Eric Vogelin Institute

 "Nietzsche's and Voegelin Response to Cartesian Subjectivity and the Rationalization of Politics"

 

Copyright 2006 Lee Trepanier

 

Introduction

 

            Postmodern philosophers have sought to overcome the Cartesian distinction between subject and object without succumbing to a foundational metaphysics in order to avoid self-referential criticism: the use of the subject's own language and ideas to expose, criticize, and deconstruct his statements which purportedly are based on a universally accessible reason.  Nietzsche was one of the first successful thinkers in rejecting Cartesian epistemology by employing a variety of tropes and techniques.  The best example of this rhetorical strategy can be found in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  In this work, Nietzsche deliberately avoided privileging one mode of critique that would relegate all other modes inferior.  The planned ambiguity in the work both overcomes Cartesian subjectivity and precludes a postmodern critique of it.

            Although Eric Voegelin did not directly address postmodern thinkers, he also was concerned about developing an epistemology that would transcend the Cartesian subject and object dichotomy.  With his reliance upon experience in a participatory mode of consciousness, Voegelin was able to effectively resist self-referential critiques and overcome Cartesian subjectivity.  Thus both Nietzsche and Voegelin were able to resist self-referential criticism and overcome the Cartesian dichotomy of subject and object.  But before we discuss how each of these philosophers accomplished this, I want to review Descartes' epistemology of subject-centered reason and its vulnerability to self-referential criticism.

Subject-Centered Reason

 

            By arguing that there is one piece of knowledge that we can possess and cannot doubt, Descartes sought to refute skepticism. [1]   Through subjecting his beliefs to doubt Descartes aimed to uncover the foundation of knowledge.  For Descartes, it is enough to question some of his accepted beliefs � those that form the foundation of knowledge � "because undermining the foundations will cause what has been built upon them to crumble of its accord, I will attack straightaway those principles which supported everything that I once believed" (Meditation 1, 60). [2]   One such foundational belief is that sensory evidence is reliable; but the senses occasionally deceive us, thereby making their veracity doubted.  Thus, Descartes dismissed knowledge that we may gained through our senses as a reliable basis.

            Another belief is sensations of our own surroundings: "for example, that I am sitting here next to the fire, wearing my winter dressing gown, that I am holding this sheet of paper in my hands, and the like."  However, this belief can be doubted, when we ask whether we are asleep or awake.  Sensations are products of our imaginations, especially in our sleep.  Descartes could be dreaming that he is sitting next to the fire and wearing his winter dressing gown: the sensations could be nothing more than images in our imagination.

            However, the basic components of these images � size, shape, time, place, number, quantity � are more simple and basic than the images themselves and therefore are immune to doubt.  A gown is a certain shape and exists at a certain time: although the composite image may be doubted, the basic components of it may not.  This distinction between composite imagery and basic components suggests two types of knowledge: the physical sciences, which depend upon basic components, and mathematics, which does not.  The claims of an astronomer are not as reliable as the claims of a mathematician.  Whether we are awake or asleep, we can claim mathematical forms of knowledge: two plus two always will equal four.

            Whatever we make of this, Descartes asked us to image a scenario in which an omnipotent God exists and whether we can know that this God has deceived us in our encounter with reality.  Could not this God deceive us in everything, such as when we add two plus two and arrive at the number four?  And especially if this God were "an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me"?  Descartes envisaged a situation in which he might think that two plus two equals four, but he really was being fooled by God. 

            Yet if he were deceived, Descartes still was thinking: "Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed, it must finally be established that this pronouncement, �I am, I exist' is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind" (Meditations 2, 64).  Thought cannot exist without existence:

 

Here I make my discovery: thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from me .

. . But what then am I?  A thing that thinks.  What is that?  A thing that doubts,

understands affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also images and senses

(Mediations 2, 65-66). 

 

 

Descartes therefore had reached the one piece of knowledge he cannot doubt: he exists, and his existence is defined by thought; or as he famously put it in Part IV of Discourse on Method: cogito, ergo sum (IV, 19).

