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...

Immortality While We Wait?

Our next essay is on an essay by Voegelin called "Immortality": Experience and Symbol. If that sounds familiar, it's because we blogged about it ourselves way back in 2014. Let's see if anything is worth recovering: 

For Voegelin, religion begins in a religious experience that is codified via symbolism. Thus, "the symbols in question intend to convey a truth experienced." 

Unlike more conventional symbols, these "are not concepts referring to objects existing in time and space but carriers of a truth about nonexistent reality." As such, the symbols are meant to facilitate "a consciousness of participation in nonexistent reality."

And when he says "nonexistent," he doesn't mean "unreal," rather, immaterial and transcendent. For example, the statement "all men are created equal" is not derived from any empirical observation, but is nonetheless real and true for all time. And it is true even if no one has discovered it, or if people have forgotten the experience that engendered it.

One of Voegelin's great concerns is what happens when the experiential reality from which the symbols derive their meaning is no longer conveyed or accessed. 

Sometimes this can occur because the symbol is overly reified in such a way that it excludes experience of the engendering reality that brought it about. Then religious symbolism becomes a kind of empty shell, or shadow of itself. 

For when "misunderstood as propositions referring to things in the manner of propositions concerning objects of sense perception," this provokes "the reaction of skepticism." 

Now, what could be the engendering experience symbolized by the word "immortality?" For it seems that no human group is unfamiliar with the concept. Indeed, one definition of humanness could be "awareness of mortality," and therefore immortality. 

That's about as far as we got before discretely changing the subject. Now let's see if this new essay advances the discussion. As alluded to above, Voegelin does not 

speak in terms of an idea. He wants to get to the heart of the experience that has engendered the symbol of immortality (which in turn has become an "idea" or even a "dogma").

Yes, but who has experienced immortality? Well, as we know, "Human existence is existence in tension 'between time and the timeless.'" And

the variety of symbols that point toward the timeless, immortality among them, are ways in which we as human beings attempt to understand and make sense of that larger reality and the structure of existence. 

So, the word immortality is a symbol of the experience of timelessness? Perhaps, but in any event,

When symbols such as "immortality," "soul," "spirit," or even "God" become dogmatic assertions, unmoored from the engendering experiences in which they were grounded, the skeptic or ideologue can demolish the symbols as meaningless...  

Now, this alienation from the experience can occur for the religious literalist no less than for the atheist, for both, in their own way, reify the symbol:

The only way to recover the truth is by a return to the experiences, the very real experiences... which engendered the symbols in the first place. 

Now, supposing we live in the tension between immanence and transcendence, it may equally be symbolized time and eternity, respectively. But this is a paradoxical space, because, properly speaking, we live neither in time nor eternity, but deploy those terms more as "directions" or "poles" of the tension in which we actually live. 

We are coming up against the limits of the expressible, but it seems that the immanentization of transcendence -- or the temporalization of eternity -- is both a cause and consequence of alienation "from the most basic structure of existence." As a result, 

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.

Now that I'm thinking about this, something very similar must occur with the use of the symbol "providence" for the experience that engenders it. I'm thinking in particular of how easy it is to ridicule Trump for saying that it was providence that spared him from the assassin's bullet. 

Maybe, maybe not, but the experience is the experience, and he is hardly the first to experience it.

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said, and I wish I could remember what it was -- something to the effect that one man's religious experience will be inaccessible to another, and that each of us has access to only a piece of the puzzle, with no one able to see or experience the whole area rug.

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.

New Writ Has Come to Light

Or at least I'm reading a new volume on Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays. He has a ginormous body of work, but it turns out that much of what he wrote is rendered more or less obsolete in light of these last works. 

Which would have been nice to know before I slogged through all those earlier works.

Voegelin’s thought continued to develop at a rapid pace during the last two decades of his life, and his work found “not only its final but its most profound expression” during this period.... 

