Consciousness and Luminosity
An Introduction to Eric Voegelin
In this newsletter you will read about:
The German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin
Immanence, transcendence, and the in-between
Pluralism and realism without the relativism
The role of participatory philosophy
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Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was a German-American political philosopher who wrote both a philosophy of history and a philosophy of consciousness. His Collected Works are available as a 34-volume set. One can be forgiven for not having ready them all cover to cover. Thankfully, The Eric Voegelin Reader comes in at brisk 400+ pages and includes in one volume many of the major essays from his long career. These days, you most often hear about Voegelin’s political philosophy, and especially his writings on gnosticism. The infamous phrase “don’t immanentize the eschaton” arrives to us downstream of these works from Voegelin.
Voegelin thinks on the span of decades and this in some important sense is still not nearly enough time to develop the ideas that he’s working through. This is, no doubt, why Voegelin in turn picks up ideas that are thousands of years old and continues to unfold them over the span of his entire lifetime, making them sound as fresh as when they first were written down. I sometimes worry that I work too slowly, or that I spend too much time on one idea. Then, as I got to do this week, I'll spend some time with a figure like Voegelin, who has an enormous depth of mind and a voluminous output, but who, when going through his collected works, shows himself to return to the same themes over decades, sometimes nearly verbatim, and I’m reminded that this is simply the right timeframe for this kind of philosophical thinking.
I started writing out this essay as a way to get clear for myself about Voegelin’s thinking on reality, consciousness, and language—a dynamic he calls “the meditative complex.” I thought at first this chain of reasoning consisted of three steps. Then I realized it was four. Four quickly became 18 and then 18 became 25. Is an argument infinitely divisible? Is there a Zeno’s Paradox of logic? I’m not sure about that, exactly, but I am confident that these 25 points will serve as a good summary for you of Voegelin’s ideas, whether you’re familiar with his work or not. Describing the meditative complex serves as a good introduction to Voegelin’s work because these ideas—especially this circular movement between participation, consciousness, and ground—form the basis of much else he has to say.
Voegelin strongly resisted the idea that individual and social life were quantifiable and reducible to mechanisms commonly described in the physical sciences. Instead, Voegelin called for a broader and deeper approach to human experience, drawing deeply from philosophers, religious figures, poets, and artists of the classical Greek and Christian heritage. While Voegelin drew primarily from the West, he recognized the same element of transcendence in the human experience taking unique shape equally in Jewish, Taoist, Hindu, and Chinese traditions. This ecumenical attitude is key to Voegelin’s sensibility. For Voegelin, if human consciousness is treated reverently and in reference to some truly transcendent ground—something that emerges in art, religion, and philosophy the world over but ultimately escapes capture by any of them—then we can see an opening for participation, openness, and perhaps most importantly, a humility and a piety so crucial to our world today.
I’ve listed the 25 premises in Voegelin’s thinking below.
For those who want to follow along with the original texts, I’ve drawn these points in a synthetic way from three essays:
“Structures of Consciousness”
“The Meditative Origin of the Philosophical Knowledge of Order”
“The Beyond and Its Parousia”
These are all available in volume 33 of the Collected Works.
The Meditative Complex
25 Premises to Understanding Consciousness, Reality, and Language
1. Consciousness in its ordinary functioning is always intentional consciousness. That is, following Husserl, Voegelin defines consciousness as consciousness about something. It takes the form of a subject in relation to an object of consciousness. At this level, consciousness just is this relation.
2. The object of consciousness is always some aspect of reality. (It can’t take non-reality as an object because no such non-thing exists, strictly speaking.) However, this is also true of the subject of this consciousness.
3. In other words, the subject, however construed, is also an aspect of reality, since a non-subject as a non-being also cannot exist.
4. Given points 1–3, we can say then that intentional consciousness at its most abstract is reality as some subject taking reality as some object, but both are alike in being reality.
5. Consequently, the whole process of consciousness is itself an event in reality as it relates to itself qua subject and object. “Man with his consciousness is a part of the reality that he intends,” is how Voegelin phrases it; a human being is just “reality as a subject.”
6. Voegelin calls this coming-to-awareness of our intentional consciousness as a relation of reality to itself in the mode of the subject’s realization of itself as an expression of this more primary event luminosity.
7. As a result, luminosity is, if you like, the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy into the oneness of reality's own relating to itself through conscious awareness.
8. The breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy reveals that the subject is not separate from reality but is an integral part of it.
9. Therefore, the subject in this sense only knows itself as a partial expression of reality, and, as an expression of itself, it is itself not the whole of itself but only this or that expression of itself. For this reason, the subject, in trying to know the Whole, reality, does so as an event of that very same reality in partial form.
10. This inevitable partiality—and moreover, our awareness of this partiality—puts us in a state of tension. We have a horizon that limits our consciousness, but we are also aware of how this horizon shapes what we see.
11. In other words, we see the horizon but we also by extension know that there is always more beyond the horizon. This is Voegelin’s nod to Socrates; we are not just ignorant, we are aware of our ignorance.
12. The awareness of our ignorance and the limitations of our horizon of understanding places us in a state of existential tension.
13. Voegelin, following Plato, calls this tension the metaxy, the in-between, and this is the human existential condition, of consciousness always in the between—in the horizon but aware of its beyond.
14. Hence, the metaxy exists as a tension between sensibility and intelligibility, immanence and transcendence, divine and mundane, universal and particular, time and eternity, conscious and unconscious, body and intellect, and much else.
15. The tensions of the metaxy are inherent to human consciousness and find expression through the symbolic and linguistic structures that mediate our understanding.
16. The metaxy is characterized by a tension between the immanent (the realm of concrete, sensible reality) and the transcendent (the epekeina, meaning “beyond” or “on the other side” as in epekeina tes ousias, or the “beyond being,” of Plato’s Republic).
17. This tension finds its resolution in the parousia, the presence or manifestation of the epekeina in human consciousness and in the reality of being, which appears through the meditative process of reflective distance.
18. Moreover, this mode of “reflective distance”—our ability to talk about this tension at all—is expressed from one consciousness to the next through symbol and language, and it necessarily takes different forms through language- and symbol-mediated structures of consciousness.
19. Contentiously, the diversity of perspectives that spring from humanity’s relation to the epekeina, to the ground, as he calls it elsewhere, reflects the multidimensionality of truth, not its absence.
20. The diversity of perspectives arising from our relation to reality suggests that truth is not a monolithic entity but has multiple facets and dimensions.
21. Thus, for Voegelin, truth is not a static object to be grasped, but a dynamic reality in which we participate. Consciousness “breaks forth” into language to describe its own relation to this reality.
22. This participatory philosophy means that our engagement with truth is not merely subjective or relativistic, but involves a real attunement to and resonance with the ground, with reality, which is the wellspring of truth.
23. However, truth is an expression of reality, in this sense, but that doesn't mean that all expressions are equally true or good.
24. The recognition that not all expressions of truth are equal necessitates a continuous process of philosophical discernment and refinement.
25. Therefore, philosophy, on this account, is always on its way, and requires a process of continual refinement and clarification, a critical sifting through of the insights we take to be true, rather than a static or fixed -ism about truth taken as a fixed reality.