Compactness, Poetic Ambiguity, and the

Equivalences of Experience—Some

Preliminary Reflections

 

Copyright 2002 Steven D. Ealy

  The following episode appears in chapter 14—“The Bottom of the World”—of C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair. A gnome by the name of Golg invites the children to come with him to the land of Bism, deep in the center of the earth. “Down there,” he tells them, “I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds.” Jill replies that they are already far below the deepest mines man knows.

            Golg responds, “I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cupful of diamond juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones in Bism.” But, rather than join Golg on a journey to Bism the children decide to return to the Overworld—the world of the surface.

            One way to understand Eric Voegelin’s writing on symbolization suggests that “ideas” are like the dead gold and silver of surface mines, while symbols are the living gems found deep within the earth. Voegelin asserts in Autobiographical Reflections, “Ideas transform symbols, which express experiences, into concepts—which are assumed to refer to a reality other than the reality experienced.” (AR, 78) He then adds, “this reality other than the reality experienced does not exist. Hence, ideas are liable to deform the truth of the experiences and their symbolization.”

            In this paper I first examine Voegelin’s analysis of symbols. I then argue that poetic symbolization has certain advantages over philosophical symbolization, advantages that Voegelin recognized but tended to downplay.

    Voegelin begins his essay “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History” with the claim that “The search for the constants in human order in society and history is, at present, uncertain of its language.” [1] As the essay proceeds Voegelin provides a number of statements and restatements of what those constants are—or what the constant is—and we will begin with a survey of these statements. His first formulation tells us that “what is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order.” (ESH, 115, italics added) The next formulation appears to be extremely provisional: “if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence . . .”—what he calls “tensional symbolisms.” (ESH, 120)

            Voegelin’s third formulation seems to move the focus away from man: “What is constant in the history of mankind . . . is the structure of existence itself” (ESH, 120), and he then proceeds to enunciate a number of propositions regarding this structure, beginning with the proposition, “Man participates in the process of reality.” Voegelin adds six additional propositions, three positive and three cautionary. The three cautionary corollaries are that reality cannot be observed from the outside, that the experience of reality is never total but always perspectival, and that “the knowledge of reality conveyed by the symbols can never become a final possession of truth” because experience and the symbols it generates “are part of reality in process.” (ESH, 121)

            Voegelin attempts to push the search further and deeper: from symbols to the originating experiences, and “from the experiences further back to the depth of the psyche.” (ESH, 128) But there are dangers in treating psyche as the constant of mankind’s history, most notably the danger of absolutizing it into something that stands outside of history and experience.

            Voegelin concludes, in his first conclusion, “There is no constant to be found in history, because the historical field of equivalents is not given as a collective of phenomena which could be submitted to the procedures of abstraction and generalization.” (ESH, 131) But this conclusion is immediately superceded by another, however tentatively it may be stated: “If anything that has turned up in the course of our search deserves the name of a constant, it is the process in the mode of presence. . . . we have not found a constant in history but the constancy of a process that leaves a trail of equivalent symbols in time and space.” (ESH, 132) This appears to be Voegelin’s final understanding (in this essay, at least), as he concludes with an affirmation of “the primordial experience of reality as endowed with the constancy and lastingness of structure that we symbolize as the Cosmos.” (ESH, 133)

            Voegelin’s various formulations of the constants of history are not random, but involve a progressive refinement of articulation of Voegelin’s understanding. Thus, as the essay progresses, we seem to be moving closer and closer to the truth of reality until, finally, we have it in our grasp. This grasping of truth, however, is merely an illusion or self-deception, as Voegelin himself has already told us—“the knowledge of reality conveyed by the symbols can never become a final possession of truth.” None of those formulations is reality or captures reality; they are all symbolic representations that have developed out of Voegelin’s experience of reality—or rather, his participation in reality—and his effort to articulate that experience.

            Man is not a mere observer of reality; rather he is an active participant in it. Both man’s consciousness of reality and reality itself are tensional and paradoxical. The structure of man’s consciousness, as Voegelin conceives it, contains both a dimension of intentionality and a dimension of luminosity. “Intentionality” presents consciousness as embedded in man’s bodily existence pointing to or in search of external objects. “Luminosity” presents the self-referential dimension of consciousness that allows consciousness itself to be located as a part of reality, thus placing emphasis on subject. [2] These are not alternative modes of consciousness, but are structures of consciousness, and both are already and always present. Reality itself also has a dual structure that is in some way related to the poles of human consciousness: “Thing Reality” and “It Reality.” Thing Reality and It Reality are not separate realities, but two faces of the same coin, two faces always present and always held in tension. These two faces of reality are also related to man’s consciousness in the following way: intentionality is attuned to “Thing Reality” while luminosity is attuned to “It Reality.” Thus man while acting intentionally, apart from external reality, is also acting luminously, as a part of reality—reality in process.

            One part of man’s response to the experience of reality is to articulate its significance, and this he does through the creation of symbols that represent experience and its underlying reality. Symbols are “the language phenomena engendered by the process of participatory experience.” [3] There is “a plurality of symbolisms” (AR 79) that man has employed, including myth, revelation, science, philosophy and poetry.

