Good Questions and Questionable Men

If Christ is the answer, what is the question? And what if you have a different question? Must you first have the "right question"? If that's the case, then the correct question is already a kind of answer.

Hmm. If you could ask one question, what would it be? Or, is there one question that would somehow subsume and answer all the others?   

We're still making our way through an essay called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin cites a text called the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?" Good question!

Meaning and fact. There's at least one buried premise in there -- that existence is a "fact." But facts are in existence, so how could existence be one of its contents? Is existence the set of facts, or the sum of facts? No, that can't be, because there are no facts in the absence of an intellect to observe and select them. 

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

How can "faith" be the answer to any question? Questions have answers. It doesn't matter how much faith one has in the answer if the answer is just wrong, otherwise I would have done better in school.

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the first is abstract, the second embodied.

I first thought about this question back down in grad school, vis-a-vis the difference between theoretical knowledge -- book learnin' -- and clinical experience of what the books could only try to capture in words. The former is primary, the words and theories secondary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by the theory. 

For example, if you believe the mind is structured by id, ego, and superego, or that the Oedipal Complex is central to human development, then that's what you'll see. You have all the answers, but you've forgotten all about the question. That's me in the spotlight, losing my religion!

In this way, the Answer can even be a kind of existential defense mechanism, and this process is near-universal in those whom we flatter with the name intellectual. Show me a self-styled intellectual, and I'll show you a man living in a matrix. 

It may be a complex or eccentric matrix or (more likely) a stupid and collective one, but it will be just a secondary reality superimposed on the one-and-only reality (reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality).

What we call "dogma" is a quintessential case of true knowledge that can render itself "untrue" via this process of superimposition, thus, it inevitably cuts both ways. In the bOOk, I used the symbols (k) and (n) to distinguish between mere theoretical/factual and existential/experiential knowledge, respectively. 

Recall what was said in the previous post about

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

Now, on the one hand, this is no more difficult than it has ever been: just hand someone the Catechism, and you're done. But unless this book full of (k) somehow translights into a person full of (n), it's a giant Fail. 

Throughout this compilation, Voegelin alludes to one of his main ideas, which is that we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma "is" the experience instead of referring to one:

The believers are at rest in an unenquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Ouch! But we all know the type. The operative words are at rest, unenquiring, intellectual metabolism, and enigma of existence. As I explained in said bOOk, (k) can actually become (-k) if it is detached from (n).

And not just in religion! To put it mildly, and without insultainment. Yet. 

Again, (k) can essentially serve as an epistemological and existential defense mechanism against (n). It occurs, for example, 

where the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

You know the type. They may be perfectly nice people, and I'm thinking of one in particular who asked me, When were you saved? It was in the context of one of my typical spiritual flights of funzy, and I couldn't help noticing a twinge of suspicion, as if I were the sinister Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter, and she were the skeptical Ben Harper:

--What religion do you profess, Preacher?                  

--The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us. 

--I'll bet! (ma.com/movie_scripts/n/night-of-the-hunter-script.html)

Now, the intellectual metabolism mentioned above is none other than -- if you've ever read the mysthead at the toppermost of the blog -- the religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us.

But hold on just a minute there Reverend Bob -- How come you got that stick-knife hid up in your blankets, Preacher?

Not mine! It's Dupree's. He smuggled it right in under the noses of them censors!

Clearly, everyone and anyone can and does have "spiritual experiences." The homicidal Reverend Powell even converses with God: 

Well now, what's it to be, Lord?

Another widow?

How many's it been? Six?

Twelve?

I disremember.

You say the word, Lord. I'm on my way.

You always send me money to go forth and preach your word.

A widow with a little wad of bills hid away in the sugar bowl.

Lord, I am tired.

Sometimes I wonder if you really understand.

Not that you mind the killings. Your book is full of killings.

Well now, what's it to be, Lord? Another post? How many's it been? 3,000? 

4,661?!

At any rate, you see the problem of mere untutored experience being the guide.

Nevertheless, there is the difficulty of restoring "the inquiring mind to the position that is his due" and of "regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening."

We have to go back to the Right Question alluded to at the top, to 

"Man the questioner," the man moved by God to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause of being. The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man's experience of his tension toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other... 

This tension of the "in between" is where both question and answer arise; and the very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Sounds a little tautological to me. 

