Pickstock 3: Voegelin, Schelling, Bruno, Cudworth
This is part of a series on Catherine Pickstock's 2013 Repetition and Identity. In this part we're going to be talking about Pickstock's ideas in relation to several other thinkers in the Platonic tradition: Eric Voegelin, F. W. J. Schelling, Giordano Bruno and Ralph Cudworth.
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Mechanical Owl
Hello there, reader! This post is getting a little long in the tooth. If you would like to read something a little better on Schelling, Cudworth, Voegelin and Bruno please see part 5 of my chapbook Process and the Derailing of Reality over at VoegelinView.

Over the past two posts (here and here) we have been talking about Radical Orthodoxy thinker Catherine Pickstock’s 2013 book Repetition and Identity (Oxford University Press, Oxford). In this third part of this four-part essay we’ll be looking at Pickstock’s theories in light of a number of key Platonic thinkers: Eric Voegelin (whom this blog is largely about), F. W. J. Schelling, Giordano Bruno (see back here) and Ralph Cudworth (see here).

The previous, second portion of this essay ended with the realisation that if we are to take our “speculative realist” process Platonism seriously, then we must emphasise that what speaks and plays in human language and thought is but an epiphenomenon of what is always-already going on in the world in which man is embedded along with his fellow res (entities). In many ways the sharing of the nature of the “out there” of the world in process and the “process from the inside” of emergent subjectivity might seem reminiscent of the few short bursts Voegelin ever ventured in relation to the fellow “existents” with whom we share this world. Man is a creaturely being of a day, as Voegelin would say, who finds himself:

“an existent among others; he experiences a world of existents of which he is a part. Moreover, in discovering himself in his limitation as part in a field of existents, he discovers himself as not being the maker of this field of existents or of any part of it. Existence acquires its poignant meaning through the experience of not being self-generated but having its origin outside itself.”[1]

This is indeed very close to Pickstock’s theory of the “judgement of God” immanent in nature, which leads us towards the search for the divine origin of the process which brings forth the non-identical repetition of res (things). Nature is anagogic – it leads us towards the transcendent. But to what degree was Voegelin a process philosopher like Pickstock? The fact is that if we look closely at his conception of human consciousness that he had very profound debts to A. N. Whitehead, F. W. J. Schelling, William James and Henry Bergson and came very close to outlining a “process Platonism”. In what follows I will attempt to illuminate these debts and contrast them with Pickstock.

It is often seems hard to categorise Voegelin using standard philosophical phyla because he was using bits and pieces of various modern thinkers to try to come at the sort of mystical experiences 19th and 20thcentury European philosophy had very little interest in. Was Voegelin a phenomenologist? Certainly, Voegelin’s philosophy centred itself upon attempting to recover the consciousness and experiences of the great philosophoi and religious thinkers, to the point that his project may well appear somewhat subjectivist. However, as Renaud Fabbri points out,[2] Voegelin certainly does not seem to have had any love for Kant and his children. He considered Husserl’s “nondiscussable ultimatum” of the rejection of traditional symbolic systems in favour of subjective “appearance” to be a “bankruptcy of philosophy” and a “symptom of spiritual nihilism” .[3] Instead Voegelin sought to move beyond the limits of mere phenomenological intentionality to how pre-intentional religious experience comes to be conveyed and converted into analogical and anagogical symbolic systems: “a mythical symbol is a finite symbol supposed to provide ‘transparence’ for a transfinite process.”[4] With this move we see a turn towards the question of consciousness as a part of ongoing cosmic process, most strongly outlined as follows:

“The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process – the only process which we know “from within”. Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness.”[5]

Even the Bergsonian “flow” of consciousness has a “limit” and “vanishing point” for Voegelin – the egological “I” disappearing either into the body or into the ground of being,[6] the old darkness below and darkness above of the Neo-Platonic mystical traditions. Transcendence seemingly cannot be a datum of consciousness. On the other hand, for someone like Gilles Deleuze, who also attempted to push and transcend the “flow” of conscious experience to its limits, empirical sense data instead take on a life of their own at the expense of the “I”.[7] I’m sure that Voegelin would have considered this process thought and its worship of schizophrenic aestheticism thoroughly nihilistic and subhuman – the darkness of the sophist disintegrating into non-being as opposed to the transcendental darkness of the philosopher due to excess light.[8] But Voegelin has far stronger debts to process thought than merely the consideration of consciousness as the “flow” of reality experienced from the inside. Consider the following quotation from Anamnesis:

“The being of immanence which we call “world” contains no problem of arche (except possibly in the sense of what transcends the world) but only one of indefinite progression. If we ask whether the “world” has a beginning in time or not, we have loaded the question by hypostatizing the order of being into a being thing inasmuch as we have forgotten that “being” and “world” do not exist but rather are relations of order with respect to the cosmos in which we still are living.”[9]

I do not think that one can read this “hypostatizing” and not feel that there are very strong hints of William James’ “vicious abstractionism” at work, or Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” – the nasty habit of transforming speculative concepts into “things” at the expense of the ongoing organismic “flow” of reality.[10] There is plenty of other material like this squirrelled away in Voegelin’s works, but rarely, if ever, is it developed into anything “systematic”. Voegelin was most certainly opposed to systematic metaphysics, but because of this it is sometimes hard to gain an overall grasp of his passage of thought, and whether certain ideas were simply uttered off the cuff and never returned to. Let’s see what we can do with what we have and what we might add by returning to the opportunities he found and passed over in other process thinkers.