There are a number of problems that may develop in this symbolic activity, and much of Voegelin’s analysis is designed to identify these problems. Or perhaps the issues I shall discuss are actually variations on one single theme: the confusion of language symbol with reality. The first problem involves the transmutation of symbol into concept, and the confusion of concept with reality. Symbols to be vital must always be tied to their originating experiences, but the transmutation into concepts involves a severing from those experiences and the converting of them into objects that are reified and treated as if they have a life, and a causal power, of their own. This is the ground for Voegelin’s critique of his lengthy, and, in his own lifetime, unpublished History of Political Ideas: “the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences.” (AR 63)

A second danger is that of “empty symbols”—“the transformation of original experiences-symbolizations into doctrines entailed a deformation of existence, if the contact with the reality as experienced was lost and the use of the language symbols engendered by the original experiences degenerated into a more of less empty game.” (AR 79) A perhaps fruitful line of investigation in regard to the life of empty symbols would be to consider Husserl’s discussion of the sedimentation that takes place in the world of mathematics and science, a phenomenon that separates the science from its originating life experience. This separation does not undermine the ability of science to proceed, however, for the superstructure of science continues to function even if the original foundations of scientific activity are no longer understood. Empty symbols may also continue to have a tremendous impact on social and intellectual life long after the living experiences they were designed to symbolize are lost. In fact, empty symbols become a part of the landscape of human activity, and are therefore a part of new experiences that lead to further symbolization.

A third difficulty encountered in the realm of symbolization has to do with man’s role as participant in reality and creator of symbols. As Voegelin puts it in “The Beginning of the Beginning,” “In the depth of the quest, formative truth and deformative untruth are more closely related than the language of ‘truth’ and ‘resistance’ would suggest.” [4] (BB, 37, italics added) This is an extraordinary, and an extraordinarily important, statement on Voegelin’s part; it appears to be at once philosophical analysis and self-disclosure. The reason for the closeness of truth and untruth, Voegelin goes on to argue, is that “truth has its reality in the symbols engendered by the quest,” (BB, 37) but the agent of creation of those symbols is man’s imaginative capacity. What may lead the imaginative capacity astray has been known ever since antiquity as “hubris . . . pride of life, libido dominandi, and will to power.” [5] Both resistance to truth and resistance to untruth can thus be traced to the same ground: “the assertive imagination of man as a force in reality.” (BB, 40) With his usual self-awareness, Voegelin recognizes that his own work is subject to the same temptation to impose “a definite form on reality.” (BB, 33)

    The “old war between philosophy and poetry” was already old in Socrates’ time, since that is his characterization of the relationship between them, and it continues in various forms today. One skirmish in this ongoing war—often friendly, often fierce—is found in Voegelin’s analysis of the movement from myth to philosophy. The core of this movement, to use Voegelin’s own terms, is from a compact articulation of existence to a differentiated articulation. Voegelin is, in many ways, a benign opponent of poetry. He assumes that a differentiated symbolization is superior to a compact symbolization, and thus that philosophy is superior to myth or poetry. I call Voegelin is a benign critic of poetry because he recognizes, along with Aristotle, that man can use both myth and philosophy equally well as languages to express the truth of reality. (ESH, 125) Voegelin further understands the value of mythic articulations –symbolizations—of reality as rich lodes of experiential ore that can be mined fruitfully by philosophy, and makes use of mythic and sacred texts in his work.

However, I would go further than Voegelin in pointing to a few ways in which mythopoetic symbolism is actually superior to its philosophical heir. Voegelin, I take it, would be aware of, or at least hospitable to, these reflections, even though they are not stressed in his own work.

The three points I want to consider are these: First, mythopoetic symbolization is not as susceptible to “ideological deformation” as is philosophy. Second, poetic symbols are more comprehensive than philosophical symbols. Finally, poetry invites an openness to experience and an opportunity for enacted experience that philosophy does not.

            Philosophical language is differentiated compared to poetry’s compact symbolism. Voegelin sees that as an advance, even while acknowledging the earlier mythic symbolization, and sees the philosophical statement as “a differentiated and therefore superior insight.” (ESH, 125)  But this move toward differentiation may also be a key weakness in philosophy’s activity, in that philosophy’s differentiated vocabulary may be more susceptible to the “conceptual subversion”—the transmutation of symbols into concepts, which are then reified—discussed earlier. As Voegelin noted in his discussion of the paradoxical nature of reality and consciousness, “There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness.” [6] (BB, 17) Philosophical symbols have the rhetorical force of suggesting that the “objects” (concepts) pointed to have an independent life apart from the symbolization itself, that is, these concepts are things that can be manipulated. Mythopoetic symbols, on the other hand, have the rhetorical force of being created, and having their existence only within a created artistic or spiritual world. Thus, the danger of confusing creation and reality is less severe in the world of poetry than in the world of philosophy.