You should talk! No, it all depends on whether or not one is an open system, vertically speaking:

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

Fair enough. Now what was the question?

To be continued....

Approximations to the Truth, and In a Manner of Speaking

Next up in our review of The Voegelin Reader is a lecture called The Gospel and Culture, in which he discusses one of our perennial bloggeral subtexts, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

You probably didn't read that lengthy post from a few days back, nor do I blame you, but there was something in there about God needing a partner (so to speak) in this epic buddhi picture we call Life. A few relevant -- and unavoidably orthoparadoxical and "in a manner of speaking" -- points from the previous post:

--Eckhart wrote that “In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and of all things... And if I did not exist, God would also not exist.” The God we can know cannot exist without our first “conceiving” and giving birth to him -- God needs our assistance, or cooperation, to manifest herebelow.

--For Eckhart, God is eternally taking on human nature, not just once, but for all time, in the ground of our being. Eckhart adheres to the ancient Christian idea that God becomes man so that man may become God -- not literally, but in the sense of transforming the ineffable God-beyond-being into a local manifestation of his presence. 

--The reason we may know God is because he is perpetually being born in the depths of our soul, but only if we cooperate and act as “midwife” to the process. God gives birth by speaking the Word, but we are only born (from above) by hearing it and conforming ourselves to it.

--God alone properly has real being. God does not understand us because he exists -- rather, he ex-ists by our understanding of him, which is ultimately his self-understanding. This is why Eckhart says the eye with which we see God is the same eye by which he sees us. We are each of us an opportunity for God to exist. Or perhaps more accurately, without us, God is orphaned in the cosmos, with no earthly parents to (p)raise him, just atoms with no evolution.

--We are perpetually giving birth to God, while God is perpetually giving birth to us. Creation means "giving existence to," or bringing something out of nothing. God’s creativity gives existence to us, but we give existence to God in our creative response to him. 

--In making present our potential and becoming who we are, we take part in God’s creation of us, which paradoxically gives birth to both God and to ourselves. In surrendering to, and cooperating with, our own mysterious ground of being, our self-knowing and God’s self-knowing become a single act of essential knowledge. We give birth to the living God.

Yada yada. Again, we're just trying to "make the Word intelligible to those who are willing to listen," starting with me. If my understanding helps someone else in understanding, then that's a bonus. 

Perhaps I should add that I literally don't understand any of it if it is presented in a straight-up dogmatically exoteric manner. Makes no sense at all, and what does it have to do with me? There's a kind of interior translighting mechanism without which it all sounds like an extremely unlikely story that one must force oneself to believe. But I would be lying if I said I could somehow disable my (¶). 

I need to write a post on how esoterism isn't what people think it is. It's not Gnosis, the bad kind, rather, just a deeper and more integral understanding of the kernel inside the shell, the formless essence of the form, of the principle of the entailments, the implicate ground beneath the explicate surface, etc.

Voegelin, for example, takes a very "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation"... and radically advanced through the differentiating symbolizations of classical philosophy. 

So, not only does Voegelin take revelation seriously -- or because he does -- he assesses it in terms of its pure truth value in providing a more advanced and differentiated symbolization of our ontological situation. (Which is not to suggest that Christ is "only" a symbol, rather, the Word which is the principle of all symbolization, more on which later.)

Another way of saying it is that Christianity serves no useful purpose for us if it isn't simply true. But the entailments and consequences of this truth are infinite.

On to the lecture. Now, if we are still trying to make the Word intelligible in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

Which implies that the same fate awaits it if we fail to do the same. We have to enter the sensibility of the time in order to understand the appeal of the gospel -- not as faith per se, but as intellectual key to the whole durned human comedy. At the time, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

Early on it was understood that the gospel and philosophy were neither opposed nor exactly complementary, rather, "the same Word of the same God," only "at a later state of its manifestation in history" -- like what Augustine said about Christianity having always existed. For

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason, whether Greeks or barbarians, have in a sense been Christians.

Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection [a perfection we are still trying to grasp, Bob might add]; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ.

He cites, for example, Justin, for whom "the difference between gospel and philosophy is a matter of successive stages in the history of reason."

That is certainly how it has been for me, i.e., from psychology to philosophy to metaphysics and theology. More importantly, that is how it is for our pal Nicolás. He aphorizes for me when he says

He who speaks of the farthest reaches of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. 