            With this piece of knowledge, Descartes constructed his philosophical anthropology: there is the mechanical structure of the body which concerns the senses, and there is the active structure of the mind which concerns such things as thought.  However, the only thing we can be certain of is the mind, since a malicious demon can deceive us about the existence of the body: "At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true.  I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason" (Meditations 2, 65).  The mind-body dualism is set firmly in place: the essential is his mind as a thinking substance that is separated and fundamentally different from the body. 

            For Descartes, the mind can act independent of external phenomena: it can understand, doubt, affirm, and deny with an autonomous will and reflective ability (Discourse on Method, I, 2).  We are rational creatures that when we use our reason (intellect) the external world is revealed to us: "even bodies are not, properly speaking, perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, not by the intellect alone, and . . . they are not perceived through their being touched or seen, but only through being understood" (Mediation 2, 69).  Because humans have rational understanding, they are able to understand reality in a meaningful way, usually in the representation of things or ideas, with the best ones as clear and distinct so they cannot be doubted (Discourse on Method II, 11).  In other words, humans are distinct not only because we have reason but we use our reason to gain knowledge through the clear and distinct ideas: "reason is a universal instrument that can be of help in all sorts of circumstances" (Discourse of Method V, 32).  Reason becomes the instrument in our search for certain knowledge.

            The problem that Descartes confronted with his philosophical anthropology is to account for the external world: how do we know there exists a world outside of my mind?  Descartes' answer is that the existence of God guarantees an external reality.  Descartes has within his mind a clear and distinct concept of God as a supreme and perfect being.  Since Descartes is finite, he cannot be the origin of this idea, so it must have come from somewhere else, i.e., God (Mediation 3).  Furthermore, it is more perfect to exist than not to exist; therefore God must exist (Meditation 5).  The existence of God allows Descartes to argue for knowledge of the external world, since an essential feature of God's perfection is truthfulness.  Since God is truthful, he would not deceive our perceptions; therefore our perceptions of the external world are accurate.

            Of course, there are numerous problems with this ontological argument: why is existence itself a perfection?  It may be the case that something is perfect but does not exist, like the Platonic eidos; or in order for something to be perfect it must necessarily exist, but it does not follow from this that there is something that exists which is perfect.  Furthermore, if we are able to provide convincing reasons to doubt God's existence, then we will not be convinced that God will provide the foundational principle of our knowledge of the external world.  Finally, if we accept Descartes' account of deist God, are we not closing off other epistemological venues in the privileging of reason? [3]            Regardless of his argument about God, Descartes has placed the subject, i.e., the "I" that thinks, at the center of his epistemology.  For Descartes, the subject is a being that is self-conscious of its own existence, or possesses subjectivity.  Knowledge is gained from the subject's individual introspective: our immediate sense of who and what we are is complete and certain knowledge, with our thought always rational and conscious.  The subject is transparent in the sense that by way of knowledge that can be said about what a subject is can be said solely by way of reference to that subject's own conscious understanding of itself.  In other words, Descartes' theory of knowledge rests upon the primacy of conscious thought: it is an unproblematically given in his philosophy.  We have no grounds to doubt the veracity of our judgment concerning who and what we are.

            Based on this presupposition, Descartes excluded all material, social, and historical conditions as reference points of what constitutes the subject and knowledge.  According to this view, the subject is defined as a rational being made of the mind that does not require definition by all other reference points.  Descartes' theory of knowledge does not dependent upon a particular context � historical, societal, material � because the question of context is a concern of the body and not of the mind, and because the mind is "utterly indivisible," unlike the body which can be divided into parts.  "Although the entire mind seems to be united to the entire body, nevertheless, were a foot or an arm or any other bodily part to be amputated, I know that nothing has been taken away from the mind on that account" (Mediation 6, 102). [4]

            This theory of knowledge as based on individual introspection, i.e., subjectivity is universally given, is committed to a particular view of reality: the world is made of two substances � mind and body � with the assumption of the primacy of a transparent and unified self-consciousness that forms the basis of knowledge.  We are self-conscious beings with rationality: "our reason makes us act" (Discourse on Method, V, 32).  Reason also assures the validity of Descartes' philosophical method: "what pleased me most about this method was that by means of it I was assured of using my reason in everything, if not perfectly, then at least as best I can" (III, 12).  Our rationality is the cause of our existence, the kind of creatures that we are, and allow us to have certainty, i.e., knowledge. 