            On Voegelin’s account reality and human consciousness is inherently, unavoidably, and ineradicably paradoxical in its structure. Paradox, ambiguity, contradictory positions that are equally true, is the world of poetry, and the language of poetry is capable of holding tensional relationships together. The world of logic, clarity, and systematization is the world of philosophy, and the language of philosophy is designed to classify, demystify, and articulate difference. In a paradoxical world a paradoxical mode of symbolization that allows for ambiguity, tension, and incommensurate competing truths, may be a better guide and interpreter than a mode of symbolization that organizes and orders.

Voegelin recognizes that differentiation’s displacement of compact symbolization may not be an “unqualified good.” In his discussion of Egyptian myth, Voegelin writes:

The very compression that reveals the limitations of they myth also points toward the source of its strength. For the fact that the speculation on being has differentiated out of the larger complex of cosmologies suggests that the myth is much richer in content than any of the partial symbolizations derived from it. This richer content may conveniently be subdivided in two classes: The myth, first, contains the various experiential blocs which separate in the course of differentiation; and it, second, contains an experience that welds the blocs into a living whole.” [7]

Finally, the mythopoetic enterprise invites an openness to and an active participation in experience on the part of its readers through imaginative reenactment in a way that the philosophical enterprise does not; the philosophic mode often moves far too rapidly to challenge and critique. But for a work of art to be a conduit to experience it must be received (attended to on its own terms) rather than used for non-poetic purposes (attempting to fit it into philosophical categories or systems).  C. S. Lewis highlights the problem of “using” literature: “To formulate [a work of art, a play] as a philosophy, and regard the actual play as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy, is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us.” [8] Lewis continues,

What guards the good reader from treating a tragedy—he will not talk much about an abstraction like ‘Tragedy’—as a mere vehicle for truth is his continual awareness that it not only means, but is. It is not merely logos (something said) but poiema (something made). The same is true of a novel or narrative poem. They are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our fist step. To value them chiefly for reflections which they may suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of ‘using’ instead of ‘receiving’. [9]

What and how we learn from works of art revolves around “imaginative enactment.” The outcome of this enactment is not a set of concepts or symbols to describe reality, but an experience, which is man’s fundamental relationship to reality. Robert Penn Warren, quoting Henri Bergson, argues that “fiction ‘brings us back into our own presence’—the presence in which we must make our final terms with life and death.” [10] The knowledge we gain in this encounter with fiction is not propositional—“does not ordinarily come to us with intellectual labels,” in Warren’s words [11] —rather “knowledge comes as enactment.” [12] Receiving a work of literature provides man with an additional mode of participation in reality, but I would emphasize that this participation is not possible when literature is high-jacked by philosophers for their ulterior purposes.

Voegelin acknowledges the depth of many ancient texts, both sacred and secular, as sources for mythopoetic symbolism. The real test of the argument I am making, however, would require a discussion, not of a classic text, but of a contemporary work of art. Such a test would also reverse the order with which philosophers tend to approach literary texts—that is, rather than using a philosophical framework as a guide to interpreting and critiquing the work of art, the work of art would be treated as primary. We would listen to the poem, rather than telling the poem what its meaning and significance is. While I will not provide that analysis here, my candidate for such analysis, a work which offers a sensitive presentation of many of the concerns raised in this paper—the intentionality and luminosity of human consciousness and the dual aspects of reality as “It Reality” and “Thing Reality”—is Margaret Edson’s play WIT. This play examines questions of mortality, knowledge, and the nature of human relationships through the story of Dr. Vivian Bearing, a specialist in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and who is undergoing aggressive chemotherapy. Through the imaginative enactment of Dr. Bearing’s reflections on her own life, we are confronted with questions concerning the nature and limits of science, friendship, education, and we are invited to consider the meaning and purpose of our own lives.

As a benign critic of poetry in the war between philosophy and poetry, Voegelin might see some merit in my argument, for the advantages of poetry I discuss are at least tacitly recognized by Voegelin himself. Remember also that Socrates had recourse to “likely stories” or myths at key points (the last thing to be said) in the Gorgias and the Republic. Finally, as Voegelin notes, “in a late letter . . . Aristotle admits to becoming philomythoteros the older he becomes.” (ESH. 126)

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Eric Voegelin’s Theory of Psychopathology

 

Copyright 2002 Robert S. Seiler, Jr.

 

I.     Introduction

A striking characteristic of psychiatry, in contrast to other fields of medicine, is that researchers and clinicians take multiple approaches to understanding and treating mental disorders.  For example, many psychiatrists [1] regard depressive syndromes as resulting from a biologically based disease.  Others hold that depressive states stem from a long-standing constriction of human relationships perpetuated by unconscious fantasies and attitudes stemming from early childhood experiences.  Those two theories have very different implications for treatment—the disease theory implying a need for antidepressant medication, the interpersonal theory implying a need for insight-oriented psychotherapy.  A philosopher who encounters the two theories will recognize that they rest on complementary insights into the ways in which a person’s psychic life is conditioned, but not determined, by his participation in the organic level of being and society.  Similarly, mature psychiatrists generally view the two theories and their related treatments as complementary and often recommend that depression be treated with a combination of antidepressants and psychotherapy.