There was never any conflict between reason and faith, but between two faiths. 

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason. 

Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are approximations to the truth.

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Or, in a Word, 

Truth is a person. 

 And a relation.

The Key to the Whole Durned Human Comedy

At the end of All Desire Is a Desire For Being is a list of maxims compiled by the editor. Girard is no Dávila, but nor is anyone else. And in fairness to Girard, these are extracted from larger works, not necessarily intended to be standalone wisecracks. 

I might add that although I have no compunction to playgiarise with Girard, he has never done for me quite what he does for esteemed acolytes such as Bailie, for whom it is as if he has discovered the key to the whole freakin' world enigma, maybe even recovered the Cosmic Area Rug that ties the Room of Being together. But that's my job. 

I mean, I take comfort in knowin' Girard's out there revealin' the secret history of sacred violence for all us sinners, and showin' how the scapegoat mechanism perpetuates the whole durned human tragicomedy down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time... 

'Course, I didn't like seein' the Injuns go, but then again, you only die once, but victimhood is forever. Frankly, victimhood has no history, nor does its kissin' cousin, redemptive envy.     

It's not just my opinion that Girard has one Big Idea, but his opinion too:

I stand revealed by these days of debate as a man of few ideas, so simple in their principle that perhaps they amount to no more than a single idea. It would in that case qualify as an idée fixe. 

I-dee what? 'Course I never been to France, and I ain't never seen no queen in her damn undies as the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after readin' this anthology, I guess I seen somethin' every bit as stupifyin' as ya'd see in any a them fancy colleges, and in English too. 

Send any masterpiece you like my way, literary, cultural or religious, and it will be quite a miracle if I do not come back to you, a month or a year later, with my mimetic desire, my sacrificial crisis and above all... that bloody atrocity with which I am infatuated, the primordial, founding act of violence: the collective murder of the deity.

You can kill God -- hell, you did kill God -- but I also happen to know that there's lil' Son on the way, who rises in the ashes of our own attempted deicide. 

You'd think that would be the end of the story, and it is the end of the story, but post-Christian history is the story of denyin' the Story.

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.

Look at the headlines, and every damn day is a struggle of naked libido dominandi in its damn undies, fightin' over the privilege of sacred Victimhood. It's an endless game of Who's the Real Victim Here? Like that smart feller Ace o' Spades says.

Isn't Expecting an Impartial and Unbiased Investigation of Hunter Biden Just Like Slavery All Over Again? https://ace.mu.nu/archives/405401.php

 Ya' see,

No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.

Least of all our persecutors. Hell, 

Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

Now, Victim, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. 

Tell ya' what, you try that big city horseshit in a small town -- cuss out a cop, spit in his face, stomp on the flag and light it up... Hell, you ain't no victim, but yer' about to be. Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk, carjack an old lady, pull a gun on the owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon, and you're entering a world of pain.  

Political correctness? Why that's just

the religion of the victim detached from any form of transcendence. 

That ain't what I learned in church. But then, I ain't never been to Bowdoin college, and I sure ain't been to no Harvard. 

Scapegoating is effective only if it is nonconscious. Then you do not call it scapegoating; you call it justice.

Hell, you call it social justice, which wraps her all up in that flowery progressive bovine excrement, but I know Ellie May's parlor from her daddy's barn.

Why is Christianity s'durned unpopular for these folks? 'Cause

Instead of incriminating a single person -- it indicts us all.

And

Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.  

Especially progressive religion, where

It is now no longer possible to persecute except in the name of victims.

Wal, I hope you folks enjoyed yourselves... Catch you further on down the trail, if the victims don't catch ya' first! 

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). 

The Autobiography of a Raccoon

So, we were talking about the vertical hierarchy, which spans every mode of existence from the immanent apeiron below to the divine nous above. In between are such familiar landmarks as inanimate nature, vegetative nature, animal nature, the passions, the local ego, and the nonlocal intellect/nous. 

Again, there is depth at both ends, and even a kind of inverse mirror image; the apeiron, of course, despite its mysterious depth, cannot be conflated with, or collapsed into, the divine ground. 

But this doesn't stop people from trying, for example, Schopenhauer. His one Big Idea was precisely this collapse and conflation. You could even say he is a sort of "immanent mystic," or apostle of immanence: there is no divine ground, and I am it! 

