Plato’s Metaxy: The Reality of the “In-Between” of Existence
For Plato, the Cosmos is One integrated, conscious, living being that comprises and orders all existents in the universe, all of which are the Cosmos’ living “parts.” Man is the microcosm, the eikon or image of the Cosmos. Man is in effect a “daughter system” of the Cosmos, a living embodiment expressing its laws. As such, he recapitulates the entire cosmic substance, activity, and content within himself, albeit unconsciously in almost all cases. Plato held that the content of the unconscious can, in principle, be made available to consciousness by means of anamnesis (memory), a process of recovering the contents of genetic (or possibly deep) mind by the conscious mind operating under the aspect of nous (intellect, reason).
The site and sensorium of this recovery or “recollection” is the psyche. Plato believed that the psyche of man the microcosm is “stretched” in a tension “in-between” two “poles”: the cosmic Depth (the omphalos or “naval and caul” of cosmic life), which Plato termed the Apeiron or ground of being; and the Beyond of the cosmos, the Epekeina. The psyche – human, planetary, solar, cosmic – resonates between these two poles, being drawn by each in the metaxy or “in-between” reality, in the tension of immanence and transcendence, of time and timelessness, of perishing and imperishability.
Epekeina signifies that which is ultimate and indefinable in principle because it surpasses all categories of understanding; it is the “proportionate goal” of the fundamental tension of existence. It is not an “existent among other existents.” It belongs to what Eric Voegelin calls “non-existent reality”: It is experientially, and thus empirically real, though not itself existing in any way the human mind can imagine or comprehend.
Anselm of Canterbury describes the noetic situation: “O Lord, you are not only that than which a great cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.”
The Epekeina is not “in” the world; yet the psyche knows by experience that it can be drawn by it, and resonate/respond to it. All we can say about it is that the Agathon – perfect love, goodness, beauty, truth, justice – is the reflection of its quality or ‘nature’ (if what is utterly “beyond” the natural creation can be said to have “a nature”).
Apeiron signifies the unlimited, indefinite, unbounded; for Anaximander, it is the ‘unlimited source of all particular things.’ Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable also. If the Epekeina is the “proportionate goal,” then on the model of the metaxy, the Apeiron would be the boundless source of potential existents whose essential order arises in response to the proportionate order of the Beyond, whereupon they come into actual existence. Human and cosmic existence unfold and are mutually ordered in this dynamic “flux.”
Thus the Cosmos (and the human psyche) is “bifurcated,” as Glenn Hughes writes, into a “natural or immanent world and a deeper stratum of reality known solely through consciousness’ finding a beyond to its own (and thus to all finite) nature…. The Beyond is not something on the other side of a spatial dividing line. When through searching and passion and insight the extraordinary souls of Israel and Hellas discerned a world-transcendent reality, whether it was the true God of Israel, or Parmenides’ Being that is other than the world known by sense experience, or the Platonic-Aristotelian Nous, what they found (or what was revealed to them) was immediately present only in consciousness. The data that form the insight that the finite cosmos has as its ground a reality that is other than finite being is “movement of the soul,” as Voegelin puts it, that discovers its own nature both to presuppose and to be co-constituted by spiritual reality unrestricted by finite limitations. Unless consciousness finds itself engaged in the questioning tension that so desires to identify the true ground of reality that it finds all the splendors of the cosmos still not enough to explain and satisfy its own restless capacity to think and feel beyond those splendors, then there can be no occasion for an epiphany of transcendence. When such a movement does occur, what has happened, in Voegelin’s terms, is that the tension of consciousness toward a reality beyond all cosmic contents has become transparent for its own nature as ‘spiritual,’ i.e., as related by participation to a ground that is incommensurate with limitation. Of course such a ground is known only in the interiority of meditation and reflection, and so it is nothing in the world that can be pointed to. [EV writes:] ‘Such terms as immanent and transcendent, external and internal, this world and the other world, and so forth, do not denote objects or their properties… The terms are exegetic, not descriptive.’… The Beyond of finite things can only be manifest through finite reality.” [see: Glenn Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993]
The problem of immanence and transcendence constitute a difficulty that can be obviated simply by saying the universe had no beginning: it is uncreated and eternal. Then the First Cause – conceived as “Living Logic” – can somehow be said to “arise” within the Cosmos, yet at the same time somehow be universally, eternally implicit within it – as “implicate order,” in Bohm’s terminology.