It may take decades for a psychiatrist to acquire a balanced understanding of the theoretical and clinical pluralism of the field.  Traveling that path involves enduring a sense of ignorance and incompleteness that eventually may become a loving trust in the wholeness of each person that transcends our understanding.  Many prefer to take refuge in a narrow dogmatism that clings to a few theories and treatments.  Students encountering the field for the first time quickly notice

the long-standing factionalism dividing psychiatric practitioners into party like blocs, or ‘camps,’ according to their beliefs about mental disorder…. psychiatry is the only discipline in medicine in which it seems appropriate, even logical, to ask of a practitioner his or her “orientation” or “philosophy.”  Such questions denote that a professional identity is not sustained from one psychiatrist to another in the way, for example, it is sustained from one surgeon to the next. [2]

When students first encounter the discipline of psychiatry, they typically experience a sense of disorientation and lostness.  Those feelings stem not so much from the many theories they must learn and treatments with which they must become familiar, but from the factionalism of the discipline and the lack of common professional identity among practitioners.  One contemporary psychiatrist spoke for many when he recalled his training residency as a time of “reeling under the bombardment of contradictory and dubious doctrines that constitutes a modern psychiatric education.” [3]

            The psychiatrist who seeks to find a way from the flood of opinions and opposing factions to a balanced understanding of his discipline can turn for guidance to two great 20^th century philosophers—Karl Jaspers and Eric Voegelin.  Jaspers is the only figure in the history of psychiatry that became a well-known philosopher.  Although initially interested in philosophy, he “turned to study medicine because, he believed, it best illuminated life itself and the challenges of human existence.” [4]   In 1913 he published a comprehensive treatise, Allgemeine Psychopathologie, which remains in print today.  That classic work is best known for its pioneering use of the phenomenological method to describe the disorders psychiatrists recognize in the mental lives of their patients.  The work is also important for Jaspers’ attempt, informed by his philosophy of existence, to differentiate and clarify the limitations of the methods that psychiatrists use to understand mental disorders.  The latter can be of considerable benefit to the contemporary psychiatrist who seeks to orient himself in the discipline.

     Eric Voegelin’s analysis of psychopathology arose from his efforts as a political scientist and philosopher to understand the political events and mass movements of the 20^th century. [5]   Drawing on Plato’s insight that “the polis is man written in larger letters,” Voegelin understood the political disorders of that century as originating in the psychopathology of the age—the deformations of the psyches of men who were representative of the period.  To diagnose those disorders, he drew upon the insights gained by previous philosophers in their resistance to the personal and social disorder of their own times.  In an important late essay, Voegelin explicitly stated a theory of psychopathology.  His work can be of great help to the contemporary psychiatrist who seeks to develop a balanced understanding of his discipline and of mental disorders.

A full treatment of the Voegelin’s writings that are relevant to psychiatry and psychopathology would require a volume. [6]   The purpose of this paper is the narrow one of  clarifying Voegelin’s theory of psychopathology.  To provide a context for the analysis, the paper first summarizes Jaspers’ philosophy of psychopathology and some important work in contemporary psychiatry that, while indebted to Jaspers, does not have an adequate philosophical foundation.  The paper suggests that Voegelin’s theory of psychopathology supplies the missing foundation for that contemporary effort.

II.      Karl Jaspers on the Philosophy of Psychopathology

According to Jaspers, the subject matter of psychopathology is “the ill person as a whole, in so far as he suffers from a psychic illness or one that is psychically determined.” [7]   Psychopathology aims to render psychic reality intelligible by means of concepts of constant significance.  The philosopher can aid the psychopathologist by clarifying the nature and limits of the methods he uses.

Jaspers argued that psychiatrists use two distinct methods—“explanation” (erklaeren) and “understanding” (verstehen)—to understand mental disorders.  The explanatory method seeks to find specific empirical causes of such disorders.  In his day that method was exemplified by Emil Kraepelin’s exploration of the hereditary basis of psychotic disorders based on the statistical study of hundreds of patients and their families.  The interpretive method seeks to establish that mental disorders emerged because of conflicts between the individual’s experience and his hopes and desires.  In Jaspers’ time that method was exemplified by the attempts of Freud and Adler to establish meaningful connections between early life experiences and the development of disorders such as anxiety or hysteria.  Those two methods of understanding yield two different types of scientific knowledge of mental disorders.  The failure to differentiate between them, according to Jaspers, had led to many false claims and misdirected hypotheses that muddled the field of psychiatry and the scientific achievements of psychopathology.