            But Descartes' presupposition demands attention: subjects are made of a substance that only can be self-defined.  Why is not the case, as Voegelin and Nietzsche have argued, that subjects can be defined by historical, societal, and material conditions?  Furthermore, what happens when reason arrives at a conclusion that the mind is not a substance independent of the body?  What happens if reason leads us to reject Descartes' metaphysics (which, relying upon the ontological proof of God's existence, already is tenable at best)?  Reason would then cease to have the kind of universality that Descartes attributes to it as soon as the substance of the mind was removed.  We would have good grounds to reject the mind-body dualism that Descartes had developed to keep his account of the self intact.

            Aside from these internal problems to his philosophy, Descartes has created an epistemology that makes a distinction between the knower and what is known: the subject is a thinking thing that is not extended, and the object is an extended thing that does not think.  Reality is bifurcated into subjects and objects, with the philosopher's epistemological objective to understand as best as possible objective reality.  However, the assumption behind this task � the primacy of a transparent and unified self-consciousness that forms the basis of knowledge � becomes vulnerable to what I call a self-referential critique: under closer examination, the subject is neither transparent nor unified, often suppressing aspects of it that come into conflict with its reason.  This is the critique of postmodern thinkers on the Enlightenment project: using the subject's own language and ideas to expose, deconstruct, and criticize the subject's subconscious agenda that conflict with his statements purportedly based on a universally accessible reason. 

            Foucault's Historie de la folie and Madness and Civilization provides an example of the postmodern critique.  According to Foucault, reason emerged in the seventeenth century as the sole cognitive apparatus to understand the world, thereby excluding or de-legitimizing other forms of thinking that were not in concord with the rational structures of binary thought.  This exclusion of these non-rational forms of thinking condemned them to the silence of history.  The task of the postmodern philosopher is to recover these silent forms of thinking � whether through the methods of archaeology, genealogy, or transgression � that have been suppressed by reason; and the only avenue available to the philosopher is to decode the language of reason to uncover these suppressed modes of thought.  Even though the subject's claims appear to be rational, the statements actually disguise its irrational impulses, to which the philosopher will expose.  Contrary to its own presentation, western philosophy is not the progressive unfolding of reason in history but the suppression of "secret movement in which unreason is plunged deep under the ground, there no doubt to disappear, but there also to take root." 

            If the postmodern critique is correct, then political liberalism is no longer seen as citizens reasonably agreeing to "the rules of the game," as John Rawls and other liberals have portrayed it; but rather, liberalism becomes like any other form of politics in that it is about discipline, power, and control.  This form of politics of control becomes all the easier to implement when reality has become bifurcated into subjects and objects, with the latter seen as something to manipulate for to help in "all sorts of circumstances."  Cartesian philosophy particularly is vulnerable to this politics of control, because 1) his split between subject and objects allows the body to be viewed as a complex machine where its behavior is determined by environmental conditions; and 2) his recognition that only a few people would be able to comprehend the "simple truths" of modern science and mathematics (although in theory this knowledge was accessible to all) (Discourse on Method, V, 9-10). [5]   The political result is a few who manages the control of its citizens through behavioralist techniques of "discipline and punishment."

           

Nietzsche's Rhetorical Escape

 

            The postmodern philosopher is to expose the power structures in the political system that claim to be rooted in reason, while, at the same time, avoid self-referential criticism.  Nietzsche, who launched the postmodern critique of Cartesian subject-centered reason, still is one of the most successful of these philosophers who accomplishes these tasks.  By resorting to traditional philosophical arguments that are based on reason, Nietzsche created his ideals by means of metaphors, tropes, and other literary techniques to defend his critical attitude and constructive visions.  In short, his presentation is based on persuasion rather than argumentation in order to avoid the self-referential critique to which Cartesianism is vulnerable. 