Voegelin saw a Plato of “erotic reason”, one who desires ongoing luminous experience of that which is hyperouranion (beyond the heavens). For this Voegelin was especially dependent upon the philosopher’s use of the words metaxy (between) and epekeina(beyond). So too the terms helkein (to pull) and zetein (to search), which he uses to describe the life of the philosopher given over to theoria (speculative existence), a metalepsis/methexis (participation) in Being. [11] Reflecting on these Voegelin came to the idea of centring experience upon the relation between two poles – that of man and that of the Beyond, and how the experience of the latter was pre-intentional and anti-foundational, an It-Reality, which could only be analogically communicated through recourse to creative use of one’s available cultural symbols. [12] As Greek philosophy develops as a series of symbolisations of divine experience, the symbols used come to be unpacked from a “compacted” state and are more clearly defined.

The notion of “two poles” was most likely borrowed from A.N. Whitehead’s similar construction of a physical and mental pole in human beings, “inseparable in their origination”. So too does Whitehead’s God have a “primal” pole from before the world and experience of it, and an “actual” pole that develops as God “grows” with the world and is affected by it.[13]The problem of course is that such a view is always likely to be misunderstood and hypostatised into two “things” – man and God as each divided into two. Voegelin seems to have taken up this Whiteheadian position because if one thing is clear about the history of Platonism and Christianity, it is that they have tended towards irreconcilable dualisms of transcendent and immanent God, of perfect spirit and lowly matter, such as Gnosticism, that have had some pretty nasty consequences. Thus, one might wonder if by speaking of the metaxy/In-Between, when Plato never uses this term into a substantive, that Voegelin may be in danger of hoisting himself on his own petard: of drawing attention to it as a “thing” that exists between man and the beyond (which itself should not be treated as some thing or “land”). He is talking about relation, and sad to say, it is too easy to concretise action into nouns because our languages seem biased towards this. Perhaps even gerunds like “metaxying” or “betweening” would have been a slightly better choice, though they do seem a little ridiculous.

Voegelin most cogently illustrates his processual conception of Plato and Aristotle and their use of the terms psyche and nous as a series of symbolised “levels” going both up and down in flows on a little chart on page 114 of Anamnesis (see below). This is very interesting because as I learned my Plato from Neo-Platonists and Guenonians, the idea of reality as series of flowing, emanated sediments like the looking at coffee in a glass cup has always stuck with me. Like this strange coffee analogy, to Voegelin nous and psyche are experiential symbols of course, and should not be hypostatised – turned into absolute “things”. They are tools for thinking a flowing reality which has steadily been closed off by “philosophers” (who of all people should know better!) over the past thousand years (especially in the West). This is not due to any natural evolutionary phenomenon, or the inherent decline of things as we find in Guénon, but seemingly because of the inherent entropy that comes with symbolisations of order which become dead dogma over time.

In relation to this, one of the most important things Voegelin took from Henri Bergson was the concept of “l’âme ouverte” (the open soul) from his late Two Sources of Morality and Religion.[14] Bergson speaks of the openness and love for reality which accompanied early religious experience and philosophy, and how this came to be closed over into dogmatic priesthoods and moral systems. It is too true that the mystic and philosopher have always had an uneasy relationship with authority, but if we look around today in the “marketplace of ideas” and its communicational “global village” (two gratuitous misreadings of “l’âme ouverte” belonging to Karl Popper and Marshall McLuhan respectively),[15] it would seem indeed that we are not only very low on mystics and saints, but also even original “secular” thinkers in general. At some point everyone seems to have got stuck in the middle of the 20th c. and what it found outre, rebellious, cool and “spiritual” and then in dotage simply stopped there. There is not much more “conservative” and closed than what remains of mid-century “post-modern” literature, art, theology and philosophy. If ever there was a time needing a bit of a shakeup and rereading of its old myths and the creation of a few new ones, just as Plato undertook, now would seem highly appropriate.

But more than anything, Voegelin’s nascent “process Plato” is fascinating for one major reason. There has been a rather naff habit over the past century to apply A. N. Whitehead’s process thought to just about every tradition outside the West, from the Hindus, to the Chinese to the Aztecs.[16] This has been largely deployed to show that everyone else “goes with the flow”, but that the West is the odd one out: diseased by clunky “essentialism” and the desire to control reality, from Plato to Newton to the cybernetician. Only at the last minute does the West come to realise that it has been wrong – that there is no essential Being, only flowing organismic Becoming. What is amusing about this is that Whitehead was obsessed with Plato, and more than anything one might claim that he was a kind of Neo-Neo-Platonist, just as he himself famously said that all Western philosophy was but a footnote to the Greek thinker.

What makes Whitehead so Platonic? In his book Adventures in Ideas, Whitehead bases the entire text around seven major concepts inherited from Plato. The most important of these is the “receptacle” or khora – one of the strangest puzzles in all of Plato’s corpus. Whitehead calls it the nexus: the ground where occasions and events emerge. This “thing” is called by many names and analogies in Plato: a man modelling geometric shapes out of gold and then moulding the material into other ones; like a mother or even nurse/foster-mother of entities in the world of becoming that are fathered by the Forms; like a scentless base liquid perfume makers use for carrying other scents; as an indestructible space (khora) where entities come into being that cannot be detected by the senses; like a receptacle or sieve for separating out grain in its use to separate primordial chaos into the four elements.[17] It is the mysterious “third thing” – a necessary tool of resolution to explain how the Forms could be actualised into physical becoming. Whitehead may have claimed that it was “unscholarly” to associate modern concepts like spacetime with Plato’s khora, but he also firmly seemed to have believed that science was coming closest to the concept for the first time since Plato.[18]