The meditative analyses and essays written in the culminating phase of Voegelin’s career not only expand and deepen his work as a whole, but also revise central components of it in ways that compel reconsideration of even his most widely read texts.

The book consists of essays about these late essays. I've only read the first one, which is about the rise of Nazism. How was this possible? What prior conditions were necessary for its emergence?

The same conditions that must exist for any ideology to hijack human consciousness and plunge it into a "second reality." Before this can occur, the person must somehow be alienated from primary -- AKA real -- reality. Which, it seems, is a constant temptation going back -- in my estimation -- to Genesis 3.

Man is a spiritual being open at both ends, i.e., to immanence and transcendence: closed off from the latter, "there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too." Again, total reality = immanence + transcendence.

The closure to transcendence typically results in the substitution of "a diminished or shrunken human reality for the Divine Ground of Being." And unfortunately, "dedivinizing is always followed by dehumanizing." 

Always? Yes, insofar as humanness and transcendence co-arise and are inseparable (or separable only in the imagination). 

Ever wonder why the rabble who disagree with us are so stupid?

First, because of a loss of reality, a human being becomes unable to properly orient his or her action in the world. Accordingly, he acts stupidly. 

Oh. That explains a lot. Because of a "defective image of reality" there is a loss of "experience of certain sectors of reality," and with it, a loss of "the language to characterize and evoke reality." Full reality, it seems. becomes an unknowable unknown:

That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is always the phenomenon of illiteracy. 

No offense though:

Voegelin warned his audience that terms such as stupidity and illiteracy (along with ignorance, rabble, and several others) were not terms of abuse but of concrete description.

Having said that, there is the "honorable stupidity" of the everyday dimwit, and "a higher or intelligent stupidity" that we know too well. The latter is "not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence," which "presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right." 

This is how the second realities of the contemporary ideologue "can become socially dominant," displacing the first (and only) reality. "Such a society perpetuates the highest betrayal of humanity," and here we are.

In summary, pneumopathology begins with "the initial non-recognition of reality and closure to the reality of the spirit." 

This "destruction of the ordering center" of the human being prevents "rational analysis" of the pathological appeal to disorder. There then "appears in place of the neglected reality the ersatz reality of the ideologies up to and including National Socialism."  

How does this square with present times? Conveniently, my inbox this morning contains an essay called The Importance of Knowing Reality, and let's find out what it says:

 “thought leaders” in many domains, from elite universities to athletics to airline CEOs to politics... seem to have departed from contact with reality in new and sharper ways.

No offense, but this sounds like intelligent stupidity and second realities. This malign combination

has given rise to calls for a return to prudence. Josef Pieper describes prudence as the “foremost of the virtues” and the “‘measure’ of justice, of fortitude, of temperance.” Prudence ‘“informs’ the other virtues; it confers upon them the form of their inner essence.”

Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of “what is,” and the ability to act based on the reality of things. 

Prudence, it seems, is ordered to first reality. But

Modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears.

Which is the very recipe for ideological second realities.

One essay down, thirteen to go.

Intellectual Abuse for My Own Demented Purposes

I wonder if the human genome -- or even the whole genetic program, from prokaryotes to humans -- is subject to Gödel's theorems? Is there something in the genetic program for which the program cannot account? How does the program even get to first base without a program to get there?

I shouldn't be abusing Gödel for my own demented purposes. However, I do have a couple books on him coming in the mail, and after digesting them I will presumably be in a more informed position to abuse his ideas. 

But let's think this through with our rudimentary understanding. Everyone knows there is a genetic code responsible for our lives. How then do we do transcend this formal system? For if we didn't so escape its entailments we could never even know of it. 

I touched on this in the book, but it is insufficiently fleshed out. But just as the mind cannot be reduced to any machine model, nor can Life be so reduced. Is DNA the secret of life, or Life the secret of DNA? Similarly, is the brain the secret of the mind, or vice versa?  

Theoretical biologist Robert Rosen writes that one implication of Gödel's theorems is that a universe "consisting of pure syntax" is "too poor to do mathematics in." 

