Polanyi would have it, upon the indwelling of a particular person, so that the emergence of new knowledge is understandable only as the expression of the history of his experiential background and concerns, is not immaterial nor inconsequential when it is a matter of determining what we and others are capable of knowing and how new awarenesses come to be. A person's knowledge, that is to say, his very capacity to discover the truth, is a function of his experiential individuality. This understanding of the intimate connection between knowing and being is, of course, the very heart of the Platonic message, the message that so fascinated Voegelin. Indeed, it is the reason for and the explanation of Voegelin's repeated focusing on recollection (anamnesis), which is but another way of speaking of the exploration of 'tacitnesses.'" [Poirier 1992:261]
See metaxy.
"Translation of Greek epekeina. That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding. The proportionate goal of the fundamental tension of existence." [Webb 1981:278]
"The acme of his [Voegelin's] noetic analysis lies in his discernment of the structure of beyond in consciousness, revealed in peak moments in history, whereby the ensuing history of revelation is seen to reveal the beyond of history and revelation. This beyond is discerned in the historical advance of differentiating insights that emerge from revelatory experience." [Morrissey 1994:118]
"... the essence of differentiation is the bifurcation of the cosmos into a natural or immanent world and a deeper stratum of reality known solely through consciousness' finding a Beyond to its own (and thus to all finite) nature..."...The Beyond is not something on the other side of a spatial dividing line. When through searching and passion and insight the extraordinary souls of Israel and Hellas discerned a world-transcendent reality, whether it was the true God of Israel, or Parmenides' Being that is other than the world known by sense experience, or the Platonic-Aristotelian Nous, what they found (or what was revealed to them) was immediately present only in consciousness. The data that forms the 'material' for the insight that the finite cosmos has as its ground a reality that is other than finite being is the 'movement of the soul,' as Voegelin puts it, that discovers its own nature both to presuppose and to be co-constituted by a spiritual reality unrestricted by finite limitations. Unless consciousness finds itself engaged in the questioning tension that so desires to identify the true ground of reality that it finds all the splendors of the cosmos still not enough to explain and satisfy its own restless capacity to think and feel beyond those splendors, then there can be no occasion for an epiphany of transcendence. When such a movement does occur, what has happened, in Voegelin's terms, is that the tension of consciousness toward a reality beyond all cosmic contents has become transparent for its own nature as 'spiritual,' i.e., as related by participation to a ground that is incommensurate with limitation. Of course such a ground is known only in the interiority of meditation and reflection, and so it is nothing in the world that can be pointed to. 'Such terms as immanent and transcendent, external and internal, this world and the other world, and so forth, do not denote objects or their properties ... The terms are exegetic, not descriptive.'
" ... the Beyond of finite things can only be manifest through finite reality. It would be in line with Voegelin's thought to say that transcendence is a further dimension of meaning that is revealed when the finite cosmos is recognized to be inadequate as the source of its own meaning. That is, we become aware of strictly transcendent being when we recognize that finite meaning presupposes an ultimate ground of meaning that can only be non-finite. But while our questioning leads us to recognize this non-finite ground, we also recognize it to lie beyond the scope of our finite imagination and understanding. Thus the restricted dimensions of meaning we understand lead us to acknowledge an unrestricted dimension of meaning that we understand to lie beyond our understanding." [Hughes 1993:52-54]
"...is not a thing beyond the things, but the experienced presence, the Parousia, of the formative It-reality in all things. The Parousia of the Beyond, experienced in the present of the quest, thus, imposes on the dimension of external time, with its past, present, and future, the dimension of divine presence. The past is not simply in the past, nor the future simply in the future, for both past and future participate in the presence of the same divine-immortal Beyond that is experienced in the present of the questioner's participatory meditation. We have to speak, therefore, of a flux of presence endowing all the phases--past, present, and future--of external time with the structural dimension of an indelible present. The flux of presence is the experienced Parousia of the Beyond in time, the mode of time in which the It tells its tale through the events of the metaleptic quest by endowing it with the indelible present; it is the time of the It-tale that demands expression through the capitalized Beginning and End when the presence of the Beyond is to be symbolized in the questioner's account of his quest." [Voegelin OH 5:30]