As the iatromantic Timaeus points out in the dialogue, just after mentioning the inability of the senses to detect the khora, we are told that it can only be approached through “logismo notho” (bastard reasoning). Voegelin, in one of the few nods to Plato’s cosmological thought notices this,[19] but does very little with it. More than anything the “receptacle” is not only the ground of emergence, it is also the ground of speculative thought about reality. We can only make comparisons and analogies to try to think where it all comes from. It is a groundless ground, as Schelling would call the basis of reality (we’ll be looking at Schelling later in this essay). Jacques Derrida had much to say about the khora/receptacle from an anti-foundationalist standpoint. It is nowhere, but everywhere – the ultimately deferred non-entity that troubles our conceptions of space, location and emergence and the very way we try to symbolise reality, from Plato down to the present:

“But if khora is a receptacle, if it/she gives place to all the stories, ontologic or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what she receives and even of what she resembles bur which in fact takes place in her, khora herself, so to speak, does not become the object of any talk, whether true or fabled. A secret without secret remains forever impenetrable…”[20]

So does this “receptacle” or khora even exist if it is neither Being nor Becoming? Derrida asks, recalling Plato’s Beyond that was so important to Voegelin: “And yet why does not Plato say that khora is epekeina tes ousias? Why is that so difficult to say and to think?” I think that Derrida was getting close to something here. John Sallis notes that epekeina tes ousias is only ever used to talk about the Good. In an ongoing discussion with Derrida, he posited that in Plato’s Myth of the Cave, when the prisoner ascends to the sunlit world, which is called a khora (place), may well echo the Receptacle of the Timaeus. Derrida thought that this was stretching things a bit far, but Sallis seems to have come to considering whether the khora is in fact what gives the Good its place epekeina tes ousias.[21] So too, in the few words he had to say about the khora, did Heidegger seem to realise that something was up: “Plato means to say: beings and Being are in different places. Particular beings and Being are differently located. Thus, when Plato gives thought to the different location of beings and Being, he is asking for the totally different place of Being, as against the place of beings.” Richard T. Livingston takes this up and asks whether:

“Plato’s khôra may provide an opening for what Heidegger refers to in “The Onto‐Theo‐Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” as the “step back”—namely, the step back out of metaphysics, or the movement beyond onto‐theological thinking into the horizon of the difference qua difference. The ontological difference refers to at least two concepts: (1) the (relatively straightforward) difference between Being and beings; (2) difference in itself and as such. On my reading, Heidegger’s ‘step back’ primarily involves thinking the latter.”[22]

The khora is a ground for producing puzzles. It draws us closely to the question of why things do not seem to exactly fit together into some neat symbolisation and “same”, but instead plagues us with “difference”. As Whitehead says, the khora “imposes a common relationship” on all things, but it does not tell us what that relationship is [my emphasis]”.[23] Therefore, an opening and doubt about commonality itself is provoked, just as we find in Pickstock’s theory of non-identical repetition and the “judgement of God” involved in the “punctuation” of reality through the emergence of res. What if, from a Voegelinian perspective, the khora is in fact a vital part to the metaxy in Plato? And what if it is by considering it and the problem of emergence and those entities around us (including ourselves) that one begins to awaken the quest for luminescence that transcends Being and Becoming?

What we should acknowledge is that the story of Socrates’ philosophical journey, as he recounts while awaiting his execution in the Phaedo, is one which began with “an extraordinary passion for that branch of learning which is called natural science; I thought it would be marvellous to know the reasons for which each thing comes and continues and ceases to be.”[24] The question of emergence and becoming is at the root of the philosophical quest. However, as Socrates continues, he did not find atomism and other materialisms satisfying. He describes how he came upon the ideas of Anaxagoras as his theory of a material world ruled by Nous (intellect). This led Socrates to thinking that “therefore if anyone wished to discover the reason why any given thing came, continued or ceased to be, he must find out how it was best for that thing to be, or to act, or to be acted upon in any way.”[25]

Yet the young Socrates soon fell out with this explanation too because it seemed to him that it never managed to explain how causation by Nous and causation by material elements worked together. In the end Socrates came up with the Forms, so we are told, and maintained this idea until his death (even if the young Socrates’ Theory of Forms had been knocked down by Parmenides, so we might recall). Nonetheless, it is the search for the reason behind why things emerge, endure and perish that is seen to characterise the Socratic life from start to finish, and however much this might be an issue for the “Socratic Problem” (ie. Plato’s own path of thought), I do not think we should ignore this. In fact, I think we should centralise it. I think I’m also going to say this: the khora is a necessary part of the metaxic journey. It is that which exists between emergent entities and the Beyond. Thus, for those emergent entities with Nous, such as man, it is only by pondering the purpose of things coming and going that he can turn to ask for the nature of things at work behind it all.

II.

Thus, it would seem very clear that although Voegelin never seems to have got around to formulating a cosmological theory (averse to “system-building” as he was), perhaps if he had turned his mind to it he would have come up with something similar to Pickstock. However, it is likely that had Voegelin truly elaborated such a “system” in detail, he would have done so through a thinker whom Pickstock seems to pass over altogether: F. W. J. Schelling. Pickstock lists a group of somewhat similar thinkers from Hume to Pierce, Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Schopenhauer and Goethe whom she sees as conjoined because they all believe that we are always-already inside the world. At the same time, they appear to also share the key belief that from within we are permitted a “wide view” of things, as if we were standing on the top floor of a house and might look out and see the “whole cosmos”. To this I would like to add Schelling so that we might attempt to bring Pickstock and Voegelin together through him.

