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Eric Voegelin's Paradoxes of Consciousness and Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert McMahon
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Extract

Eric Voegelin thought his “paradox of consciousness” was “the key to all his other works,” but no one has yet explored it as such a key. “participation” is the central term in Voegelin's philosophy, and the “paradox of consciousness” reveals the paradox of participation: a participant-partner is simultaneously a part and the whole (albeit in a perspective) of a reality of consciousness, like a marriage, a polity, or the cosmos.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 117 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1999

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References

1 Voegelin, Lissy, “Foreword,” In Search of Order, vol. 5 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

2 The most substantial treatment of In Search of Order is by Morissey, Michael, Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 117–50Google Scholar. He treats the ambiguities effected by the paradox of consciousness without probing its paradoxicality per se. Hughes, Glenn treats certain aspects of the paradox in Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), see especially pp. 4–5,34–37, and 112–14Google Scholar. Caringella, Paul meditates on the volume and other late works by Voegelin in “Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence,” in Eric Voegelin's Significance for the Modern Mind, ed. Sandoz, Ellis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Heilke, Thomas, “Narrative in Voegelin's Account of Consciousness,” Review of Politics 58 (1996): 761–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explores the role of narrativity in Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. See also the discussions by Ranieri, John J., Eric Voegelin and the Good Society (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), pp. 31–34Google Scholar; and McAllister, Ted V., Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1996), pp. 223–58.Google Scholar

3 Voegelin first distinguished these two structures in ‘Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,’ in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Sandoz, Ellis, vol. 12 Published Essays: 1966–1985 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), p. 326Google Scholar, where “luminosity” is called “mystery.” He did not, however, explore their relationship as paradoxical. The essay was originally published in 1977, the last work he published while living. It would seem that he discovered the “paradox of consciousness” while working on the final volume of Order and History.

4 In Search of Order, p. 15.

5 Ibid., p. 16.

6 See Webb, Eugene, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Riceour, Girard, Kierkegaard (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988)Google Scholar, for the language of subjective and objective poles, especially pp. 6,44, 73, 79,291–92.

7 Voegelin always uses the adjective “intentionalistic,” rather than “intentional,” in order to distinguish his use of “intentionality” from that of other philosophers, such as Husserl and Lonergan. “Intentionalistic” serves to underscore the mutual dependence between—the necessary copresence of—Voegelin's “intentionality” and “luminosity” in all experience. In other words, while there may be “intentional experience” for other philosophers, for Voegelin “intentionalistic experience” simply does not exist, except as copresent in and with luminosity.

8 In Search of Order, pp. 37–39.

9 See Aristotle Metaphysics 982b 11–27 on “wonder,” and 980a 23 for the innately human desire to know. See Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. Dych, William V. (New York: Crossroad, 1987), p. 69Google Scholar. Rahner's terms mystery and transcendence prove close equivalents to Voegelin's luminosity (Foundations, pp. 19–23 et passim).

10 The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 316–35.Google Scholar

11 See Lonergan, Bernard J. F., Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 27–36Google Scholar on the world mediated by meaning and pp. 57–99, the chapter on “Meaning.”

12 See In Search of Order, pp. 29–31, on “the plurality of middles.”

13 I am grateful to Jacques Bagur for suggesting the line of thinking pursued in the previous two paragraphs.

14 See “Remembrance of Things Past” in Published Essays, pp. 304–14.

15 Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 1 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

16 Ibid.

17 The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 1.Google Scholar

18 Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand, Principia Mathematica, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 60.Google Scholar

19 In Search of Order, p. 50.

20 Ibid., p. 93.

21 Israel and Revelation, p. 2.

22 New Science of Politics, pp. 1–26.

23 Glenn Hughes poses this question in Myth and Mystery, pp. 35–37, and argues that Voegelin's terms do escape the paradox they articulate. Hughes limits “luminous symbols” to “the language of mythoi” and sees Voegelin's terms as “reflective symbols.” He ignores Voegelin's own assertion that his “analysis itself is paradoxic in structure” (In Search of Order, p. 27). Understandably, Hughes is trying to save Voegelin's philosophical language from inextricable involvement in paradox, but I do not think his view is tenable.

24 See “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in Published Essays, p. 120.

25 “Of” functions similarly in Voegelin's phrase “the story of reality”: simultaneously an objective genitive, indicating an intentionalistic story about reality, and a subjective genitive, expressing reality's own luminous self-revelation. The same holds true for “epiphany of structure.”

26 Voegelin treats a similar conundrum in his “The Origins of Scientism,” Social Research 15 (1948): 462–94Google Scholar, especially pp. 473–82 on the criticism of Newton's notions of absolute space by Berkeley and Leibniz.

27 Israel and Revelation introduces “attunement” on p. 4 and it pervades the rest of the Introduction (pp. 1–11), even when the word is no longer used.

28 See Published Essays, p. 378 (emphasis added).

29 Ibid., p. 376 (emphasis added).

30 Ibid., p. 378.

31 Ibid., p. 380.

32 For this distinction between knowing “from the outside” and “knowing from within,” see Webb, Eugene, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 89–128Google Scholar, especially pp. 92–95 and 103–107.

33 Published Essays, p. 176.

34 Lissy Voegelin, In Search of Order, Foreword.