"...is understood not to be a thing among things, but is experienced only in its formative presence, in its Parousia. In relation to the immortal-divine Beyond even the formerly immortal gods now become things deriving their immortality from their contemplation of the truly immortal reality of the divine Beyond. We witness the beginnings of an understanding of the `gods' as a the experience of divine presence in a more compact mode, as well as an awareness that the `intermediate immortality' of the gods does not dissolve into nothingness when the gods are discovered as a compact language in relation to the differentiated language of the Beyond. Moreover, when the Beyond is fully understood as a non-thing, the being things other than the gods can be fully understood in their thingness. They acquire a `nature,' this nature understood as the form they have received as their own through the formative presence of the Beyond. However, this nature of the things, this rerum natura, can then become, regarding its comparatively stable characteristics, an autonomous matter of exploration, so autonomous indeed that its origin in the formative presence of the Beyond can be forgotten and a capitalized Nature will assume the functions of the It-reality." [Voegelin OH 5:31]
"On whether the idea of a Beyond not intrinsically conditioned by space and time is simply an experience--"[reply from Voegelin] It can simply be experienced as a tensional pole of your experience. It can never be an experience." [Voegelin in Lawrence 1984:110]
"The movement toward the Beyond of the cosmos can become fully articulate only when the Beyond itself has revealed itself. Only when man has become conscious of divine reality as moving his humanity, not through its presence in the cosmos, but through a presence reaching into his soul from the Beyond, can his response become luminous as the immortalizing countermovement toward the Beyond." [Voegelin OH 4:16-17]
"In Christianity, the love of God for man and of man for God or for fellow men when this is an expression of the love of God. Latin translation of the Greek agape. cf. amicitia." [Webb 1981:278]
"1. We can distinguish three type of civilizations:A. cosmological2. They are roughly identical with Toynbee's three generations of civilizations. The main civilizations by generations are:
B. anthropological (or classical)
C. soteriologicalA. Egyptian, Babylonian3. The decisive event in the anthropological civilizations is the discovery of the psyche as the sensorium of transcendence...
B. Sinic, Indic, Israelitic, Hellenic
C. Far Eastern (with offshoot in Japan), Hindu, Byzantine, (with offshoot in Russia), Islamic, Western"1. To the three main types of civilization correspond roughly three main types of legal cultures--roughly, because of the numerous intermediate forms.
A. Cosmological civilizations symbolize order by analogy with cosmic order. The political community is a microcosmos. (Prototype discussed in class: early Chinese symbolism.)
B. Anthropological civilizations symbolize order by analogy with the order of the human soul. And the order of the human soul is achieved through attunement to the unseen transcendent measure. Society is a macroanthropos. (Prototype discussed in class: Plato's conception of society as man written large.)
C. Soteriological civilizations develop more clearly the experience of transcendent revelation and grace that reaches out to all mankind. Spiritual order is differentiated from temporal order. (Prototypes discussed in class: Israelite and Christian revelation, division into spiritual and temporal powers)." [Voegelin, "Supplementary Notes for Students in Jurisprudence Course" in CW 27:76-78]
"Voegelin's term for the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with 'open existence' (q.v.)." [Webb 1981:278]
"Knowledge through or by faith (or love, or hope). A more fundamental (and compact, q.v.) cognitive mode, according to Voegelin, than reason. An important element in the preanalytic cognitive matrix from which reason develops." [Webb 1981:278, also see p. 62]
"According to Voegelin's interpretation of representatives of the late eighteenth-century school of thought that goes by this name (particularly Thomas Reid), a compact (q.v.) form of rationality made up of good habits of judgment and conduct deriving historically from noetic experience, but without a differentiated knowledge of noesis (q.v.)." [Webb 1981:278-279]
"Voegelin's term for experience having distinguishable features yet to be noticed as distinct. Contrasts with 'differentiated' (q.v.)." [Webb 1981:279]
"a something that receives its character as a unit through the pervasive presence of another something, called the paradox of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-ness and It-ness." [Voegelin OH 5:18