As Jerry Day has pointed out, Voegelin was strongly taken by Schelling’s “process theology” Potenzlehre as the “only meaningful systematic philosophy”, and in the Last Orientation went as far to call it “perhaps the profoundest piece of philosophical thought ever elaborated”.[26] Yet, for all the talk we might find scattered in Anamnesis about consciousness as the process of reality known from the inside and that it occurs side by side with these other immanent processes and has contact with them,[27] we never really get any development of the notion that: “the primary experience of the cosmos in which man is consubstantial with the things of his environment, a partnership which in philosophy is heightened to the wake consciousness of the community of order uniting thought and being”.[28] Perhaps only at the end of The Ecumenic Age do we ever arrive at something complex, a rather Schellingite evolutionism towards human consciousness emerging out of the cosmos to become luminous:

“There is no flux of presence in the Metaxy without its foundation in the biophysical existence of man on earth in the universe. By virtue of their founding character, the lower strata reach into the stratum of human consciousness not as its cause but as its condition. Only because the strata of reality participate in one another, through the relations of foundation and organization, in the order of the cosmos, can and must the time-dimensions of the strata be related to one another, with the time-dimension of the universe furnishing the ultimately founding measure….The physical universe as the ultimate foundation for the higher strata in the hierarchy of being cannot be identified as the ultimate reality of the Whole, because in the stratum of consciousness we experience the presence of divine reality as the constituent of humanity. In man’s consciousness, the foundational movement within reality from the physical depth becomes luminous for the creative constitution of all reality from the height of the divine ground.” [29]

This “creative constitution of all reality” seems to be closely echoed when Pickstock writes (p.16), seemingly against both mainstream scientific thought and Aristotle’s hierarchical three souls (vegetative, animal, rational) that:

“Instead of trying to see ourselves as initially as a kind of animal, and then as a kind of plant, and then as a pile of very small stones, and finally as a distillation of ethereal molecules, they suggest…that we know what we are like from the inside and therefore assume that the whole of nature is in various degrees somewhat like to ourselves, by the analogical kinship of the elements we find about us in nature.”

So Voegelin put it, the process of reality “from the inside” in the form of consciousness exhibits the fact that there is a “continuum” of animalic, vegetative and organic being that we find in the human microcosm.[30] This sort of view is course far from shocking, as far as premodern thought goes. Rumi said it most succinctly: “consciousness sleeps in minerals, dreams in plants, wakes up in animals, becomes aware in humans.” Yet perhaps this “Great Chain” is too concretely hierarchical and not analogical enough for the sort of cosmos Pickstock is getting at.

Thus, with Pickstock, Schelling and Voegelin we seem to have alighted upon a key part of the (Neo)Platonic heritage, perhaps not so distant to the “process” interplay of Plotinus’ spermatic logoi at work in the emergence of the plentitudinous emanation of living and non-living entities. However, compared with the others, Schelling’s cosmology might well seem an “ontologically violent” and “voluntarist” version of Neo-Platonism – something RO (Radical Orthodoxy) thinkers would surely not forgive. All is crashing and bashing between the start and the end, a millenarian Romanticism of epic proportions, in which man and God come to exist in perfect mutual tension. Voegelin’s understanding of Schelling’s Ages of the World, laid out in the Last Orientation might seem to sound at least a little to agree with this:

“Schelling considers this experience as revealing the character of the universal process in general. It is a futile endeavor to explain the manifoldness of nature as a peaceful interpenetration and harmonization of different powers. All that comes into being can do so only in restlessness and discontent (Unmut), and as anxiety is the fundamental feeling of every living creature, so is everything that lives conceived and born in violent strife.”[31]

However, the point is that to Schelling this “violent strife” is a bizarre illusion. The cosmos is little more than, so to speak, God nodding off, becoming unconscious. It exists as if all time and space are some temporary accident of the emergence of the negating will that wills nothing. Let alone the profoundest, Schelling’s theory might be the oddest vision of things every outlined. Schelling’s Potenzlehre in the Ages of the World tells the story of the eruption of the negative “will that wills nothing” (A1) from the primordial harmony of the transcendental God, the “will that does not will” (A0). This is a curious rethinking of the Neo-Platonic pleroma, the One which was so full that it could not help but pour out from itself. The cosmos will only return to A0 through the emergence of the affirming “will that wills something” (A2) and the balancing “will that wills itself” (A3). This process comes to perfection in a great alchemical “end of history” of human gnosis after three “Ages of the World” – that of the Father (mythology), the Son (rationality) and the Holy Spirit (love). Clearly the structure of this is avowedly Joachite, which would explain why Voegelin avoided it for so long. But is Schelling simply another ridiculous millenarian thinker of the three ages like like Fichte, Comte and Stirner? Has Schelling just rendered Neo-Platonism historical and progressive?