Schopenhauer was neither the first nor last to overlay a second reality over the first. It's pretty much what humans do in that projective space alluded to a couple of posts ago. 

How do we avoid f-

a-

    l-

         l-

               i-

                     n-

                            g

for this, i.e., living in the comfort and safety of our own projected delusions? Frankly there's only one way, but it involves God -- specifically, God breaking into what is otherwise necessarily a closed system. 

The man does not escape from his prison of paradoxes except by means of a leap of faith.

Interestingly, the choice is ours. This freedom is the basis of man's dignity, of his shame, and of his shamelessness, in that order. Depending on how you look at it, a shameless man has ether sunk beneath the human or is all too human. All I know is you can't shame a Democrat.  

Liberty intoxicates man as a symbol of independence from God.

And 

God allows man to raise barricades against the invasion of grace. 

So, thank God for atheism!

Are there really two modes of existence -- existence in truth and existence in untruth? NO. For there can be only one truth of existence and countless alternatives. 

A few lines are enough to demonstrate a truth. Not even a library is enough to refute an error.

Tried. Check. 

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

Been there. Check. 

Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.

Of whom I am first. Check. 

Foolish ideas are immortal. Each generation invents them anew.

So far. Check. 

The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them. 

One of my favorites, but Nietzsche said much the same thing -- that most philosophies are but unwitting autobiographies. What he did not say is that the death of God isn't a fact, rather, a confession, and a shameful one at that. Supposing one is capable of shame.

Now, ideologies are quintessential second realities. Think of the tranny contagion, which is literally projected and superimposed upon the primary reality of biology. 

Similarly, "progressive economics" is projected onto the economy, feminism onto sexual differences, homosexuality onto sexuality, CRT onto race, AGW onto the weather, and a functioning mind onto Biden.

Everything about the left is a second reality -- and proud of it!

It is also the Autobiography of a Fool. Dreams & Schemes from My Marxist Father.

Okay, I'll bite: First Reality. What is it? 

It's a little orthoparadoxical, or even goround zero of what Bob means by Orthoparadox as such, and how to put it? 

The most elegant way to put it is:

O

(↓→↑)

(¶) 

It is the simplest way, all other ways being number two or lower.

Really? Or is this just the embarrassing Autobiography of a Raccoon?

Man is much like -- I said like -- an Immanent God. Which he cannot be unless he is a kind of projection of the transcendent God -- the image and likeness, or something. 

This accounts for the quasi-infinite apeironic depth of (¶). I mean, have you ever looked down there? Circumnavelgazed the whole existentialada? 

Supposing you have, then you know what the Aphorist means when he says... many things, among which some of my favorites are:

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

True, but I did get a Ph.D. out of it.

Man is the animal that imagines himself to be Man.

Been there; strictly speaking, no God, no man.

Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God.

Done that. Check.

Pure (↑) with no (↓)?

When it finishes its "ascent," humanity will find tedium waiting for it, sitting on the highest peak.

That and a Ph.D. 

Now,

Modern man seeks above all a religion that denies grace [↓].

The soul [¶] is the task of man.

Then again, 

Man is an obligation that man often violates.

The truth is that we exist, and cannot not exist, between the tension of the two poles referenced above:

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and Man. 

There's also a good one that says something to the effect that the punishment for the man who seeks himself is that he finds it. That and a Ph.D.

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.

Spiritual Illness and Cosmic Idiocy

Longest post ever?  

Or just more click bait promising more than it can deliver?  

Too soon to tell, but I slept a little late, so let's get after it, beginning at the end of the previous post, vis-a-vis the difficulty engaging in debate with ideo-illogical matrix dwellers: 

behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurks the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared (Vogelin).

How convenient that everyone who disagrees with you is out of touch with reality! Must be nice.

Remind me why you're here? I have friendlier voices in my head, you know.

The Common Ground of Existence in Reality. What is it, and does it exist? If it doesn't, then this post is over. If it does, then somebody needs to do something about it! 

We'll provisionally go with the latter: that there is a Common Ground of E. in R. 

In fact, I would say that it exists necessarily as the very basis for rational thought and communication. It is another way of characterizing the Absolute that is of necessity ontologically prior to the relative. Invert this relation and you end in the absurdity of absolute relativism, which of course obliterates the very possibility of reason (and abolishes man in the process). 

With such an interlocutor, rational argument cannot prevail, because 

the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted...