"This complex...includes language and truth, together with consciousness and reality. There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness. Words and their meanings are just as much a part of the reality to which they refer as the being things are partners in the comprehending reality; language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth by pursuing truth as a thing intended." [Voegelin OH 5:17]
"language" as used here apparently includes both concept and symbol, see [Lawrence 1984:57]
"I try to give symbol the meaning of expressing the consciousness of the paradoxic It-reality and Thing-reality. From such symbolizations, I distinguish concepts as definitional formulations referring to objects which have existence in time and space. For instance, you cannot have a concept of history, because history is not really in time and space for it involves the future and we have no knowledge of the future. There is no 'thing,' history, about which one can talk at all, as we can about this table existing in time and space. The question can then also be raised concerning the existence of finite symbols in mathematical form which perhaps are more than that ... The mathematical form of the universe is a symbol..."...As far as one can see, a symbol like the beginning of the universe or the universe itself, and so on, is not a concept of anything, but the symbolization of the tension of experience and existence: in time, we exist in relation to the Beyond and so on..." [Voegelin in Lawrence 1984:97]
Voegelin loosely uses the terms so that "concept" is that which intends a thing-reality, while "symbol" expresses the It-reality. He also refers to "the intentionality of conceptualizing science" and "the luminosity of mythic and revelatory symbols." He noted that the "difficulty of assigning precise meanings to the terms" is one of the difficulties associated with the paradoxic structure of language that has become a constant in the philosophers' discourse. Plato recognized the problem and "in the practice of his own philosophizing, coped with it by using both conceptual analysis and mythic symbolization as complementary modes of thought in the quest for truth." [Voegelin OH 5:17-18]
Walker Percy comments on the usage of "symbol" in a form that suggests its association with luminosity rather than intentionality:"...[Susanne Langer] sets forth to perfection the truly distinctive character of the symbol: that it neither signifies another meaning nor constitutes meaning anew, but that it re-presents something. And so she can speak of the truth and falsity of the art symbol, according as it does or does not succeed in representing its subject.
"If, by the same token, it ever be admitted in the field of cognition that the symbolic transformation is not an end in itself, a `need,' but a means, a means of knowing, even as is the art symbol--then the consequences are serious indeed. For it will be knowledge, not in the sense of possessing 'facts' but in the Thomist and existential sense of identification of the knower with the object known. Is it not possible that this startling semantic insight, that by the word I have the thing, fix it, and rescue it from the flux of Becoming around me, might not confirm and illuminate the mysterious Thomist notion of the interior word, of knowing something by becoming something? that the 'basic need of symbolization' is nothing more or less than the first ascent in the hierarchy of knowledge, the eminently 'natural' and so all the more astonishing instrument by which I transform the sensory content and appropriate it for the stuff of my ideas, and that therefore the activity of knowing cannot be evaluated according to the 'degree to which it fills a biological need,' nor according to the 'degree to which the symbol is articulated,' but by nothing short of Truth itself?" [Percy 1975 pp. 296-297]
Cf. Polanyi: "Symbolization therefore entails something quite different from designation or indication. To designate the United States by its name is structurally the very opposite of symbolizing the United States by a flag. To designate the United States is to integrate A NAME to a country, while to symbolize the United States by a flag is to integrate a country to a flag."In surrendering ourselves, we, as selves, are picked up into the meaning of the symbol." [Polanyi 1975:74, 73]
"The intentionality structure of consciousness tends to express itself in concepts; the luminosity structure in symbols. Concepts express or refer to objects in the external world. But symbols arise from the exegesis of the event of luminosity in participatory consciousness in which the truth of the It-reality becomes luminous. They do not refer to objects, in Voegelin's sense, but evoke movements of existence or participatory consciousness. As Voegelin has put it, then, '[t]heir meaning...is not simply a matter of semantic understanding; one should rather speak of their meaning as optimally fulfilled when the movement they evoke in the recipient consciousness is intense and articulate enough to form the existence of its human bearer and to draw him in its turn, into the loving quest of truth'" [Lawrence 1984:57 in part quoting Voegelin "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation"]