Jaspers emphasized the limits of the methods of explanation and understanding.  Kraepelin’s labels might neglect an individual’s suffering, for example, whereas Freud’s interpretations might neglect a neurological process.  More importantly, science yields no complete picture of mental life and its potential.  Because human beings are free, they are ultimately unknowable.  “There is no … construct of a human life.  The human being is essentially incomplete and in himself he is inaccessible to knowledge.”  It is the task of philosophy, rather than science, to illuminate Being and human existence.  “[P]hilosophical illumination” provides “an awareness of Being” that stands as the “silent matrix” of the methodical inquiries of science. [8]   Philosophy makes no contribution to the contents of psychopathology or any other science, however.  “So far as concrete research is concerned, a thorough study of philosophy is not of any positive value to psychopathologists, apart from the importance of methodology.” [9]      

III.     Jaspers’ Legacy in Contemporary Psychiatry

Jaspers’ effort to clarify the methods of psychopathology continues to influence American psychiatry today, most notably in the work of Paul McHugh and Phillip Slavney of Johns Hopkins University.  McHugh and Slavney have written a volume, The Perspectives of Psychiatry that is intended to introduce students to how psychiatrists think about mental disorders and their treatment.  According to the authors,

… the purpose of this book is not to review the contemporary contents of psychiatry on which practice proceeds—such as the identifying characteristics of schizophrenia, the regimens and dosages of antidepressant medications, or psychotherapeutic approaches for treating marital disharmony.  Rather, our intention is to consider and render explicit the forms in which those contents are contained, that is, the basic patterns of thought and explanations by means of which psychiatrists arrive at diagnostic and therapeutic assertions. [10]

 

McHugh and Slavney hold that psychiatrists employ four methods to understand mental disorders.  “With each explanatory method the definitions differ as to who is a patient, what is psychopathology, what is meant by ‘normal,’ and which treatments are suitable.” They call these methods “perspectives,” using “a visual metaphor intended to emphasize that each method can illuminate some aspects of psychiatric responsibility but will be blind to other aspects.” [11] The four perspectives are the disease perspective, the dimensional perspective, the behavior perspective, and the life-story perspective.  The following summaries of each perspective draw heavily from McHugh and Slavney’s text. [12]

  The disease perspective follows the general practice of medicine in attempting to cluster patients into separate groups, where each group is distinguished from other groups and from normal people by the features that are the defining characteristics of their disease.  The ultimate characteristic validating a category of psychiatric disease will in most cases be an identifiable abnormality in the structure or function of the brain.  From this perspective, psychiatric treatment is conceived as the prevention or cure of the identified physical abnormality.

  The dimensional perspective classifies patients in terms of where they are on human psychological dimensions of variation that are analogous to physical dimensions of variation such as height and weight.  McHugh and Slavney distinguish three such dimensions of variation.  One is intelligence.  The other two—emotional stability/reactivity and introversion/extroversion—are aspects of temperament.  The dimensional perspective holds that people who are near the tails of the distribution along one or more of those dimensions, when responding to stressful life circumstances, have greater potential to develop distressing mental symptoms.  Such people are “abnormal” only in degree, not in kind.  From this perspective, the goal of psychiatric treatment is not to prevent or cure complaints and symptoms but to avoid them.  To do so, treatment focuses on discovering means of guiding and strengthening patients so they can manage their lives more successfully in the future.

The behavior perspective classifies people in terms of abnormalities in their behavior.  The perspective distinguishes between driven or motivated behaviors and socially learned ones.  Driven or motivated behaviors have three components:  a driving, impelling, physiologically based hunger or appetite (for water, food, sleep, or sex); conditioned learning; and choice.  Obesity, when not caused by a physiological disease, is an example of an abnormal driven or motivated behavior.  Socially learned behaviors are interwoven with the social contexts in which people live and are affected by a person’s intelligence and temperament, but are driven by physiological urges only indirectly, if at all.  Those behaviors are connected to social roles and rules represented by the day-to-day actions of people in a community.  Socially learned behaviors also have three components:  antecedents that precede or precipitate the behaviors, the person’s choices and actions, and consequences that reinforce and sustain the behaviors.  Examples of socially learned, disordered behaviors that are the targets of psychiatric treatment include hysteria, suicide, and crime.

     Understanding either driven or socially learned behaviors involves grasping the teleology of a sequence of actions:  what may be described as taking place must be understood as what a person is doing.  From the behavior perspective, psychiatric patients are classified in terms of what component of their behavior is disordered:  their goals (for example the goal of suicide, which is death), their means of achieving those goals (exhibitionism as a means of sexual expression, for example), or the events that provoke their disordered behavior (for example, cravings for food or sex).  Psychiatrists and other physicians attempt to use both medical and psychological treatments to prevent, ameliorate, or interrupt disturbed behaviors.  Treatment is conceived as a process of conversion from one way of life to another.

The life story perspective sees the patient as someone who is to some degree demoralized [13] —overwhelmed, defeated, overmastered—by the circumstances of his life.  Demoralization is a reaction to misfortune.  A psychiatrist can often help relieve such suffering by offering ways of tying the facts of the person’s story into a life story.  In doing so, the psychiatrist applies the logic of narrative in the same way as a historian.  The basic elements of psychiatric stories are the presence or absence of disease; the person’s intelligence and temperament; his drives and behavior; his assumptions and intentions; and the patient’s capacity for choice—his ability to shape his feelings, behavior, assumptions, and intentions in the present and the future.  A story aims to identify the patient in a life—as a person with particular characteristics and intentions and thus with particular vulnerabilities—and to indicate how the patient has contributed to his situation and can reshape it.  The story will be helpful if it enables the person to think of himself less as a victim of circumstances and more as an agent responsible for his future and in control of his feelings, prepared to produce a better story (and fashion a better life) in the future with the information he has learned from his past and the insights he has gained from treatment.  From this perspective, treatment is conceived of as the rescripting of a life.