This strategy is best demonstrated in his work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The work contains many literary patterns � the narrative, the romance, the philosophical tale � with the title already raising the question about the nature and structure of the work: to whom is Zarathustra speaking?  The one, the many, the reader, to all three?  Is Zarathustra's prophecy the dominant narrative of the work, or should it be considered as one of the many others within it?  These questions reveal the deliberate ambiguity inherent in the work so as to avoid self-referential critiques. 

            In the Vorrede Zarathustra announces his concern about wisdom and his new way to proclaim its dissemination, "I am weary of my wisdom." [6]   Unlike traditional western philosophy with its claim that wisdom can be commonly owned and therefore shared among others, Zarathustra seeks to dispense with his wisdom because he has a superfluous amount of it that requires him to be rid of it.  He seeks purification instead of communal sharing by dispensing his wisdom, "Behold!  This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be man again" (p. 39).  In the marketplace Zarathustra attempts to teach about the superman to the content townspeople but only is able to represent him as a distant goal.  This symbolic or poetic prophecy is an indirect refutation of the present and ultimately becomes an inadequate mode to communicate his teaching with the end result of the townspeople ridiculing him.  This episode is representative of the challenge confronting Nietzsche: to be able to communicate effectively his critique and vision to others without resorting to the subject-centered reason of Descartes.

            Part One consists of a series of metaphorical discourses, with Zarathustra transforming or inverting traditional metaphors into new ones: the body will be spirit, peace should be victory, and the state is a cold monster.  The destruction of old metaphors and the creation of new ones is the activity of transvaluation, for "all names of good and evil are images" and "he who has to be a creator always has to destroy."  The plethora of metaphors that Zarathustra invokes in Part One could be described indefinitely; but what is important to note, as Paul de Man suggests, is that the abundance of metaphors "is itself a sign of divine absence, and the conscious use of poetic imagery an admission of this absence." [7]   Besides God, the superman also is absent, with a frenzy attempt to fill this void with metaphors.  The absence of a foundation, whether transcendent or man-made, creates a surfeit of unmoored metaphors that deify rational classification and categorization.

            A closer examination of "Of Reading and Writing" in Part One not only reveals the metaphorical tone with its images of reading, writing, violence, sexuality, and a dancing god; but it also reveals that its rhetorical stance is metaphorical.  Zarathustra is addressing the satisfied townspeople, the Motley Cow, as he called them, in a variety of oral discourse � speech, song, and silence � that is concrete and therefore universally accessible.  Zarathustra's speech, especially when he is reading his own aphoristic writings, does not require the particularly audience in front of him, the Motley Cow, because his speech as written text in concrete imagery is accessible to anyone who reads Zarathustra.  The reader is challenged to separate himself from the Motley Cow and to try to decipher Zarathustra's teaching through his series of metaphors.  The rhetoric of the work therefore is metaphorical in trying to elicit the reader directly into Zarathustra's teachings.

            Part Two focuses on the idea of the will as the cause and nature of all things.  This reduction of all reality to the will and the obstacles it must confront is metonymical.  An example of this is Zarathustra' teaching, "On the Blissful Island,": "But to reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god!  Therefore there are no gods (p. 110).  The reasoning here is not logical but tropological.  When all is reduced to the will, experience becomes a series of dichotomies between the will and the obstacles it confronts.  Like the metaphors, these dichotomies are presented in their traditional forms but are transvaluated into what should be privileged � man over god, self-affirmation over self-denial, becoming over permanence � and like Part One, the series of dichotomies presented, and at times what should be privileged, is never fully resolved.  Again, the deliberate ambiguity invoked here is to preclude the self-referential critiques to which modern philosophy is subject.

            An example of this ambiguity is found in "Of Poets," where Zarathustra criticizes the poets for failure in thought and sentiment in their use of vague and indefinite metaphors in their work (this criticism also could be interpreted as an attack on the metaphorical principle itself that was used in Part One, although we cannot be certain about it, for Zarathustra himself claims to be a poet).  In his criticism of the metaphorical principle, Zarathustra first converses with his disciple and then talks to himself: the poets' claim of metaphorical unity can be dissected and reduced to a metonymic opposition between the poet and nature, the poet and his fantasies, the poet and an imagined reality.  If there is any hope for the poets, it lies in their own weariness of themselves: "I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: they all seem to be superficial and shallow seas" (p. 151).  The only hope for them is to overcome their dependence upon an audience, like Zarathustra was able to accomplish from conversing with his disciple to his interior monologue.  Thus, Zarathustra neither fully embraces the poets nor completely rejects them: he does not want to be classified or categorized as either a philosopher or a poet; but rather, he wants to be more self-conscious of the quarrel between poetics and philosophy.

