The Truth About Man, God, and Cosmos

I'm about 100 pages into The Eric Voegelin Reader, and while many passages are highlighted, when I go back and review them in order to build a new post out of them, it occurs to me that I've already assimilated it all so thoroughly that it's almost a sort of "backward movement," so to speak. 

In other words, I've already plagiaphrased Voegelin into my own blogatory substance, so it's like a reversion from the whole back to the parts or something. If you write a paragraph it presupposes knowledge of words and letters.  

In yet other words, it's analogous to, say, building a vast global empire from the self-evident truth that All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and then going from all the vast historical developments and entailments -- the tree, so to speak -- back to the seed. 

What you I trying to say, Bob?

Well, one thing I'm trying to say is that this great distance between seed and tree is precisely what allows the left to not only forget all about the former (the seeds of liberty) and pretend that the tree grew from utterly different seeds -- say, racism, or sexism, or imperialism, etc. Only this kind of systematic "ontological amnesia" can redound to someone as stupid as a Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

A meme is worth a thousand other words:

With this in mind, let's review some of Vogelin's anticipatory plagiarism of me, and see how we got here.

We begin with the Raccoon principle that man qua man is situated in the evolving "space" between immanence and transcendence. This has not always been obvious, but it has long been noticed by historians that the discovery occurred simultaneously in diverse civilizations that had no contact with one another, in what Jaspers called the axial age (AA) between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age).

During this period of time we see the appearance of Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Upanishads and the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, the prophets of ancient Israel, Peak Philosophy in Greece, etc. 

It cannot be sufficiently stressed that this does not represent the "invention" of some kind of ideology, but rather, the discovery of the truth of man, God, and cosmos. Indeed, Voegelin suggests that "one might almost say that before the discovery of the psyche man had no soul."

Man had a soul, of course, but prior to this literally radical (i.e., down to the ontological roots) discovery, it was more compact and undifferentiated, with a shifting and unstable conflation of immanence and transcendence. 

Not to get ahead of our skis, but postmodernity in particular is characterized by a retrograde and regressive re-conflation of these primordial categories -- hence Voegelin's gag that modernity is characterized by Gnosticism (the bad kind, as opposed to the everyday gnosis which is simply the direct perception of transcendent reality).

Note that the deeper point about the AA is not that it involves a new kind of explicit knowledge, but rather, a new kind of knower, so to speak:

one would rather have to say that the psyche itself is found as a new center in man at which he experiences himself as open toward transcendent reality. 

To be precise,  

this center is not found as if it were an object that had been present all the time and only escaped notice. The psyche as the region in which transcendence is experienced must be differentiated out of a more compact structure of the soul; it must be developed and named.

What is it that is seen, and what shall we name it? For a variety of reasons I unnamed it O, and as for those who saw it, let us call them seers, for example, the seers who composed the Upanishads. 

If Voegelin is correct then, we can consult these seers and see the same timeless truths they saw, since what they saw about man, God, and the cosmos will always be true.

Note that this "openness of the soul is experienced through the opening of the soul itself," which sounds like a tautology, but it is very much like saying that the discovery of life is experienced through living, or thought by thinking; one term is meta in relation to the other, so it's not a circle but a spiral. 

Through the opening of the soul the philosopher finds himself in a new relation to God; he not only discovers his own psyche as the instrument for experiencing transcendence but at the same time discovers the divinity in its radically nonhuman transcendence. 

Which we characterized as the O <--> (¶) dialectic way before we discovered Voegelin, because he and I are in the orbit of the sophsame attractor. This doesn't mean we are correct, because we could be delusional or ignorant or tenured.  

Just kidding. Of course are correct. We're just humble, that's all.  

The truth of man and the truth of God are inseparably one. Man will be in the truth of his existence when he has opened his psyche to the truth of God; and the truth of God will become manifest in history when it has formed the psyche of man into receptivity for the unseen measure.

This receptivity and seeing require a turning around -- a metanoia, a coonversion, a re-pentance. Voegelin's mythic archetype for this conversion is embedded in Plato's Parable of the Cave, which memorializes "the turning-around from the untruth of human existence as it prevailed in the Athenian sophistic society to the truth of the Idea."

This parable accounts for cavedwellers such as Jesse or Ketanji Brown Jackson living in the darkness of the Big Lie: "This lie is not an ordinary lie in daily life for which there may be extenuating circumstances." Rather, "it is the supreme lie of ignorance, of agnoia of the soul."

A metacosmic soul sickness, and then some. Nor is this just our "opinion," rather, it is Petey's opinion too, therefore rock-solid. 

To be continued...