Instead, this infracosmic bounder "has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence" which Voegelin calls second reality. Moreover, what appears obvious to the person living in a second reality will appear more or less irrational or delusional to us, while we will appear anywhere from naive to malevolent to them.

The first thing to notice is how this all takes place in a kind of "projective space," which means that we have to dig down a little deeper and investigate the very nature of the psyche. For example, is this projective process pathological in itself, or are there healthy forms of projection? If so, what would constitute "healthy" projection? 

These questions will take us somewhat far afield. We'll address them more thoroughly as we proceed, but at this juncture I will just say that projection is a kind of side effect of the very intersubjectivity that makes us human. 

And this will take us veryvery far afield, but this in turn is grounded in the "projection," so to speak, that goes in in the immanent Trinity. Don't take it literally, but looked at this way, the Son is a kind of "projection" of the Father, as the Incarnation is a projection of the Son into human nature. All in a manner of speaking. Don't worry, we'll tuck in this loose shirt as we proceed. 

Voegelin is so verbose that sometimes I just want to blurt it out and cut to the chase. Let's just stipulate that there is Common Ground of Existence in Reality, which is both infinitely intelligible and ultimately unknowable. Let us call it O.

Again, the existence of O is not on a scale of probability, for either it exists necessarily or is necessarily impossible (and what is necessary is also eternal, and how do we now that?!). 

Not only must we pick one -- call this binary O or Ø -- but should we choose the latter, we must live with the consequences and entailments (or deny them). Expressed in mythopoetic terms, it is the choice every man faces at every time in the Garden referenced way down in Genesis 3.  

Now, man is a "hierarchical being" spanning every mode of existence, and let us count the modes, from the bottom to the top of the scale. For starters, there is something like O at both ends of the spectrum -- unless you happen to know where the Big Bang comes from (for it bangs yet), or how life sprouts from matter, or how the spirit blossoms from animality (and vice versa). 

Voegelin uses the clunky term "apeiron" for the depth of being. Freud called it the "unconscious," but it's not as if he discovered it, rather, just reduced it to something far less than what it is. Among other epistemic sins (chief of these being reductionism), he committed the old fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

I won't bore you with the whole story, but (speaking of my old racket) the conception of this depth evolved over the decades, at least for some psychoanalytic thinkers.

For example, my late pal, James Grotstein -- actually, we've only become pals since his death. Prior to that he was my psychoanalyst, this being back in the '90s. Here is something I wrote about it way back in 2006, in a post called  On Slipping the Surly Bonds of the Ego and Giving Birth to the Living God (https://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/11/on-slipping-surly-bonds-of-ego-and.html).

Sorry about the length, but it it kept my interest, and besides, I'm under a time constraint anyway. It's a little too romantic for our current tastes, but we'll just let it fly and tuck in the loose shirt afterwards:  

The psychoanalyst James Grotstein has attempted to rescue the concept of the unconscious from its unfortunate reduction to a mere cauldron of uncivilized desires and impulses, and restore it to its true place as a mysterious alter-ego, or “stranger within” that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being merely “primitive and impersonal” (although it surely includes primitive “lower vertical” elements as well), it is “subjective and ultra-personal,” a “mystical, preternatural, numinous second self” characterized by “a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.”

Like his teacher Bion, Grotstein appreciates the spiritual implications of the unconscious as it manifests in our moment-to-moment experience. Understanding this higher aspect of the unconscious enriches one’s spiritual life, if for no other reason than it represents such a comparatively larger aspect of consciousness itself. Otherwise, it’s a little like living your life in a tiny boat and never looking around to appreciate the immense ocean upon which your insignificant vessel is floating -- of which your vessel is actually composed, because in reality there is no “ego” and "unconscious.” 

Rather, there is more of a wave-particle complementarity between them, so it is a mistake to either deny one half of the complementarity or to blend them together. The wave belongs to the ocean, while the ocean does not belong to the wave (with at least one rare exception).

Grotstein conceptualizes the unconscious as a sort of “handicapped” god who needs a partner in order to accomplish its mission. The goal of psychotherapy is not merely knowledge of, or insight into, the unconscious, but to establish a sort of dynamic collaboration between the phenomenal ego -- our conscious self -- and the “ineffable subject of being” (O) upon which the ego floats and into which it infinitely extends.