Radical Orthodoxy thinker John Milbank seems to understand that for all this there remains a “positive” core to Schelling because of his recognition of the importance of the Christian message of love:

“While Schelling’s schema is Joachite and heterodox, it remains closer than Hegel to an orthodox Christian sense that, since love is a matter of contingent willing and acting, the pattern of love in Christ and fidelity to the spirit of that pattern in the “Church” (the true human community) is indispensable to our understanding of love.”[32]

Schelling might speak of a violent cosmos, but in the end the gospel of love triumphs. I am quite sure that both Pickstock and Voegelin would agree with this and realise that the thinker can be saved from being simply one more dull millenarian. Instead, as Voegelin saw, Schelling seems to show us one of the profoundest articulations of the anthropology of religious experience. What then might we do with Schelling’s valuable insight into the “deep” nature of man’s existence within the cosmos and its realisation in luminous love between man and God?

In recent years there has certainly been an increase of interest in Schelling. For the most part it has been the same text that Voegelin found most interesting, the unfinished Ages of the World, that has garnered most attention from recent thinkers in the continental tradition. In spite of this they do not seem interested in the full Schelling. “New Materialists” only seem to be able to see in the Potenzhlehre one more boring antihumanist “complexity” cosmology.[33] Slavoj Žižek only seems interested in Ages to square Hegel with Lacan in order to develop a theory of the emergence of the human psychological subject and its desires from a vitalist Will.[34] But where in all this is Schelling’s God and man’s evolution towards knowledge and oneness with him? It’s not there because such thinkers are of course not interested in it.

As Milbank observes in his conversation with Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ, Schelling’s transcendental metanarrative of cosmic history and the emergence of man remains “genuinely theistic” when Hegel’s (and thus Žižek’s) is not. Schelling’s God is an “unbeginning eternal divinity above all being” – an entity of radical freedom. And yet man also shares in some aspects of this freedom. That which is knowable in God by man is so because like looks upon like. Does this mean that Schelling imagines man as some Faustian being destined to dethrone God? No, this does not seem to be the case. The emphasis is on oneness with God through love, a returning to a will which no longer wills because it no longer needs to go in search of things. If we remove the millenarian aspects from this we are left with the history of luminosity and affirmation of the ontologically different nature of the divine. Man may experience this, but which can only be conveyed analogically through what Voegelin called the move from pre-intentional It-Reality to intentional and symbolic Thing-Reality. The groundless ground cannot be converted into perfectly symbolised absolute gnosis.

Hegel, in comparison is very different. He claimed that with the crucifixion, the transcendent God died there and then so that the immanent community might live. Only clever moderns had come to understand this and thus in order to overcome their “unhappy consciousness” needed to realise Christianity and history’s completion in the liberal state. Now this is proper secularisation thesis millenarianism! But, as Milbank notes, the central problem is that Hegel reads the groundless ground as one of inherent negativity – the emergence of the cosmos out of nothing rather than a contained plenitude. Žižek feeds this negativity into quantum cosmology and the Lacanian “topography” of desire as lack. Thus, Žižek’s Hegel-Schelling-Lacan product imagines that human beings are but an epiphenomenal product of a “death drive” cosmology (and ontology) that is essentially “walking around forever in misery and pain” – tortured by the impossibility of any desire to be fulfilled by anything. The Schellingite “Wills” whip back and forth in search of completion, but it can never arrive. At the base of things is a Non-All that can never be satisfied. Like Badiou’s Neo-Marxism Žižek’s is terrified of completion because what haunts these thinkers is the possibility that Fukuyama’s liberal Hegelian “end of history” might be correct. It is a slightly monstrous thought, but is it worth dying on the hill of perpetual lack? To force Schelling into this sort of negativity, back into Hegel, is a gross misuse of the thinker, as Milbank rightly sees it:

“[Žižek’s] “love” is finally Hegelian and not Schellingian after all, because it is no positive, seeking desire (as with Deleuze and Guattari), but rather, as we have already seen, the disillusioned free embrace of the contingent as the contingent in admission of the impossibility of discovering any general amorous truth or any reality to erotic union.”[35]

Thus, while Žižek would have us turn our desires away from the endless false promises of consumerism which fail to satisfy in order to expend our efforts on a communist “messianic violence”, in the end this seems rather self-defeating and nihilistic “primacy of the negative”. Communism isn’t going to solve anything if the human being is an inherently dissatisfied creature. Communism just seems to be a kind of fantastical “busy work” for Žižek’s human being – some project that it is attractive because today it is generally regarded as failed and absurd. Why this? God knows what else we’re supposed to do with the pathetic human desire animal that can never be satisfied. As soon as it might get there, then surely it would realise that this great big object “a”, this pursued unicorn, is nothing more than just a normal boring everyday horse. Žižek thus in his attempt to preserve a radical freedom, an infinity of second chances for revolution, has nothing better than, in his own words, the pursuit to “fail again, fail better”.

But what is most interesting is the language Voegelin used to describe Schelling’s Potenzlehre. It is unabashedly sexual, an erotic union of feeling, anxiety and cosmic “orgasm of powers”. He writes: “the term potency was chosen with an awareness of its sexual implication. And, to the extent to which it rests on this aspect of the protodialectic experience, the Potenzenlehre would be a mathematizing speculation on the experience of the procreative act.”[36] It might well seem as though by taking desire as cosmic with Schelling, Voegelin moves close to the sort of bizarre ideas we might associate with Wilhelm Reich and his orgone energy, which had a profound effect on Deleuze and Guattari’s positive “seeking desire” (as Milbank terms it).[37]

What are we to do with this? If we side with a cosmic desire-as-lack in the spirit of Žižek, then we are, for want of a better term, “cucked” by the cosmos – there is no sexual relation, there is no woman – all is just symbolic fantasy trying to anxiously cover over a massive hole in the nature of things. Thus, while perhaps Voegelin and the RO thinkers might seem to agree with the anti-foundational nature of many post-modern thinkers against modernist absolute gnosis, the recognition of the analogia entis is a healthy and joyous, erotic recognition of human limitation. By recognising that sexuality is an epiphenomenal product of the cosmos, inherent in man and God’s other creatures, part of what Pickstock calls “divine judgement”, then we can realise that desire is indeed a “deep” part of our realism. We live in an erotic cosmos.