From this he concludes that "contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it," which means that there is always more to Life than can be contained in any reductive model: in short, semantics -- meaning -- can never be reduced to syntax -- order. 

Could Life ever be exhaustively expressed in a formal program? Nah: "Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program," and "There is always a a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by the syntactical scheme."

Rosen essentially affirms that reality is always more complex than the simple formalizations in which we try to enclose it. Again, something always escapes the formal system, model, or quantification.

Let's ponder some paradoxical implications.

Can we prove free will doesn't exist? Absolutely, but only if we are free to know the truth of our condition.

Can we prove that evolutionary biology is a complete explanation of man? Sure, but only if we transcend the explanation.

Can we prove that the mind is the product of random evolutionary changes? No doubt, but only from a position outside or above those changes.

I would tie this back to what Voegelin says about our being situated between immanence and transcendence. Because there is always transcendence, no immanent explanation will ever be complete. 

Yesterday we touched on the need for revelation. What if -- just spiritballin' here -- the transcendent (Logos) becomes immanent (flesh) that the immanent may become transcendent?  

That would be a pretty good answer to Klavan's question at the end of yesterday's post -- "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"

There's still the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence, but instead of our perpetual reaching toward the latter pole, it reaches down into human nature, so our own reaching can finally get somewhere.

This would be an advance in our attempt to solve the puzzle of existence, like some kind of good news or something.

In fact, this morning Klavan's son Spencer addresses the questions posed by his father: our pre-Christian brethren -- stoics and the like -- took things pretty far in the direction of transcendence (↑). But  "magnificent as they are," they 

tend to exude a kind of weariness at their pinnacle. Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing philosopher, compassed between them the full range of human reactions to the natural world. Both of them concluded that it’s an endless flow of change -- everything always happens, so nothing ever really happens....

Those who grope their way up [↑] the mountain of human wisdom seem to reach the summit exhausted by the climb. If Christianity has something to add, it must be something you can’t work your way up to from below -- something that comes down [↓] onto the mountaintop from above, like thunder onto Sinai.

Something from totally outside the system definitively enters the system? Something radically unformalizable and irreducible? Something that cannot be modeled because it is the Model? The original Semantics that can never be reduced to syntax? The Way and the Life, only quite literally?

Like I said, I need to absorb these books on Gödel and figure out which one of us is more misguided. 

A Consistent But Incomplete Post

Now, this business of revelation: is it necessary, redundant, irrelevant, neutral, or harmful?

I suppose it depends on the revelation, but who are we to pretend to judge something that purportedly comes straight from God? Nevertheless, some kind of judgment must be made, but on what basis? 

Perhaps in the same way we judge a scientific theory, which will explain a great deal -- i.e., unify the phenomena -- in such a way that it doesn't unexplain what had previously been understood. 

Looked at this way, the revelation in question needs to make more sense of our lives than anything else on offer. It must transcend science while not in any way negating it, because science (obviously) explains a great deal, even if it has necessary limits. 

Let's think this through. First of all, we either need revelation or we don't. In other words, either we can form an accurate and complete map of the cosmos via wholly natural resources, or we can't. If we can't, then there is either no remedy to our ignorance, or we are in need of a vertical murmurandom to complete the epistemological circle.

It seems that we can never arrive at a complete and consistent model of reality. Stanley Jaki, in his Brain, Mind and Computers, correctly notes that Gödel's theorems prove

that even in the elementary parts of arithmetic there are propositions which cannot be proved or disproved in that system (emphasis mine).

And if that isn't enough to put a crimp your day, his analysis implies that "no formal system" of any kind "is immune to the bearing of Gödel's conclusion."

So, the mind is not, and cannot be, a logic machine. If it were, it could never know it, because it would be confined to the closed circle of logical entailment. Which I suspect also goes to our freedom, since it too escapes necessity. 

A machine

can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions....  