Following Jerome Frank, McHugh and Slavney argue that all forms of psychotherapy involve, to a greater or lesser degree, the telling and retelling of the story of the patient’s life. They acknowledge that psychotherapeutic stories, because they reflect judgments about how a life can be made meaningful through intentional choice, “are brought into a dialogue, if not a confrontation, with ‘ultimate concerns.’” Therefore, psychotherapists have an obligation to compare the ultimate concerns “promulgated by a story-based psychiatry” with those “from other encompassing views about humankind, such as the philosophical and the religious.”  For “[i]n discussions about the best way to live a life, psychiatrists do not, simply by virtue of their professional educations, have the final jurisdiction.” [14]

McHugh and Slavney do not clearly state a philosophical foundation for their account of the four perspectives of psychiatry.  On one hand, they affirm that consciousness is a mystery and argue that “we do not know how the brain produces the mind.” which suggests they are neither mind/body dualists nor naive phenomenalists.  On the other hand, the disease and dimensional perspectives focus on how the animal aspect of the organic level of a person’s being and his passions condition the order of his psyche.  Similarly, the behavior perspective also reduces man to the level of an animal.  The only human good it recognizes is the satisfaction of physiological appetites.  The only reason that a psychiatrist can offer for converting from one way of life to another —the goal of behavioral treatment—is the greater satisfaction of those appetites afforded by the new life.  While consistent with the view that man differs from animals, the life story perspective offers no explicit criteria for evaluating the truth of the stories by which people make sense of their lives or that psychiatrists tell their patients.  The issue here is not whether a story recounts a person’s circumstances and experiences as accurately as possible, given the imperfection of human memory, but whether the story reflects a true image of reality as a whole and man’s place in it, including a truthful account of the hierarchy of human goods.  McHugh and Slavney recognize that psychiatric stories presuppose an image of reality and a notion of the good of man.  But although they say that psychotherapeutic stories should illuminate a person’s freedom and responsibility, they provide no further criteria for distinguishing between true and false stories or between virtues or vices.  In short, they accept the results of Jaspers’ philosophizing about psychiatric ways of knowing but do not attempt to go any further.  Similarly, their colleague Jerome Frank, who originated the life story perspective, notes that Plato distinguished between base and noble or therapeutic rhetoric [15] and states that the aims of psychotherapy are similar to those of noble rhetoric, though more modest and circumscribed.  But he provides no criterion for distinguishing between base and noble rhetoric or good and bad psychiatric stories.

The absence of an adequate philosophical foundation for psychopathology does not matter if psychiatric practice occurs in a society with a strong common-sense culture that recognizes the validity of different ways of understanding human beings, affirms the reality of human freedom, and assumes that in many cases a person is capable of taking responsibility for his conduct and the quality of his life despite difficult circumstances. Voegelin may have had that context in mind when he remarked that “a psychology can be empirically sound and even render excellent therapeutic results in spite of the fact that its metaphysical foundations are untenable, as for instance in the case of Freud’s psychoanalysis.” [16]   One senses in McHugh and Slavney a respect for and trust in the strength of common-sense culture in the United States and the stability of American political and social institutions.  Those sentiments are stronger than their dismay at the factionalism of contemporary psychiatry.

But if a psychiatrist happens to practice in a society that is disintegrating, where a common-sense understanding of reality and man does not exist and the most atrocious acts have become the norm in society and are even sanctioned or carried out by government, the absence of a philosophical foundation will make it very difficult for him to understand and resist effectively the evil around him, so that he will be in acute danger of becoming a more or less willing and conscious accomplice in that evil. [17]   To avoid that fate, he will have to fashion a truthful image of reality and a true story about man’s place in it that he can draw upon to diagnose the psychopathology of the age. 

IV.     The Premise of Psychopathology:  the Idea of Man

Psychopathology and psychiatric practice assume that all human beings at all times and places suffer from the same types of mental disorders.  That assumption rests on the idea that all men share a universal human nature.  All theories of mental disorders share that assumption, however much they may differ about the specific characteristics that are common to all men.  In light of those differences in opinion, is it possible to reach agreement about what man is?

According to Eric Voegelin, the only rational way to ground the idea of man is to acknowledge the empirical fact that man was discovered and his nature clarified at two specific points in history:  among the pre-Socratic and classical philosophers of ancient Hellas and in ancient Israel.