What we really need to understand is that desire is not univocal, but that it has differing registers. If there has been an eternal problem for mysticism it has been that of no one ever being quite sure, from the Song of Songs, alchemical unions, and the Islamic mystics to the mediaeval troubadours and Teresa of Avilla, whether the language of the lover and beloved really mean an analogical language for the pursuit of the divine, or whether they mean something far more carnal and crude and that is that.[38] Of course, the closed Freudian mind during the last century (which Žižek inexplicably prolongs) was only able to perceive the latter as Real rather than the greater sweep of things. Nonetheless the problem forever remains, and if it did not then such language would not be able to hold any useful analogical value anyway. Without the problem we would not be able to speak of religious ecstasy as the longing to be kissed by Christ, of the sacred wedding chamber, of being married to God and so on.

III.

I think we’re going to need Giordano Bruno to help us out with this. In his De Vinculis in Genere (On Bonds in General) Giordano Bruno develops a theory of politics as a sorcery of Eros, of rulers as magicians able to implant images in the minds of their subjects. As Ioan Couliano has observed this is perhaps the first modern theory of mass psychology, which would not again be returned to until Gustav Le Bon (and so we might add Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays).[39] To Bruno the cosmos is permeated with Eros – it is the force of attraction which binds everything together, from Man to God and from love to hate, from the highest desires to the lowest epithymia (appetition).

I think that we must say that should we approach human species-being that man is a creature embedded in process, drawn by all sorts of attractive or erotic forces, most of which he understands very little at all, including his current condition of “compelled repetition” under a futureless consumerism which has locked out the higher aspects of Eros – thymos (courage) and noos (thought) – as though the Political were now as fantastical as the belief in God is considered by a great many to be. If man was always uncertain or for the most part unaware of the forces dragging him hither and thither, now he has almost no understanding or perception of them whatsoever. Perhaps William James has a valuable image that he uses while arguing against Kant in Varieties of Religious Experience. It involves the comparison of human existence and spiritual experience to, of all things, an iron bar:

“Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence and their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.”[40]

What a strange comparison indeed! It might seem that it is already three quarters of the way to post-human “object orientated ontology!” But let us not forget that Plato in the short Ion compared the divinely inspired powers of the Homeric rhapsodes to that of a lodestone – to magnetised iron drawing in the audience and possessing them.[41] Most of our human’s existence is very simple indeed, simple organic systems – bodies, limbs and organs of repetition and immunisation against the “outside” that last until the wearing out or disruption that comes with the “entropy” of the building return of the non-identical. People adjust to lifeworld patterns, they see success in one thing and it becomes a ritual to stabilise the payout of the same; they “automate” themselves and their landscape by coming to know its predictability; they build social machines that “cut the flow” (as Deleuze’s process thought would say) – they take advantage of what appears to be reliable repetition in the order of things. And yet, in time, nothing concrete holds. No society lasts forever unchanged, without disruption and the need to adjust and diagnose an “order in history” to deal with ontological anxiety – in the inability of the immanent “same” to remain.

Are people then mostly machinic? As Voegelin said against Jung’s collective conscious, it is rather the case of a collective unconscious. Thought is rare – it takes effort to see around the limitations of the social machines one lives in and then to use their symbols to express a new luminous realisation. As Voegelin would say, Plato and Socrates turned away from the “unconscious” Athens of their day to go in search of wisdom.[42] Philosophy is dangerous – it always remains half in and half out of the polis. If it is not questioning “human nature” and common sense “the way things are” then there is something terribly wrong with it. It may demythologise by seeking the “natural law” at the bottom of things, but so too it cannot hear those two words “natural law” and not twitch, not necessarily in the name of the erection of some magical Faustian “freedom” (for it is obviously its duty to question that too), but simply because the “nature of things” always remains an unfinished question, a luminous ontologic underground beneath (or above, depending on the analogical mode) the phenomenal surface of res.

Most of the time just about all of us are nigh on unconscious, I think Voegelin would say. We should not be surprised that when it comes to the coining of the modern term the “unconscious” that it was Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth in the 17th c. who was responsible for this. Schelling of course is usually popularly accredited with “inventing” the concept of the unconscious as a way of getting around Kant and Hegel’s systems by emphasising man’s emergence into consciousness from the cosmos. Let’s bring them together. Building on Plotinus’ imagery of nature being like a trained dancer, Cudworth noted the overlap between habits that had become second nature through practice in human beings and their state when sleeping. He uses the image of a sleeping musician who contains all his songs within him.[43]

Man, to Cudworth, is thus part of “unconscious nature” – he is often as unconscious as the rest of the world growing and dying might seem to be. One might note that Schelling also developed his own understanding of the unconscious around the fact that consciousness continues during sleep: “none of the inner forces that are active in waking are lost in sleep.” Yet, it would seem very unlikely that Schelling might have known about Cudworth. Hardly anyone has. However, Schelling of course developed his discovery towards a millenarian history of the cosmos waking up, of the return to the “will that does not will”. Cudworth two centuries earlier did not even consider such a thing. His cosmos is without direction, though he did ask in typically open-minded Baroque fashion, whether in an infinite cosmos there might be an infinity of planetary world souls out there and creatures partaking in them. In light of the previous part of this essay, a good Platonic “theory fiction” should be more than able (and willing) to ask if there are other creatures that become “woke” from time to time on other worlds. Who knows?

