(Page 10 of 22) - "Show me something snaky": Reflections on Eric Voegelin's theory of consciousness and consubstantiality authored by Embry, Charles.

occurred in spiritual continuity with the earlier mythic symbolizations of order building upon what

Voegelin calls “the primary cosmic experience.” “Noetic exegesis,” Voegelin asserts

does not occur in a vacuum, but engenders historically a differentiated consciousness of the tension
toward the ground as the center of order, in contrast to a preknowledge of man and his order that stems
from the compact primary experience of the cosmos and its mythical expression. . . . Our knowledge of
order remains primarily mythical, even after the noetic experience has differentiated the realm of
consciousness and after the noetic exegesis has made explicit its logos. . . . The knowledge of the
premise [“that all men, qua men, are equal in essence, regardless of whether or not they experience their
human essence in the clarity of differentiated consciousness”], however, does not come from the
concrete experience of essence of the respective noetic or pneumatic person, but from a cosmic primary
experience in which things are already experienced, through participation, as what they are—men as
men and gods as gods—even if we do not know clearly what their essences are. . . . [O]nly with the
premise as their [noetic experiences] background do they attain their ordering function in society and
history because, on its basis, they can claim to be representative of humanity and hence binding on all
men.

Voegelin summarizes this relationship with the statement that “the myth reaches into the noetic

exegesis, because the noesis reaches beyond the myth as it recognizes the logos of the latter.”

As the philosophers “incorporated” the experiential base symbolized by the myth into their

exegesis, reaching beyond the myth in recognition of its logos, the reality of “things”—the community

of being and its reality—experienced in the primary cosmic experience came to be understood, and

thus symbolized, differently. It is this differential that must be guarded against misunderstanding that,

on the one hand, is threatened by dogmatization and, on the other hand, by propositional statements

about things. Voegelin reminds us of this when he says

I should like to recall Aristotle’s statement that the question ‘What is being?’ turns into the

question “What is ousia [reality of things]?” as well as my comment that ousia concerns the self-evident
and compelling reality of “things” encountered in the primary experience. Let us then discuss “reality”
and determine the range this term has to cover. Reality (a) is not a thing confronting man, but the
comprehending reality in which he himself is real by participating in it; real (b) are the “things” that can
be discerned in the comprehending reality—gods, men, and so on; and real (c) is the participation of
things in one another within the comprehending reality. Furthermore, in the case of man—if we set
aside the questions of bodily existence for the moment—participation takes on the form of
consciousness; hence, we can speak of consciousness as the sensorium of human participation. From
the experiences, recollections, phantasmata, and symbolizations of consciousness are compounded the
conceptions of reality, in which the termini of participation—i.e., the realities of God and world, of
other people and of the concretely participating man—find their place. Among the experiences of
participation, finally, the noetic experience occupies its special place in that it elucidates the tension
toward the divine ground not merely as the structure of consciousness but also as the fundamental
tension of all reality that is not the divine ground itself. Consequently, the mythical conception of

Voegelin, “What is Political Reality?” Anamnesis, 348-349.

Ibid., 350.