"Consciousness is a process... in being. The process can be symbolized and differentiated, but not conceptualized and 'grasped' absolutely in rational categories and systems. Neither the ontological status of consciousness nor the existence it transcends is in doubt. The perception of reality is immediate, but the understanding of it, which comes through the screen of the archetypes, is not. But what is perceived and what is understood is reality. Voegelin was not an idealist: existence has ontological status apart from perception or understanding. He was not an empiricist: the truths of reality are not immediately present to the mind, nor do they impose their own meanings absolutely on the mind. We could not label him a rationalist: archetypes are not 'a priori,' but are interpretive constructions that arise out of the primal vision, based in and on primary phenomena. The mind orders sense-perceptions, but not in an 'a priori' manner. The ordering principle in the psyche imposes itself on the phenomena, but the psyche discovered its ordering principle in the structure of the phenomena as they are presented to it in the primal manner of seeing." [Heilke 1990:32]
"Perhaps the most fundamental principle Voegelin offers theology is his insistence on consciousness as the foundational starting point. It is by our consciousness that we are able to participate in and know reality. To understand the structure and dynamics of our consciousness would serve as a foundation for any theological reflection. For Voegelin, consciousness is the in-between reality of participatory experience. The order of human existence in history and society originates in the order of human consciousness."Any serious inquiry into reality must be rooted in human experience. This chief canon of contemporary thought should always guide theologians in their foundations and methodology. If theology's foundations are not congruent with, nor grounded in, living human experience then they would be wholly inadequate. Less emphasis would be given to ideas and concepts than to the existential reality of personal experience which grounds all symbolizations of reality. In this regard, Voegelin's method is widely empirical in the best sense. His is an empiricism in the original Greek version of it, not the positivist mode of objectivist perception that is available naively to everyone, but the classical mode of personal appeal, of direct persuasion of those whose inner experience conforms to the symbols, images, and analogies left behind by a seeker of truth, to the virtuous who have been graced by the same experiences illuminated by these symbols wand whose souls are ordered by the same reality they point to. This was the method employed by Socrates' dialectical conversations. It has every right to be called science." [Morrissey 1994:247-248]
"The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process--the only process which we know 'from within.' Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness." [Voegelin Anam:21]
"...Husserl presumed to elevate the notion of the 'I' as experienced in its formal position in the nexus of body and world to the status of a pre-experienceable, transcendental consciousness. To Voegelin, this is simply inadmissible. The 'I' pertains only to a definite individual, and as such is an ontologically derivative phenomenon--since ultimately consciousness ... must be said to belong to the timeless ground of time and meaning, about which we know at least that it is beyond whatever we can know or designate except through metaphorical or analogical hints and speculations. Husserl, in other words, had marched the claims of a 'science' of consciousness proudly but irresponsibly onto the terrain of mystical and mythic symbols."As he concludes his letter, Voegelin expresses an abhorrence of the supposedly scientific category of the transcendental ego, regarding it as symptomatic of a modern hubris that rejects the dependence of consciousness on cosmic origins: 'The creation of the transcendental I as the central symbol of philosophy implies the destruction of the cosmic whole within which philosophizing becomes at all possible.' Voegelin makes his own position clear: human consciousness is always an event within a historical context of language, community, world, and cosmos, whose ultimate reference point is a radically transcendent ground of being. Recognition of this full context, as a first principle of any philosophy of consciousness, makes the notion of an 'apodictic beginning' in the modern style of Descartes and Husserl inadmissible. Consciousness is a late event in the unfolding of the cosmos from its mysterious ground; every philosopher and philosophy begins, as Voegelin was later to put it, 'in the middle of the story.'
" ... it should be stressed again that Voegelin never considered his own theory [of consciousness] a novel way of understanding human nature; to him, its merit lies in its recovery of the traditional insights of philosophers, sages, saints, and prophets.
