Cosmic Disorder and the Endless WTF?!

Which is kind of an oxymoron, being that kosmos = order.

In order to reorder and reorient ourselves, let's begin by repeating the aphorism with which we ended yesterpost:

The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous is the claim of certifying the competence of those who exercise it. A diploma of dentistry is respectable, but one of philosophy is grotesque.

Okay, but why?! 

Because philosophy is not some body of knowledge one assimilates and masters, rather, a way of life with no subcelestial end; or rather, oriented to a trans-cosmic end which no one reaches in this life. 

In any life? Different question. For now let's confine ourselves to the curious structure of this life, albeit a structure that is by no means self-explanatory. 

Sometimes the Answer is the disease that kills curiosity. Voegelin talks about pre-Socratic thinkers such as Parmenides who

concentrated the preanalytical content of his vision in the nonpropositional exclamation Is! The experience was so intense that it tended toward the identification of Nous and Being...    

Which, if I am not mistaken, is essentially a conflation and fusion of (¶) with the vertical depth we've been discussing. 

Again, this depth is a kind of "projection" of O, so to fuse it with (¶) is to forget all about the transcendent ground. 

I suppose it equates to a kind of pantheistic nature mysticism, a seductive error that will recur down through the centuries, in which knower and known "fuse into the one true reality," 

only to be separated again when the logos became active in exploring the experience and in finding the suitable language symbols for its expression.

This differentiation and symbolism only come later, with Plato on the one hand and the Jewish prophets on the other. 

In other words, there is the emergence of the idea of philosophy as loving engagement with the transcendent ground, taking place in this ambiguous but ubiquitous tension of the "in between." You might say it's that place where we have nowhere to lay our heads, AKA the (human) World. 

Hence, philosophy in the classic sense is not a body of "ideas" or "opinions" about the divine ground dispensed by a person who calls himself a "philosopher," but a man's responsive pursuit of his questioning unrest to the divine source that has aroused it.

In our lingo, it is the new and improved Is! referenced above, now with the added ingredient of WTF?, which we symbolize as the endless (?!). This is the very form of the eternal, light-filled Question that is Superior to Any Answer We Might Give. 

Anything less than (?!) is... less than (?!), or either (!) or (?) alone, the former again going to some variety of immanent nature mysticism, the latter to misosophic or philodoxic skepticism. 

And now you have some idea of what Voegelin means -- or I take him to mean --when he says (with my pneumaticons added in brackets):  

The consciousness of questioning unrest [?!] in a state of ignorance [o]  becomes luminous to itself [n] as movement [↑] in the psyche [¶] toward the ground [O] that is present in the psyche as its mover [↓].

I realize that this is an annoyingly unfamiliar way of putting it, but then again, it is actually an intimately familiar way of putting it, because this is either what you are always doing, or avoiding doing via some pneumopathology, ontological deformation, or projection of an ideological second reality. 

I guess the most remarkable thing is that it works. Except when it doesn't work, and coincidentally, the next section of this essay is called Psychopathology, which was always one of my favorite subjects back down in grad school: nuts & sluts, klutzes & putzes, the whole menagerie of human folly. Come to think of it, I even dreamt of one last night.

This patient was so annoying I could barely tolerate it. I was taking copious notes, but later in the dream a wind blew the notes all over the place, and I was futilely scrambling to gather them up and reassemble them into some coherent order. 

But it's not just my dream patient, for "the phenomena of existential disorder through closure to the ground of reality" has been around forever, or rather, is a permanent possibility of man qua man. For there are always folks 

who live in the one and common world of the Logos which is the common bond of humanity,

and the many folkers -- the rank & foul amongus -- "who live in the several private worlds of their passion and imagination" (I would rather say fantasies), i.e., "the sleepwalkers who take their dreams for reality."

This state of "revolt against the divine ground" is "a disease or madness" and prima facie evidence of existential disorder.

When this latter becomes a mass phenomenon... This is a timely subject, as it is a point of convergence with Girard (again, I'm reading a book called René Girard: All Desire is a Desire for Being), and I'm seeing implicit connections everywhere. That's my problem, but in the next post I will make it your problem. 

I'll leave off with this pregnant -- and not just a little bit -- passsage: "A man is altogether raving"

when he is ignorant about his self and what concerns it; this ignorance is the vice opposite to the virtue of true insight; it is to be characterized as an existential state in which the desires become uncontrolled or undirected, a state of fluttering uncertainty and overexcitement of passions, a state of being scared or terrified because existence has lost its direction (Voegelin, emphasis mine and Girard's).