On the Experience and Symbolization of Cosmic Depth

Next up is an essay by Glenn Hughes on Voegelin's essay Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History. Records indicate that I too wrote a meditative essay on this essay back in 2012, and let's see if anything holds up. 

One reason this essay interests me is that it confronts one of the problems addressed in the bʘʘk, which is to say, the equivalence of experiences that use diverse symbols to describe them (or sometimes the same symbol for different experiences).

Because these symbols differ, people may be misled into believing they are describing different realities.

Voegelin writes that "What is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order" (emphasis mine). Too often, it seems that we either conflate symbols that are distinct, or else distinguish symbols that are roughly equivalent (or symbolize the equivalent experience).

For example, the Allah who is so akbar to Islamic terrorists is not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Conversely, Schuon maintained that Buddhists have the experience of God even if they lack the name. 

Voegelin criticizes philosophers who adopt "the belief that the truth of existence is a set of propositions" which are "demonstrably true and therefore acceptable to everybody." 

"In vain [the philosopher] will look for the one set of true propositions," for which reason we can "hardly blame him if in the end he decides that skepticism is the better part of wisdom and becomes an honest relativist and historicist."

Voegelin suggests that "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." 

Regarding that last comment, a later essay in this book has a quote by Justin Martyr to the effect that

"Christ is the Word (logos) of whom every race of men were partakers," so that "those who lived reasonably [in accordance with the Word or reason] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists."

Hmm. It seems that this Logos is always available to man in the experiential order, for example, "among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like them," not to mention Abraham, Moses, Elijah, "and many others."

And why not? To put it the other way around, why reduce the living experience to a narrowly objective proposition? The letter killeth, and all that.

In the past we've often spoken of the "depth" dimension of the cosmos. Without it, we would have no way of perceiving the shallowness of so many people, philosophies, experiences, explanations, politicians, works of art, etc. 

I attribute this perception of cosmic depth to what we call the soul, which is why soullessness (relatively speaking) and shallowness are always found together, change my mind.  

Voegelin says something similar, and now I wonder if it's the symbolization of an equivalent experience (such equivalences again being the subject of the essay under discussion). "For Voegelin, the 'depth of the cosmos'"

is an elementary fact; further, it is a fact that requires... for each of us adequate expression, or "symbolization," if we are to successfully orient ourselves in existence.

So, we all must find a way to adequately symbolize the experiential depth of cosmic existence, or, -- as described in yesterday's post -- 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Depth is one of the things we can toss out the window and then fail to notice it because it has been tossed out the window: experientially "there was nothing there to begin with" and no one there to experience it.

Now, some -- many -- people recoil from depth, in my experience because it covaries with unity, or with making connections between things they would prefer to leave unconnected. Which is why it is difficult to conduct psychotherapy, since there is a part of the patient fighting against the unsettling depth and the disturbing connections.

On a societal level this is of course the role of journalism, i.e., to fail to notice obvious connections and to always keep things on the surface. But at some point in the past half century academia began to serve the same function, and here we are. 

But these are all just my opinions. We've hardly touched on the essay. Hughes goes on to say that "symbols of the cosmic depth may be more adequate or less adequate to the reality of this depth," and ain't that the truth. 

What happens when one has an experience of the depth but there are no symbols available to symbolize it? I'm pretty sure that a religious vocabulary is perhaps the most common way to express this vertical depth for the average man.  

There's also poetry or music, but to try to use a scientific vocabulary to symbolize the experience is to deny the experience. Indeed, how can a world-immanent ideology speak of transcendence?

Now, to say there are different expressions of equivalent experiences is not to say that some expressions aren't more adequate (nor some experiences more deep), for "some articulations are superior to others in representing a more refined or more differentiated understanding of a particular truth."

Sorry to leave you hanging, but it's getting late, so that's about it for this morning. To be continued...