"The most important feature of the letter is Voegelin's insistence that consciousness has the structure not only of an 'I' but also of an 'other-than-I,' since it experiences itself as belonging to the mysterious ground of being. Therefore, the articulation of the meaning of consciousness demands; at some stage, the use of mystical or mythic symbols--that is, symbols that communicate the fact that consciousness participates in a reality whose ultimate meaning transcends human understanding and, in the case of mythical symbols, that suggest an interpretation of that further dimension of meaning consistent with what we do know about reality." [Hughes 1993:20-22]
"The term consciousness, therefore, could no longer mean to me a human consciousness which is conscious of a reality outside man's consciousness, but had to mean the In-Between reality of the participatory pure experience which then analytically can be characterized through such terms as the poles of the experiential tension and the reality of the experiential tension in the metaxy. The term luminosity of consciousness, which I use increasingly, tries to stress this In-Between character of the experience as against the immanentizing language of a human consciousness which, as a subject, is opposed to an object of experience." [Voegelin AR:73]
"...consciousness is not a given to be deduced from outside but an experience of participation in the ground of being whose logos has to be brought to clarity through the meditative exegesis of itself..."Consciousness is the luminous center radiating the concrete order of human existence into society and history." [Voegelin, "Foreword to 'Anamnesis'" in Lawrence 1984:35-36]
"Our fundamental prereflective experience is not a form of object knowledge. There cannot be a separation between a knowing subject and a known object because the subject is a part of the process it knows. Object knowledge (intentionality in Husserl's sense) is only a substructure within our awareness of this larger reality. Ultimately this comprehensive reality is a process that becomes comprehensible itself in the consciousness of individual human beings." [Keulman 1990:92]
"The term `consciousness' had rarely appeared in the first three volumes [of OH]... There had been no previous indication that the central locus of our humanity was consciousness. In the earlier volumes, the term most often used to suggest the core of our humanity was `human nature.' In The Ecumenic Age, it is noted, in passing, that human nature is simply `classical language' for `the structure of consciousness.'[OH 4:252]"...This change of terminology, along with the shift of emphasis it contains, removes the ambiguity of such terms as `human nature' and `experiences of transcendence.' It constricts the area affected by the process of differentiation from elemental to elaborated symbolisms, while at the same time broadening the context in which those symbolisms may be understood to operate through time...
"But consciousness cannot be understood as an object freestanding in the world. Rather, in the manner of field-theory, there exist intertwining strata, spatially and temporally manifested, which are interdependent not only for their reality but for their meaning within reality. Among the elements we perceive as distinct from the process of consciousness is the cosmos itself. But this cosmos is not an object among others; it is the background against which all else exists [OH 4:72]. Consciousness evolves within a cosmos that preexists, and it is principally for this reason that this new work begins with reflection on the limitations that awareness must impose on the meaning of events that occur within the field of consciousness. [OH 4:8]
"...the area of meaning is shifted from the `soul' of [NSP and OH 1-3] to the `consciousness' of [OH 4]. Having made this change of terminology and position, Voegelin then proceeds to define sharply the degree to which insights arising within consciousness can be said to condition those aspects of reality that lie beyond consciousness, or beyond what may be called a `transformation boundary' that interfaces consciousness with that intelligible congeries of entities that lie outside consciousness.
"There is, then, an important shift from the elemental symbols of `soul' and `human nature' to the highly specific and differentiated symbolism of `consciousness,' inexorably carrying, as it does, not only the venerable weight of the classical `psyche,' but to some extent that of the Pauline `pneuma' as well..." [Keulman 1990:133-134]
"...it would be helpful to describe briefly the figure Voegelin adopts to characterize the structure of consciousness. He refers to the situation of consciousness as existing in the Metaxy,' Plato's `In-Between.' The figure is well chosen. While it refers specifically to the state between Anaximander's Apeirontic depth and the noetic height of the later philosophers it connotes, in The Ecumenic Age, much more. It is not simply the `In-Between,' the present moment that divides the symbolisms of the Beginning from those of the Beyond, though it is certainly and decisively that."...the insights which extend the field of awareness derive from the `motion' of the psyche itself. Like the photon, consciousness possesses no `rest mass.' Consciousness is a processive, not an objective, reality; and like a wave, it cannot be said to possess a `place' or a `time' or to exist without motion. The insights flow not from `outside' or `inside,' but from the movement of the process itself. Even given the nonpredictability of their occurrence in any given situation, the occurrence of such insights is certainly predictable since they are fundamental to process of developing consciousness.