            Part Three is characterized as synecdoche: the parallelism of the microcosm and macrocosm in the examination of the idea of the eternal return.  The traditional use of synecdoche is for philosophy, because it produces a sense of totality and comprehensibility while not subject to perpetual shifting of metaphorical identification or dichotomous metonymy.  Zarathustra eternal return is eternal in the sense that every moment is "baptized in eternity": the eternal thing is a state of continual becoming rather than permanence.  When we think of eternity, we think and discuss about every past, concrete moment of our lives.  Eternity is not about contemplation of Platonic eidos but about remembrance of fleeting particular moments of temporal existence. [8]   Thus, Zarathustra is able to accomplish this transvaluation of values by transvaluating his language from metaphorical to metonymical to synecdochic adequacy.  In "Of the Three Evil Things," where sensual pleasure, lust for power, and selfishness are valued, Zarathustra sings himself a song to lift up his spirits in order to promulgate a new set of laws to replace the old.  The interiority of the speech could lead us to interpret Zarathustra as a pathetic and lonely man; but the synedochical aspect of the work transvaluates loneliness into solitude where meaning is self-created but not subject-centered. 

            Part Four is governed by the trope of irony, as Zarathustra struggles with his pity for higher men.  His distress leads to an assemblage of guests, which includes the last Pope, for the ass-festival, a parody of the last supper, where he says, "Truly, you may all be Higher Men but for me � you are not high and strong enough."  Each higher person represents a misunderstanding of Zarathustra's teaching; and Zarathustra distances himself from them by ridicule and irony.  When he does express some pleasure, Zarathustra instructs them about the ass-festival, "And if you celebrate it again, this ass festival, do it for love of yourselves, do it also for love of me!  And in remembrance of me (p. 325-326).  With the absence of God, Zarathustra does not want to be worship in his place; instead, he wants to be remembered by continual dance and play � activities by their very nature avoid privileging any person or idea.  Dance and play precludes the formulation and transmission of doctrinal teachings.

            The number and different types of tropes and literary techniques employed in Zarathustra makes a rational assessment of the work difficult and prevents a self-referential critique.   The open-ended and contradictory language communicates Zarathustra's teachings to the reader symbolically rather than philosophically � something of which Nietzsche himself was acutely aware.  For Nietzsche, clarify, order, and coherence are the marks of good philosophical writings: "Those who know that they are profound strive for clarify.  Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity." [9]   But as Nietzsche recognized and contrary to Descartes, clarity itself is a philosophical problem that requires rhetorical consideration.  A work is rhetorically determined by its inclusions and exclusions: it does not address an audience but functions as a conspiracy for a few to keep the true nature of the text away from the many outsiders.  This understanding helps describes the form of Nietzsche's writings, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in his attempt to avoid self-referential criticism.

            Given the rhetorical strategy of Nietzsche in his works, a form of his politics is difficult to assess.  Some, like Tracy Strong, advocate for an interpretation that Nietzsche seeks to transform human nature in a Homeric-type of society, although Nietzsche himself rejected this notion in The Anti-Christ. [10]   Others, such as Mark Warren, suggest that Nietzsche's politics is "neo-aristocratic conservatism," which does not warrant serious consideration. [11]   Building on this, there are those who focus on Nietzsche's "politics of the soul" where the individual is composed of a multiple combination of drives, passions, and identities.  The state should cultivate individuals but ultimately is unable to; consequently politics becomes at best a distraction to the real task at hand: the struggle within the individual psyche. [12]   Finally, there are those that argue Nietzsche's political theory is rooted in a sense of compassion and empathy with one's fellow human beings. [13]

            In spite of these different interpretations of Nietzsche's politics, we can see that Cartesian epistemological division of reality into subjects and objects has produced unfortunate consequences.  The first is the over-valuation of consciousness as transparent and unified; the second is the drive towards radical individualism and introspection.  For Nietzsche, it may not be possible to separate consciousness from sub or unconsciousness, even though humans would image them to be different because they experience them differently.  Furthermore, historical change on the nature of the subject is ignored within the Cartesian paradigm � something which Nietzsche would reject.  In short, the subject and object dichotomy is nothing more an elaborate mask or attempt to disguise certain unpleasant realities from ourselves.