But how does a First Cause whose arche is “in” the cosmos the same as for all other existents, and thus might properly be classified as an existent among other existents – how does it have the power to order all the other existents but not be modified by them in turn? If it can be modified by them, then how can we say it is universal, let alone eternal? How does it derive its preeminence in the cosmic hierarchy such that it affects everything, but is always unaffected itself?
These are my problems with the idea of universal law arising from within the cosmos itself. The problem is compounded because the “Beyond” has been so vividly experienced within my own consciousness; and the only way I can understand such experiences is as fleeting contacts with transcendent Reality.
I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity of discussing Plato’s cosmology with a brilliant friend, a working physicist, who also views the universe as a living being. In disagreement with me, he does not hold with Big Bang theory, but considers the universe as eternal and uncaused. If there is a God, he allows, he would be “our fellow prisoner caught in the net of life and time” just like any other existent in the cosmos.
But I don’t see how it can be shown that either my friend’s model or Plato/Voegelin’s is the “true” one. Indeed, there is a very “delicate problem” at the bottom of this question: I strongly doubt that the scientific method can falsify either theory. And it seems there’s nothing from the “humanities-side” of human knowledge that can prove one or the other either.
Whichever theory one chooses, ultimately one must choose on the basis of faith. For it seems there is no other criterion, no other way.
Once again, I'm making a comment without having followed the thread, always a risky thing to do. Still, reading only your last post, it we have two propositions that can't ever be falsified, why bother to make a choice? Is it unreasonable to withhold judgment as to both?
I strongly agree that one must choose. I'd venture that one always chooses whether or not he realizes that is what he has done. Ultimately, a metaphysical naturalist (atheist) must believe in an infinity of something (space/time) to reject God, the Creator.
Once he accepts that there was a beginning - which is required by all accepted theories of cosmology - he is faced with the theological question. A god-within-the-cosmos can only either be an imagining or a collective of other existents.
You say about this: Of course such a ground is known only in the interiority of meditation and reflection, and so it is nothing in the world that can be pointed to.
Yes and no. Consciousnesness may be the intersection, but there is no intersection without history. And pointing is the supreme act, for it alone can give direction to a beyond. Jesus of Nazareth, when blamed for his greatest arrogance, pointed to himself. Against this, Voegelin remained a platonist, and preferred periagoge over conversio. Not bad, though. Voegelin's got a sharp saber against all those queer products: pragmatism, postitivism, gnosticism, communism. But for Voegelin, the conscious experience of the fact of the resurrection ranks higher than the actual resurrection. Why should that make any difference? Christ's historical existence is moot. So Wilhelmsen records: Abraham had an experience of the divine, Parmenides had an experience of the divine; Heraclitus had one; Plato . . . "Who," argues Wilhelmsen, "can argue with experience? . . . As Willmoore Kendall once put it to me, it's not whether Moses ever lived or not." What really matters then is an interior tug to the unknown god. Moore from W.:
Voegelin insists that his enumeration is not intended to suggest that one answer is as good as another but is rather illustrative of the truth that all are answers to the fundamental question about the groundlessness of existence, sensed as anxiety over contingency in both early and later societies. But Voegelin's "no answer" rubric violates his own discovery as well as his method. The question about the absoluteness of man's experience of the divine suggests that there is a true answer: that the answer be true is part of the experience which poses the question. In a word: Eric Voegelin could not have the experience of the divine. He tells us that all experiences, most especially the breakthrough to the divine, must be explored from inside its own context. But this very experience, man's brush with the divine, is imperiously antirelativistic and anti-Voegelinian. Relativists don't have it; only absolute dogmatists have it, fierce fellows--and they insist on the uniqueness of the truth that they have grasped. To withdraw from the insistence of the witness to his own experiience that there is a true answer is to withdraw to his own experience that there is a true answer is to withdraw from the history that the experience presumably establishes. On Voegelin's own grounds one cannot look at these things from an outside perspective--and yet that is what he does in The Ecumenic Age: the work of a Ph.D. judging the truth of historic Christianity. Voegelin's fastidiousness about wars of religion wars against his earlier