"Thus the division between consciousness and the cosmos ceases to be relevant only when we speak of the entire process, the reality of which both consciousness and cosmos are constituents. In fact, the very differentiation of reality within the process is dependent upon the bipolar `inside-outside' of the individual transformation boundary since that differentiation occurs as the psyche `moves' through perceptions of both consciousness and cosmos.
"...The field through which the development of consciousness takes place extends in relation to a vast and varied pattern of experience. The transformation boundary, which limits and controls the passage of information into concrete individual psyches and the flow of communication outward from them into the world inhabited by others (to whom the communication presents itself as experience), establishes another aspect of reality in that no exterior experience can be unequivocal because it must be transformed by the very act of perception into an intelligible symbolism that relates in some way to the field of individual awareness. Similarly, no internal experience, when transformed into a symbolic communication, can avoid what Cassirer has called `the curse of mediacy' in that the symbol cannot be congruent and equal to the experience as it passes from the psyche into the cosmos." [Keulman 1990:137-138]
"symbolized by the complex of consciousness-reality-language and the paradox of intentionality and luminosity, of thing-reality and It-reality, is not simply 'there' as the structure of a finite object to be occasionally discovered. It is not a 'thing' to be described or not, but has its reflective presence in consciousness itself. Whatever the mode of consciousness may be in the plurality of its diversification, whether it appears on the scale of compactness and differentiation, or of formation and deformation, it is reflectively present to itself in its symbolization." [Voegelin OH 5:44]
also see [Voegelin, "Meditative Origins of Philosophy" in Lawrence 1984:48ff]
"The truth is there can never be any symbolism that is exempt from being one more historically equivalent truth. Nor is there an absolute experience that can found such an absolute system. There are only equivalent experiences and their equivalent symbols. To symbolize these constants is not to engage in system building, for the constants lie on the level of 'depth' which is discerned by philosophers examining the process of differentiation in their own consciousness." [Morrissey 1994:129]
"For Voegelin, the abiding and comprehensive constant in human existence is the search for meaning. 'What is permanent in the history of mankind is...man himself in search of his humanity and its order.' ["Equivalences of Experience," 115] This permanent search for truth and order to which Voegelin refers is the immediate and ongoing dynamic principle of each individual and every society, insofar as existence is a struggle for the experience of meaningfulness, of meaning fulfilled." [Hughes 1993:74]
"...if we analyze the search for equivalent experiences engendering equivalent symbolisms, we are driven to conclude that the sought-for constant lies below the equivalent experiences that engender the equivalent symbolisms. This constant may be symbolized as the 'depth,' but 'it does not furnish a substantive content in addition to our experiences of God, man, the world, and society, of existential tension, and of participation.' That is, the 'depth' is not an area whose topography may be charted by various scientific discourses. Then, what is it? We have seen that it is not a reality experienced in addition to those just indicated. Nor is it a 'perspective' on the field of reality as a whole' rather, it indicates, to use Plato's language in the Timaeus, the underlying reality that makes God and man, world and society, partners in a common order, the core experience of which is trust in the oneness of reality, in its coherence, lastingness, and intelligibility. 'There is a depth below consciousness,' Voegelin said, 'but there is no depth below depth in infinite regress.' Accordingly, the depth yields up no permanent truths but only equivalent experiences of the primordial field of reality."We may formulate this insight another way: there is no constant in history because the field of equivalent experiences and symbols is not an object or a collective phenomenon about which generalizations might be offered. New insights or new truths are not new realities superior in some way to old ones; they are superior insights into the same reality. What the search for constancy brings up from the depth is the process of reality in the mode of presence in consciousness that
"'Leaves a trail of equivalent symbols in time and space. To this trail we can, then, attach the conventional name of 'history.' History is not a given, as we have said, but a symbol by which we express our experience of the collective as a trail left by the moving presence of the process [Voegelin, "Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization"].'"[Cooper 1986:211-212]
"Term adopted by Voegelin from John A. Wilson (The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man) for the sensed underlying unity of reality, the common participation of all levels of being in the tension of existence toward