 

Experience and Ineffable Reality

 

            Whereas Nietzsche supplanted Cartesian subjectivity through his different tropes and literary techniques in order to avoid a self-referential critique, Voegelin created a theory of participatory consciousness that relies upon experience to the same effect.  Voegelin's theory of consciousness in similar to Nietzsche's in that he also acknowledges the reality and experience of transcendence, but it differs in that Voegelin believed transcendence is the source of the most significant meaning for individuals and the political society in which they exist.  He also agreed with Nietzsche that consciousness is not a constructed a priori but rather is a fluid movement that continues to articulate and re-articulate itself in the reality which humans partake.  Consciousness is a process that only can be observed from a vantage point within: there is no Cartesian point-of-view where humans detachedly can observe reality as an objectivity entity; instead, it is a process of illumination of reality that is experienced within the confines of one's own consciousness (CW6, 77-79). [14]

            Unlike Nietzsche's emphasis upon forgetfulness, Voegelin's theory stresses the importance of the dimensions of time � past, present, and future � as the model to understand all other processes in reality as rooted in a concrete personal, social, and historical existence (CW6, 398-403; CW12, 306-12).  By rooting his theory of consciousness into concrete reality, Voegelin avoided the problems of Cartesian abstraction that splits reality into subject and object: the restriction of the "horizon of consciousness" is removed by emphasizing the participatory aspect of consciousness in concrete existence.  For Voegelin, this participatory experience with transcendent is relational and manifests itself in the form of differentiation and compactness within a societal and historical context.  This focus on the concrete as the site for human experience of transcendence avoids the problems of self-referential critiques to which subject-centered is vulnerable.

            However, the philosopher's encounter with transcendence should not be mistaken for knowledge of the substance of transcendence: according to Voegelin, the philosopher is not able to obtain knowledge of things in themselves (CW6, 80-81).  The philosopher's experience with transcendence is articulated in symbols as realities of consciousness: they are neither representations of a reality independent of experience nor are they realities that are self-referential, i.e., knowledge.  The only knowledge the philosopher is able to grasp is the symbols of his experience with transcendence (CW12, 313).  This construction of consciousness and its symbolization therefore is able to prevent the Cartesian dichotomization of reality into subject and object.  For Voegelin, a knowledge of reality is possible that neither slips into the solipsism of subjectivity nor obliterates consciousness for objectivity.

This experience with transcendence is what Voegelin called the metaxy: the existence of the philosopher's consciousness in a state of tension between the poles of immanent and transcendent reality.  The philosopher's existence in the metaxy is an ongoing struggle to know transcendence, which is beyond the scope of human understanding.  Consequently, the philosopher must not let his desire to know dominate his exploration of reality (libido dominandi): he must not degenerate into an "intentionalist" desire to know transcendence as if it were some "object this side of the horizon"; nor must he assume that human realities belong to the realm of transcendent (CW12, 327).  The philosopher must strike a "balance of consciousness" between his intentionality to know transcendence and his acceptance that his analysis always will remain incomplete.

On the one hand, the philosopher must recognize that intentionality is an epistemological mode of understanding reality as "things" while, on the other hand, acknowledge that the symbolization of those experiences cannot be understood in a subject-object epistemological approach (CW12, 326).  If the philosopher loses this "balance of consciousness" between intentionality and acceptance, he will fall into a deformed existence (i.e., gnosticism) where he perceives reality merely as objects like Descartes or attempt to transform reality by magic.  Again, the philosopher, therefore, must recognize that consciousness is not a fixed structure that is created a priori; but rather, it is a fluid process in which the process of reality becomes luminous (reveals itself) to the philosopher.