Perhaps as an old teacher of mine used to say, even the very beasts of the fields are worshipping God’s throne in all their acts. And what weird and violent acts they can be! “Unconscious nature” remains strangely innocent in its crashing and bashing, including among human beings. So what if man should have some complex instrumental reason to build some great big social “megamachine”? So too do the bees. The problem of course is that the human (and perhaps many other creatures out there in the cosmos) seem cursed to think themselves alienated from this unconscious world, but are not quite conscious enough to know what to do.

How does one deal with this? The imperative seems to be that we must train ourselves towards certain unconscious habits – ones which encourage the pursuit of luminosity: religious ritual, virtuous behaviour, wonder and curiosity towards the signs immanent in the natural world we are embedded in. Thought is rare, once again, luminous thought even moreso. Voegelin saw it as belonging to a small few – “individuals of privilege” – a term not particularly welcome today. If there is a cult of personalist genius, then is it not located in the fact that Plato’s Socrates and the Christ of the Gospels are incredibly analogists, storytellers, and so too Mohammed and Lao Tzu? And yet those who can produce erotic sorcery, a lodestone effect upon other men through their words, while seemingly all too common – from the quack physician to the ad men – rarely manage to tap into something that has such an enduring effect.

Giordano Bruno’s problem was that he realised that the erotic ensorcellment of mankind can be practised by all sorts of people – it is simply that when Christ and the Church did it that it was good. Oh how easily then we might fall into a Calliclean or Nietzschean approach to such things – history is the story of those who have the power to convince the dullards to do what they want. But then of course we must ask why some have had far more enduring influence than others, why their ideas have birthed all manners of rereadings, heresies and inversions – support for power and its undermining – and yet no “exit”. Why does Western society remain “Christianity-shaped” and “footnotes to Plato”? Quite simply, so it would seem, because they supplied models that had magnetic effects on men’s desires and ontological anxiety that could keep on giving and mutating as the world has worn on, one concrete culture giving way to another.

Frankly it should not be surprising if the genealogies of both are not still echoing in thousands of years to come, though they may look very much different from what they do today or did yesterday. Now that is the sort of thing that no Nietzsche nor Callicles has ever really managed, except as the predictable return of the parasites of cynical and sceptical reason. So too the cheap nihilism that man is very small indeed and the universe so very large and thus somehow this means that one instantly jumps ahead, to human extinction or to heat-death as consolation for the misery of things, when there is likely many, many thousands of years of human societies still to come, aliens whom we may never predict and never know, not with what we have thus far seen of human history or the science fiction myths of the last century. These standard exertions are all deeply embedded within and not outside or over-against the genealogical history of the Platonic and the Christian, in the twin drives of Athens and Jerusalem to both demythologise in order to mythologise “better”. Christianity and Platonism have thousands of years left in them (and the millennium and Statesman likely still “not yet’!) one would imagine, but, as silly as trivial as it might sound: Coca Cola has not.

[1] Eric Voegelin, “On Debate and Existence,” in Collected Works Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1990, p. 47.

[2] Renaud Fabbri, “Voegelin and Whitehead’s Process Theology (Preliminary Remarks),” A Post-Secular Age blog, 1 November 2013, https://renaudfabbri.com/2013/11/01/voegelin-and-whiteheads-process-theology-preliminary-remarks/

[3] Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gierhart Niemeyer, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London, [1978] 1990, p. 35.

[4] Ibid, pp. 21.

[5] Ibid, pp. 21.

[6] Ibid, pp. 18-19.

[7] Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas et al, Bloomsbury, London, 2015.

[8] Plato, Sophist, 254a.

[9] Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, p. 85.

[10] William James, The Meaning of Truth, Harvard University Press, New York, [1909] 1979, pp. 135-6; A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Free Press, New York, [1925] 1997, p. 52.

[11] See esp. Voegelin, Anamnesis, pp. 103-9, 148-59. Yet Voegelin says in Order of History Vol 3, p. 276 that Aristotle was guilty of an “intellectual thinning out” of the experience of transcendence that Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato had all articulated.

[12] See esp. Eric Voegelin, Order and History Vol 5: In Search of Order, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2000.

[13] A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press, New York, [1927] 1978, pp. 248, 344.

[14] Henry Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Bereton, Anchor Books, New York, 1954, esp. pp. 52ff. Cf. Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin, pp. 147-8; Eric Voegelin, Collected Works Vol 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1990, p. 273.

[15] See: K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol 1: Plato, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, [1945] 1966, notes to introduction p. 202. Cf. Marshall McLuhan,The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, [1966] 2002, pp. 7-8. Note here that McLuhan here is talking about Popper and thinks that through television that the “open society” will be “closed” into one big community. On Voegelin’s recognition of Popper’s abuse of the term see: Peter Emberly and Barry Cooper, Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2004.

[16] See: Radhakrishnan, The Idealist View of Life, Unwin Books, London, [1932] 1975, pp. 259-65; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China Vol 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, [1956] 1996, esp. pp. 291, 458; James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado, Boulder, 2014.

[17] Plato, Timaeus, 50-53.

[18] A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, esp. pp 150, 159.

[19] Eric Voegelin, Plato, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1966, p. 201.

[20] Jacques Derrida, “Khora” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1995, p. 117.