The idea of man is not a question of arbitrary definitions; rather, man is discovered in quite specific historical places and in quite concrete situations ….  We are dealing here with strictly empirical questions:  When was man as such discovered?  and What was he discovered to be?  These discoveries have taken place respectively in the Hellenic and the Israelite societies.  In the Hellenic society, man is experienced by the philosophers of the classical period as a being who is constituted by the nous, by reason.  In the Israelite society man is experienced as the being to whom God speaks his work, that is, as a pneumatic being who is open to God’s word.  Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man, which were generalized as the idea of man. [18]

 

There was something essentially similar about the experiences of Hellenic philosophy and Israelite revelation that gave rise to the idea of man, according to Voegelin:

The experiences of reason and spirit agree on the point that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist for himself.  He exists in an already given world.  This world itself exists by reason of a mystery, and the name the mystery, for the cause of this being of the world, of which man is a component, is referred to as “god”….  There is a ground of being in the sense of a first cause, a prima causa or a proton aition, to which we remain in relation philosophically through the seeking, the zetema in the Platonic sense, and pneumatically through hearing the word in the sense of revelation.  In both manners, through the seeking for the divine, the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophical experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience, man participates in the divine.  The concepts are methexis in Greek, participatio in Latin, participation in the divine. [19]

Voegelin’s analysis implies that the contemporary student of psychiatry who seeks to find a rational basis for the discipline must begin by acknowledging that he is aware of existing by reason of the mystery we call “God” and recognizing that awareness as the indispensable starting point from which he can orient himself in reality.  On that basis, he can recognize his feelings of lostness and disorientation as originating in the fact that nearly all of the theories and therapies he is expected to learn do not acknowledge the experience of participation in the divine.  With the recovery of that experience and the accompanying insights, he will begin to gain a critical distance on the discipline.

V.      The Experiential Source of the Premise

Voegelin’s analysis of the experiential source of the idea of man is couched in philosophical language.  That raises the question of whether the experience is common to all men, or only to philosophers like Voegelin.  In other words, for Voegelin’s analysis to be valid and the idea of man as constituted by and participating in the divine to be true, there must be some pre-philosophical and pre-revelatory experiential constant that is common to all men at all times and all places.  According to Voegelin, that experiential constant is the experience of all the areas of reality as consubstantial.  In his later work, Voegelin calls this constant the primary experience of the cosmos.  This experience is primary in the sense of being “the historical and personal starting-point for all interpretations of reality.” [20] The experience is of a cosmos in the sense that reality is experienced as an embracing oneness that comprises all that is.  As Voegelin describes the experience in the fourth volume of his magnum opus, Order and History:

The cosmos of the primary experience is neither the external world of objects given to a subject of cognition, nor is it the world that has been created by a world-transcendent God.  Rather, it is the whole, to pan, of an earth below and a heaven above—of celestial bodies and their movements; of seasonal changes; of fertility rhythms in plant and animal life; of human life, death, and birth; and above all, as Thales still knew, it is a cosmos full of gods. [21]

Voegelin’s historical studies led him to conclude that, in societies such as ancient Egypt, where the breakthrough to the more differentiated experiences and languages of philosophy or revelation has not yet occurred, reality is symbolized in mythical language as an embracing whole that is comprised of the four areas of the gods, man, the world, and society, all of which are symbolized compactly in terms of analogies with each other.  Thus, a king’s rule over a territory and its people may be symbolized as an analogue of divine rule over the cosmos, or the king himself as a god or perhaps a son of god.  Reflection on such intracosmic analogies reveals, according to Voegelin, an important truth about the relationship between such mythical symbolism and the primary experience of the cosmos.  The intracosmic analogies used by ancient societies make sense only on the assumption that the various partners in the community of being are consubstantial.  That is, the validity of the analogies is not self-evident but derives from

the experience of an underlying, intangible embracingness, from a something that can supply existence, consubstantiality, and order to all areas of reality even though it does not itself belong as an existent thing to any one of these areas.  The cosmos is not a thing among others; it has reality in the mode of nonexistence.  Hence, the cosmological play with mutual analogies cannot come to rest on a firm basis outside itself; it can do no more than make a particular area of reality … transparent for the mystery of existence over the abyss of nonexistence. [22]

 

            For Voegelin, philosophical symbols that seek to explicate the consubstantiality of man and the reality of which he is a part, including the reality of other men, also have their source in the primary experience and emerge from and are continuous with more compact mythical symbols. The cosmic primary experience is also the source of the differentiated revelatory symbols about man developed by the prophets of Israel to articulate the experience of the presence under God as their essence. [23]   Voegelin’s view is made clear in his interpretation of the famous Aristotelian statement of sameness, the claim at the beginning of the Metaphysics that “all men by nature desire to know.”