            This acceptance of an incomplete understanding of transcendence becomes all more vulnerable to misinterpretation, if not outright rejection, given the nature of language (CW6, 373-374).  Since language by its very nature is structured with subjects and objects in its sentences, one can easily mistake an articulation of one's consciousness in the Cartesian instead of the Voegelinian "process" sense.  As a result of this condition, Voegelin selected linguistic indices to speculate about the divine: ineffable reality can only be described by way of analogy.  If we remain sensitive to the fact that philosophers from the classical and medieval world were speaking of the divine by analogy instead of literally, we will not fall into the trap of thinking consciousness as an object which we can analyze � an approach that was abandoned by modern philosophers, beginning with Descartes, and recovered with postmodern thinkers starting with Nietzsche.

            With this understanding of language, Voegelin's emphasis on the concrete as the site of the encounter between the philosopher and transcendence becomes all the more important.  Whereas the ancient and medieval thinkers recognized that the Nicene Creed was merely linguistic indices to describe the ineffable reality of transcendence, the moderns failed to recognize that these symbols were merely indices of experience.  Instead of recovering the lost experiential context behind the symbol, modern philosophers reacted only at the level of linguistics and as a result produced theories of consciousness that ignored transcendence (CW6, 369-371, 391-392).  The return to the concrete for Voegelin is an attempt to recover the experiences behind the symbols, to anchor the symbols in a particular societal and historical reality that is tangible.  The philosopher therefore participates with reality in the metaxy where he strives to maintain a balance of consciousness in concrete existence within a societal and historical context. 

This theory of consciousness emerged from Voegelin's study of Vico's and Schelling's reaction to Descartes' new philosophy: Voegelin rejected Descartes' cogito � "reflective thinking" � for the "unreflective, creative evocation of symbols which expresses a deeper stratum of human substance" (CW19, 28). [15]   Voegelin believed that Descartes fell into the positivist fallacy of creating an epistemology that was modeled after the new mathematics, thereby transforming the transcendent nature of reality into an objective reality to analyze (CW23.176).  The underlying motive for the creation of this new epistemology was at Descartes' time the authority for meaning no longer resided in the Roman Catholic Church; consequently, philosophers became aware of being "engaged in a civilizational process without meaning" and consequently attempted "a reconstruction of meaning through the evocation of a new �scared history'" by "evoking an image of man in the cosmos under the guidance of inner-worldly reason" (CW24, 56, 94, 121).  The reliance upon the autonomy of human reason led to a re-conceptualization of the divine as an objective entity, as we find in deism, where God is no longer a being who participates in reality with man but rather stands outside of the human realm and observes it with detachment. 

            The scienza nuova of Vico is an example that Voegelin cites as one that seeks to counter the Cartesian philosophy with its examination only of the physical phenomena.  By contrast, Vico's science looks at both the physical and substantial aspect of reality, making him for Voegelin "beyond a mere rivalry with Descartes and beyond a competitive attempt to create a science of politics in emulation of physics" (CW24, 94).  This new science understood that humans only can understand transcendence through his consciousness with a non-Cartesian certainty: "This is the epistemology of [Vico's] Liber metaphyiscus; it is directed against the physicist's claim of certainty for the results of their science, and particularly against the Cartesian cogito as the point of certainty in mediation" (CW24, 99).  Certainty for Vico and Voegelin is not verification of the proposition or symbol but of the experience as articulated in the proposition or symbols.  Non-Cartesian certainty is when the philosopher must examine his own consciousness to compare his own experiences with that of whom he is studying (CW12, 313).

            Vico's new science requires a philosophical anthropology that re-incorporates transcendence, history, and society back into the given of the analysis.  The Cartesian position is to locate an "Archimedic point of metaphysics in the cogitare of solitary existence" where the philosopher can survey all of reality as if were some objective entity (CW24, 145).  For Vico, the first axiom of his new science is the historicity of existence; and this new science studies the substance (transcendence) as its subject.  From Vico's and Voegelin's perspective, Descartes' cogito belongs to the realm of phenomena rather than of substance, thereby being unable to furnish a point of certainty in its analysis of reality.  The cogito is reflective instead of unreflective and is symptomatic of the time where the "hubris of disoriented man who is obsessed by his amor sui" manifests itself in the "scientism of the Cartesian movement and of Protestant political speculation that became fully visible only in his own lifetime and in the following century" (CW24, 95).  The human libido dominandi has sought to create new meaning in a civilization that had lost its own.