Gödel's theorem, therefore, cuts the ground under the efforts that view machines... as adequate models of the mind.

A machine "can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can without relying on other minds.... No matter how perfect the machine, it can never do everything that the human mind can." 

So, it seems that our most perfect manmade system of thought will necessarily have to put its faith in at least one thought or principle or axiom or assumption or intuition or speculation or delusion or hallucination that the system cannot justify, and which comes from outside (transcends) the system.

Therefore, if I am following my argument correctly, there is no escaping faith. 

Back to our opening statement: either we need revelation or we don't. Looks like we do, but just because we need it, that doesn't mean it exists. What we call revelation could be -- and for materialist must be -- just self-deception. It is as if we are unconsciously trying to get around the theorems by pretending to a completeness that is forever inaccessible to us.

However, I recently found out that Gödel not only believed in a personal God, but thought he could prove the existence of an afterlife:

I am convinced of this, independently of any theology. It is possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning that it is entirely consistent with the known facts. If the world is rationally constructed and has a meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife] (quoted in Wang).

It is indeed ironic "that the greatest logician since Aristotle" thought "God's existence could be proved a priori" (Goldstein).  

Nevertheless, which God? What is he like?  

Andrew Klavan asks, "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"  

Good questions.

The System of God

Talking about process philosophy is an exercise in gnostaliga for me, because this was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which in part tried to reconcile developmental psychology with Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures. Now I'm wondering if the latter could also be reconciled with spiritual development. 

First let's skim to see if anything has changed with regard to the science of dissipative structures over the past 35 years. Yada yada,

A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter....

Back in the day, I understood it to be matter, energy, and/or information -- for example, the system of the economy, which is one big exchange of information centering around price signals.

If we're talking about far-from-equilibrium conditions, I suppose the conditions don't get further than Creator and creation, or man and God, finite and infinite, absolute and relative. However, at the very least, the vertical ingression (↓) of grace -- or something like it, e.g., shakti, shekinah, barakha, etc. -- implies  an open system between these terms.  

Or, more experience-near are the ubiquitous phenomena of truth and beauty to which man is always properly open. Likewise, when we understand something it is because we abstract the form from the matter -- in other words, the intellect qua intellect is open to the abstract essences that in-form it.

In the Orthodox east they talk about the distinction between God's essence and energies, the latter available to us herebelow.

It's hard to think of a more concrete example of vertical exchange than communion. Prayer too presumes an open system between man and God. In fact, all of the sacraments are vehicles of grace, therefore presupposing an open cosmos. 

We might also compare the tension between immanence and transcendence to the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for a dissipative system. Collapsing this disequilibrium kills the system. This is what Voegelin calls CLOSED EXISTENCE or CLOSURE:

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."

So man is quite literally an open system, open to truth, love, beauty, unity, in a word, transcendence. 

Now, the Trinity is -- in a manner of speaking -- a sort of open system, is it not? Bracken touches on this, writing, for example, that "the essence or nature of God is not in the first place an entity but an activity," i.e., perichoresis. 

It seems to me that it is also analogous to the particle/field complementarity in physics, such that the Persons are the "particles," the shared substance the "field," two complementary sides of a single reality. One can also discern a kind of discontinuity-within-continuity, i.e., the Persons are distinct but not separate. 

For our purposes, 

if the Trinity is a community of divine persons, then the Trinity is a relational reality with the consequence that creation as made in the image of God is constituted by finite entities in dynamic interrelation.

And why not? As above, so below. 

I suppose this would be the last word in vertical openness:

human beings who attain close personal union with God retain their finite identity as creatures even as they enter into an I-Thou relation with the three divine persons.

In conclusion,

The triune God as the all-comprehensive system of the divine communitarian life is both the transcendent origin and ultimate goal of the cosmic process as a vast network of dynamically interrelated and hierarchically ordered finite systems whose progressive growth in order and complexity began with the Big Bang and will ultimately end with full incorporation into the divine life.

Works for me.