[21] John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1999. On this discussion see: Yunko Theresa Mikuriya, A History of Light: The Idea of Photography, Bloomsbury, London and Oxford, 2017, p. 27.

[22] Richard T. Livingston, “Khoragraphical Connections: From Being to Event in Heidegger and Whitehead,” April 12, 2014, 65th Annual Meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, Draft. Cf. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, Harper and Row, New York and London, 1968, p. 227.

[23] A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 150. One might also note Irigaray and Judith Butler’s beliefs that Plato’s Khora/Receptacle seems to “erase” the female: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, Routledge, New York and London, 1993. Thus, Western philosophy begins with the female being repressed. The sacred quest for the erased of course comes into post-structuralism from Heidegger’s “forgetting of being” via Derrida. With Heidegger it remains a kind of mystical work, an anamnetic exercise. However, for Heidegger’s rather boring children this does not seem to be the case. I appreciate Derrida’s take on the Khora, but I am suspicious that because the Khora is an anti-foundational foundation (we should perhaps call it ontologically different) and thus must be analogically approached by “bastard reasoning”, what is said of it actually reveals what a culture builds its most important myths and preoccupations upon. I think Irigaray (who retains some vestiges of feminine essentialism as if she is demanding a Feminine to go with a Masculine) and Butler (who just wants to deconstruct gender) are showing us something very important about post-structuralist “critique”. This is the tendency to hypostatise erasure in the name of victimocentrism, so we might call it – the “cultural Christian” preoccupation with the destined meek of history. Rene Girard’s concern that the Freud-Marx-Nietzsche “hermeneutics of suspicion” are engaged in a race towards the “omnipresent victim delayed since time immemorial” may not be too incorrect with the sort of stuff we see these days (especially from the American academy).

Who else’s erasure might one imagine Big Critique claiming the Khora represents? In a footnote to Bodies p. 257 we are told that Donna Harraway argued with the author that the Khora is a symbol of the repression of non-Western thought, following Martin Bernal’s Black Athena that was all the rage at the time (and not all wrong – most of it was painfully obvious to anyone who has ever read Plato or Herodotus). Nonetheless, I’m not quite sure what Harraway means at all because she does not explain it. It makes no sense, unless of course it is something like Geburg Treusch-Dieter, “The Beginning of the End” in J. Baudrillard et al, Looking Back on the End of the World, Semiotext(e), New York, 1989, pp. 10-1 in which the khora is imagined to represent an erasure of the feminine of the Babylonian goddess Tiamat, who is murdered in order to make the world. I think in the end we are simply seeing what each person desires best (to quote Sappho) to be prioritised because of sacred “erasure”. Yet, the Khora undercuts any attempt to hypostatise it – it can be compared to the feminine (mother, womb, nurse) but it is also equally not like any of those things at all.

[24] Plato, Phaedo, 96b.

[25] Ibid, 97d.

[26] Idem, Anamnesis, pp. 26-7, The Last Orientation, p. 195, 208. Cf. Jerry Day, Voegelin, Schelling and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London, 2003.

[27] Idem, Anamnesis, p. 27.

[28] Ibid, p. 80.

[29] Idem, The Ecumenic Age, pp. 333-5. See: Brendan Purcell in his article for VoegelinView “Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy”

[30] Idem, Anamnesis, pp. 27-8.

[31] Eric Voegelin, The Last Orientation, pp. 215-6.

[32]John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011, p. 148.

[33] E.g. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, Continuum, New York, 2006.

[34]Slavoj Žižek/F. W. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/The Ages of the World, trans. J. Norman, Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor, 1997.

[35]John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p. 155.

[36] Eric Voegelin, Last Orientation, p. 117.

[37] For fun one might note Charles Rycroft, Reich, Fontana Modern Masters, Collins, Glasgow, 1971, pp. 92-3 which insists that Reich’s orgonomy presents a cosmos which might be construed as homoerotic (or even autoerotic!) because it downplays and even seems to erase the female. The author even accuses Reich of being a repressed homosexual. Today one is sure that Reich would probably just be accused of “phallogocentrism” or something similar.

[38] See: Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1987. From the Lacanian perspective of “lack” in relation to mediaeval courtly love: Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Mediaevalism, MIT Press, London, 2006. For a good old-fashioned base Freudian take on things: George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Mtrans. Mary Dalwood, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1986. There is an unintentionally amusing video I found somewhere not far back from 2013 in which Milbank and several other British theologians talk about the ethics of gay marriage, in which a female theologian manages to annoy Milbank no end by claiming that the mediaeval mystic Rolle’s The Fire of Love with its language of kissing Christ somehow vindicates pre-modern acceptance of gay marriage. I think I agree with Milbank here – that the idea would have been totally alien, especially to ancient pagan conceptions of sexuality (often boorishly cited as closer to ours than those dastardly middle ages by progressive types). One might recall the story in Suetonius in which batty old Nero married a boy and everyone joked that if only Nero’s father had also done so then he would not exist. So too the story of Iphis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the heroine falls in love with a woman and the gods pity then so much Iphis is turned into a man so that they can be married.

[39] Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, Unity and Essays on Magic, ed. R. J. Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 143-76. Cf. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, pp. 89-106.

[40] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Collins, Fontana Library, London, 1960, p. 71.

[41] Plato, Ion, 533d-e.

[42] Eric Voegelin, Order and History V: In Search of Order, ed. E. Sandoz, University of Missouri Press, Columbia MS, 1999, pp. 74-6.