            Descartes did not want to return to a Christian ontology; nor did he believe that the external world was accessible to knowledge.  The only certainty about reality only could be located in the cogito of the philosopher: the world had to be "reconstructed when the philosopher had assured himself that the existence of his ego implies the existence of God and that God cannot wish to deceive him" (CW24, 205-206).  This start of a new philosophy removes the experience of nature and society and solely relies on human reason, resulting into deism, the notion of the Archimedean viewpoint, and radical individualism:

 

The Mediations, it is true, belongs still to the culture of the search, but Descartes

has deformed the movement by reifying its partners into objects for an

Archimedean observer outside the search.  In the conception of the new,

doctrinaire metaphysics, the man who experiences himself as the questioner is

turned into a res cogitans  whose esse must be inferred from its cogitare; and the

God for whose answer we are hoping and waiting is turned into the object for an

ontological proof of his existence.  The movement of the search, furthermore, the

eroticism of existence in the In-Between of divine and human, has become a

cogitare demonstrating its objects; the luminosity of the life of reason has

changed into the clarity of the raisonnement.  From the reality of the search, thus,

as it is disintegrates in the Mediations, there are set free the three specters which

haunt the Western scene to this day.  There is, first, the God who has been thrown

out of the search and is no longer permitted to answer questions: living in

retirement from the life of reason he has shriveled into an object of unreasoned

faith; and at appropriate intervals he is declared to be dead.  There is, second, the

cogitare of the Archimedean observer outside the movement: it has swollen into

the monster of Hegel's Consciousness which has brought forth a God, man, and

history of its own . . .And, finally, there is the man of the Cartesian cogito ergo

sum: he has sadly come down in the world, being reduced as he is to the fact and

figure of the Sartrean sum ergo cogito; the man who once could demonstrate not

only himself but even the existence of God, has become the man who is

condemned to be free and urgently wants to be arrested for editing a Maoist

journal (CW12, 176-177).

 

 

Conclusion

 

            Voegelin's theory of consciousness avoids self-referential criticism 1) by relying upon experience, particularly of transcendence, in a participatory mode which side-steps the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy; 2) by contending that experience is articulated symbolically which are neither representations of a reality independent of experience nor realities that are self-referential; and 3) by focusing on the concrete site of the human encounter with transcendence within a changeable historical and societal context.  These strategies are effective in overcoming Cartesian subjectivity without self-referential criticism.  Nietzsche also was successful in this task, although he used different strategies in his philosophical project of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 1) the use of tropes and other literary techniques to deliberately create ambiguity in the interpretation of the text; 2) the use of concrete imagery, metaphors, and symbols to replace philosophical reason as a means to persuade the reader of Zarathustra's teaching; and 3) the philosophical teachings of transvaluation and the eternal return that can be employed to perpetually  shift existential, human meaning.  Both Voegelin and Nietzsche are able to overcome Cartesian subjectivity without being vulnerable to postmodern self-referential criticism.

            The superiority of one mode over the other depends upon the reader's position on the nature of transcendence.  For Voegelin, transcendence was not only a given in his analysis but a source that provided significance to individuals and political societies; while for Nietzsche, transcendence was a reality acknowledged but to be transvaluated in favor of a pre-moral ethics of strength, pleasure, and utility.  To determine which of these philosophers is correct would be difficult without returning to a subject-centered reason and all the problematic consequences that would entail.  Ultimately, it would seem that the basis of that decision without being vulnerable to self-referential criticism is self-examination � something which both Nietzsche and Voegelin had asked their readers to do.  It is our experiential encounter with reality � and what we make of it � that will tell us which of these two thinkers were correct about the nature and our relationship with transcendence.

 

Endnotes

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