Existential Normality?

Our next essay -- called Debate and Existence -- has to do with the impossibility of debating someone who not only has a different conception of existence, but actually inhabits a different existence -- one of those second realities alluded to in yesterday's post:

rational discussion with ideologues is unlikely to succeed, since their mode of existence is willfully untrue insofar as they ignore or deform one or more constitutive elements of reality.

The most obvious contemporary example that comes to mind is the impossibility of "debating" someone who exists in a world in which it is possible for one sex to change into the other. Might as well debate a mental patient over the reality of his hallucinations. 

The essay touches on "the breakdown of rational discourse caused by the prevalence of ideological thinking in the modern age." Here again, this breakdown is not a result of

an impasse owing to disagreement between two positions within the parameters of what might plausibly be true, but rather, a conflict between "two modes of existence, existence in truth and existence in untruth."

This occurs -- you will have noticed -- when one of the disputants "refuses to recognize and live within reality as commonly experienced, opting instead to operate in a 'Second Reality.'" This latter term refers to "imaginative constructs of ideological thinkers who want to eclipse the reality of existential consciousness."

Now, it is entirely fair to ask how we know we aren't the ideologues living in an imaginary second reality. Certainly an atheistic materialist would say this of us. What could be more real than good old matter?

This is addressed in a later essay, but for now let's ponder the fact that Voegelin posits what amounts to a normative stance toward the totality of reality (for which reason he uses terms such as "deformation" and "pneumopathology" for people who fall short of the normative stance). Such ideologues

refuse to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. Ideology is thus rooted in revolt rather than error -- it is a state of spiritual alienation or... pneumopathology.

The human condition as it is. Well, how is it? And please be as concrete and specific as possible. No dodging, equivocation, or Krautsplaining. 

ancient thinkers seemed well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.... [and] that existence in untruth is a perennial possibility. 

Unresponsive. Exactly what is the reality we shouldn't reject, and what is existence-in-truth? 

Well, good: the next section is called Recovering the Truth of Existence, and let's see if it delivers on the promise.

Here we go: Voegelin defines "truth of existence"

as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the condicio humana.

Well, what is this fundamental structure of the human condition?  It "takes place in the 'metaxy,'" by which he means

that we exist in the midst of tensions between poles of existence symbolized as transcendence and immanence, good and evil, immortality and mortality, and so forth.  

Nor can this tension ever really be eliminated -- short of death -- because we are always participants in it:

we are actors within reality rather than observers of it from afar. This means that we cannot obtain a Gods-eye view on reality -- we do not have access to complete knowledge of the whole of reality. 

At best we are participant-observers from within the Tension. We are oriented to transcendence but this nevertheless takes place in historical time and indeed constitutes historical time, for the alternative would be a static immanence (or I suppose the "static transcendence" sought by nondual mystics). 

Yada yada, does any of this have a practical application? 

Well, "everyone," it seems, is vulnerable to "the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth," or to essentially barter the truth of existence for certitude -- to dogmatize experience in the Tension.

We all want to find a solid foundation on which to build our lives, but the participatory and metaxic character of existence means that a perfectly solid and objective foundation is unavailable to us.

Wouldn't a Christian say that this is the whole point of revelation -- to provide a rock of certitude on which to lean?

Well, yes, but with important qualifications, because it is possible for Christianity to be dogmatized and transformed into a kind of one-and-done frozen ideology, when it is the sine qua non of a dynamic, open, and living relationship with the transcendent person. Jesus doesn't eliminate the tension but renders it fruitful. 

We must bear in mind that 

forgetfulness and revolt are possibilities for each of us and that the struggle between ideologues and non-ideologies mirrors a "debate" that takes place within each individual. 

Hmm. Like a symbolic debate in a garden over a couple of trees?

Stringing together a few passages from above:

 --ancient thinkers were well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.

-- everyone is vulnerable to the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth.

--ideology results from a refusal to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. It is thus rooted in revolt rather than error.