Through a creative resonance between these two aspects of ourselves, we are much more spontaneously alive, creative, and “present.” It is like adding another dimension (or two or three) of depth to our being, through which we become something that has never actually been, but is somehow more real than what we presently are. In this ceaselessly trinitarian dynamic, a new entity emerges, a “transcendent subject” that lives harmoniously in the dialectical space between our foreground self and the mysterious background subject that surrounds and vivifies it.

This novel way of looking at the unconscious has much in common with another one of my favorite spiritual cartographers, Meister Eckhart. Eckhart, like Petey, often relies upon various rhetorical devices such as paradox, pun, and oxymoron in the effort to use language to transcend language. Language cannot ultimately capture God, and yet, it is all we have to try to mark out the torahtery and communicate the experience to others. As a result, Eckhart said many things that are easy to misunderstand and which landed him in some trouble during his lifetime.

For example, Eckhart wrote that “In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and of all things... And if I did not exist, God would also not exist.” Just what did he mean by this? (the Catholic authorities asked!). In fact, it was something very similar to Grotstein’s description of the unconscious. That is, the God that we can know cannot exist without our first “conceiving” and giving birth to him -- God needs our assistance, or cooperation, to manifest in the herebelow.

First, it goes with unsaying, since it cannot be said, that God in his essence so surpasses our conceptual categories that he is beyond being or knowing, beyond the very horizon of knowability. What he actually is in himself, we cannot say, and he certainly doesn't require us to not say it. Apophatic theology holds that the only true things we can say about God are what he is not. Therefore, only by achieving the “negative capability” of unknowing, can we paradoxically know him in his essence.

Perhaps this is why, as Grotstein writes, God is the only true atheist, “because only He knows for sure that He doesn’t exist.” Furthermore, we are His children.

But we can certainly know God in his energies and activities on this side of the manifestivus. That is, in Eckhart’s understanding of the incarnation, God is eternally taking on human nature, not just once, but for all time, in the ground of our being. Eckhart adheres to the ancient Christian idea that God became man so that man may become God -- not literally, but in Grotstein’s sense of transforming the ineffable, nonlocal God-beyond-being into a local manifestation of his presence. 

The reason we may know God is because he is perpetually being born in the depths of our soul, but only if we cooperate and act as “midwife” to the process. God gives birth by speaking the word, but we are only born (from above) by hearing it and conforming ourselves to it.

Our absecular friends have it backwards. It is not God that requires explanation, but us. God alone properly has real being. God does not understand us because he exists -- rather, he ex-ists by our understanding of him, which is ultimately his self-understanding. That is why Eckhart said that the eye with which we see God is the same eye by which he sees us. We are each of us an opportunity for God to exist. Or perhaps more accurately, without us, God is orphaned in the cosmos, with no earthly parents to (p)raise him, just atoms with no evolution.

In other words, we must actually negotiate a “cyclopean” or “double worldview” between imagination and reality, something that the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott emphasized as well, with his idea of the “transitional space” of consciousness. We can never actually be just one or the other. We are perpetually giving birth to God, while God is perpetually giving birth to us. Both statements are equally true. Otherwise, we live in the dry desert hell of egoic separation from our source, or the alternate "fluid" hell of engulfment in symmatriarchal being with no way to express or communicate it -- no way for anything to "evolve" out of the formless and infinite void.

Creation means "giving existence to," or bringing something out of nothing. God’s creativity gives existence to us, but we give existence to God in our creative response to his actively present absence. That is, in both Judaism and in Eckhart’s thought, God actually must withdraw from the world in order to create it -- otherwise, the world is simply identical to God, and there is no freedom. (Of course, he cannot completely withdraw, as he leaves an immanent trace in every “part,” which in turn is a metaphysically transparental theophany that proclaims his glory.)

We are a creation of the absent God-beyond-being, but in making present our potential and becoming who we are, we take part in God’s creation of us, which paradoxically gives birth to both God and to ourselves. In surrendering to, and cooperating with, our own mysterious ground of being, our self-knowing and God’s self-knowing become a single act of essential knowledge. We give birth to the living God.

All in a manner of spooking (boo!). There are some category errors in there, and some statements that are easy to disunderstand, but it's okay, so long as we draw the distinction between the height and the depth, between O at the top and the apeiron at the bottom.

We'll make some real progress tomorrow, when I have more time.