discovery: that is, history cannot be studied outside of itself. To speak, as he does, of the "fallacy . . . entertained by doctrinaire theologians, metaphysicians, and ideologists" is a kind of precious washing of the hands by a latter-day Pilate who is too pure to enter the Golgotha of history. Voegelin also dismisses, as the ideologue that he is, two thousand years of Christian history. If "every last answer is a penultimate in relation to the next last one in time, the historical field of consciousness becomes of absorbing interest" if this sentence is read in terms of the understanding of conceptual intelligibility, it makes sense--sense is what intelligibility is supposed to be about--but if the sentence is read in terms of truth, it dissolves into gibberish. If "every last" true answer is penultimate in relation to the "next last one," let it be a false one, then Voegelin's sentence is bad Alice in Wonderland. The sentence does not even make any better sense when worked the other way: if every last false answer is penultimate in relation to the next to the last true answer, then --well--well--nothing follows! Voegelin is simply not saying anything about anything. Meaning is not truth any more than intelligibility is the ground of being.Our author here, in acto exercito, gives away his game. Eric Voegelin is a Platonist and for Platonists there is no distinction between being and meaning. This error of the Platonici is rooted in a failure to distinguish between the way in which tings exist in the mind and the way in which they exist in the real. Thomas Aquinas called this a failure to distinguish between separatio and abstractio. Platonizing thinkers confuse the state of abstractness thanks to wich the mind can understand meanings and essences with a state of separation: that is, because I can think X without thinking Y in which X actually exists, then it follows that X does in fact exist as separated from Y. This permits Platonists to think that the meaning of Christ is his being even though he never proved his claims by rising from the dead in fact, in being understood not as meaning but as existence. Platonists, thus, and rationalists as well can construct castles in the air. In Voegelin's case this error permits him to confuse the meaning of answers with their existence. Experienced meaning is one noetic situation but the verification therof in existence is something else. But it is precisely this conformity of the mind of man to things as they are which constitutes the truth as known. Voegelin thus drives a wedge between being ("meaning" for him) and existnece. Existence is a kind of degeneration of being. This is curious because Dr. Voegelin has always been sensitive to the grandeur of the "I Am" passage of Exodus but he has never barred this sensitivity through to a metaphysics of being as existential act. Wheras Platonic being is all the more real the less it exists, Aquinas's "existence" is so much being that it does not even admit of a contrary.
Voegelin tells us that he holds that "the fact of revelation is its content." This looks curiously like the same kind of reasoning that led Saint Anselm to conclude that God existed because existence was included in the meaning of the concept of God. Years ago the late Hannah Arendt told us that Voegelin had an unsophisticated notion of the relation between essence and existence because he tended to see factual history as falling under certain paradigms or models undertood by him to be somehow explanatory principles for grasping history. Dr. Arendt was right: she spotted the Platonism. (I confess that I did not see it at that time: mea culpa.) In any event, if the "fact of revelation is its content," then it is highly cavalier to hunt around for evidence of historicity. If the meaning, once again, or the content of religious experience is intellectually interesting to Voegelin then the question about the meaning's historical verification existentially is irrelevant for him. the abstraction from existence of the experience is sufficient verification of separability from reality and hence contempt for reality. Reality does not count for Professor Voegelin. The very question, hence of the historicity of Christ and of His resurrection, of the Easter we Christians celebrate as the central feast of our Faith, annoys Voegelin: he finds it vulgar. In fact only fundamentalists, for Voegelin, are worried about whether the empty tomb on the third day was really empty after all. Whether Christ arose in deed or arose from the dead only in Paul's experience of a deed that occured only in Paul is an irrelevant distinction for the German professor. Voegelin is a right-wing Bultmann but whereas Bultmann takes a properly Teutonic glee in proving that God would do nothing that a German Professor would not do, Voegelin considers the very subject to be trivial [or avoided for chosen confreres!] . . . But, Dr. Voegelin, "if Christ be not risen"-- in the words of the same Paul--then I for one don't give a damn about Paul's experience of him.
Science without history (scientism) is no worse than religion without the incarnation (leap in the dark faith). Aristotle sometimes works as an antidote for both.