The statement that the known nature is not merely the nature of one person who concretely has the experience of his essence, but rather that of all men, implies the premise that all men are equal qua men, regardless of whether or not they experience their human essence in the clarity of differentiated consciousness.  The knowledge of the premise, however, comes not from the concrete experience of essence on the part of the respective noetic or pneumatic person, but from the cosmic primary experience, in which things are already experienced as participating-men as men, and gods and gods-even when we do not know too well what precisely they are.  Without that premise, the noetic experiences would remain a biographical curiosity; only with the premise as background do they attain their ordering function in society and history, inasmuch as the premise is the basis of the claim that they are representative and binding for all men. [24]

In the last quotation Voegelin refers to noetic and pneumatic persons, meaning concrete human beings whose consciousness is constituted by the experience of the nous in Hellenic philosophy or the pneuma in Israelite revelation, respectively.  He draws a distinction between experiences and acts of transcendence that can be used to clarify his understanding of how noetic and pneumatic experiences differ from the primary experience of the cosmos. [25]   The term “transcendence” refers broadly to those experiences in which, as one focuses his attention on any aspect of reality, a “more” emerges into awareness.  Voegelin generally speaks of “experiences of transcendence” in which the “more” that emerges is experienced and symbolized as holy, sacred, divine, or the equivalent.  He uses the term “act of transcendence” to refer a process of meditation in which an experience of transcendence culminates in the pervasion of consciousness by transcendent, divine reality.

According to Voegelin, experiences of transcendence occur in ancient societies that symbolize reality solely in mythical terms, but the various realms of being are not clearly distinguished and acts of transcendence are not recognized as such, if they occur at all.  In both Hellenic philosophy and Israelite revelation acts of transcendence dissociate the cosmos-full-of-gods of the primary experience into a world of existent things and a transcendent, divine reality that in philosophy is symbolized as Being and in revelation is symbolized as a personal, creator God.  Beginning with the essays written in the 1960s that were published in Anamnesis, Voegelin begins to speak of “noetic” and “pneumatic” experiences and to use those terms as synonymous with the philosophical and revelatory differentiations, respectively.  In the fourth volume of Order and History, published in 1974, he makes clear that both differentiations always include a pneumatic core and a noetic periphery.  I interpret the pneumatic core as the experiences of transcendence, especially the acts of transcendence, and the noetic periphery as the experience of making the differentiating event explicit to itself through discovering and symbolizing the logos of consciousness.

VI.     Resistance to Existential Disorder

According to Voegelin, men who live in a society in which the divine is experienced and symbolized compactly in mythical language are just as capable of allowing their lives to be ordered by the divine as those who live in societies in which the divine is experienced and symbolized in more differentiated noetic or pneumatic terms.  For “[o]rder in existence … corresponds to a man’s actualization of his relation to the [divine] ground through ritual, meditation, faith and prayer but does not correspond to the degree of differentiation.” [26]   And whenever order in existence is actualized, it is accompanied by language symbols that express the experience of and resistance to existential disorder.

Two texts analyzed by Voegelin illustrate that phenomenon from outside Hellenic civilization.  One is an Egyptian poem from about 2,000 B.C. that he praised for its subtle psychological analysis of the loneliness of the spiritually sensitive man living among a people that have morally disintegrated:

     To whom can I speak today?

     One’s fellows are evil;

     the friends of today do not love.

     To whom can I speak today?

     Faces have disappeared:

     Every man has a downcast face.

     To whom can I speak today?

     A man should arouse wrath by his evil character,

     But he stirs everyone to laughter, in spite of the

      wickedness of his sin.

     To whom can I speak today?

     There are no righteous;

     The land is left to those who do wrong.

     To whom can I speak today?

     The sin that afflicts the land,

      It has no end. [27]

The second text is from Israel in the eighth century B.C. The prophet Isaiah (32:6) designated the person who speaks falsely against God as the fool (nabal) and his state of disordered existence as foolishness (nabalah):

For the fool speaks foolishness

and his heart works iniquity:

to practice ungodliness

and speak falsely against Yahweh,

to make empty the soul of the hungry,

and cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. [28]

According to Voegelin, in Hellenic philosophy the resistance to existential disorder takes the form of an analysis of disorders of the psyche.  The pre-Socratic philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle differentiated the psyche as the area in reality that becomes luminous to itself in the noetic exegesis of the experiences of being drawn toward, loving, and seeking to know transcendent, divine being.  In articulating the logos of the psyche and analyzing psychic disorder, the Hellenic philosophers, and especially Plato, were quite conscious of engaging in an act of resistance to the disorder of the surrounding Hellenic society and, especially, the deformed images of reality and man presented by the Sophists.  The triad of turning toward and participating in the divine, awareness of social and personal disorder, and the symbolization of psychic order and disorders as an active resistance to disorder, remain to this day inseparable components of philosophizing.  As Voegelin summarized the issue,

[t]he truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it; and the movement toward truth starts from a man’s awareness of his own existence in untruth.  The diagnostic and therapeutic functions are inseparable in philosophy as a form of existence.  And even since Plato, in the disorder of his time, discovered the connection, philosophical inquiry has been one of the means of establishing islands of order in the disorder of the age. [29]

Philosophy is only one form of resistance to existential disorder, and in any concrete society it is not empirically the most important.  However, a philosopher who wishes to understand a specific case of existential disorder can draw on the concepts developed by previous philosophers for the purpose of diagnosing other cases.  Voegelin’s theory of psychopathology explicitly draws upon and extends the insights of his predecessors, especially Heraclitus, Plato, and Schelling.  The following section of the paper summarizes aspects of Voegelin’s interpretation of the first two of those philosophers, in order to prepare the ground for a presentation of Voegelin’s own brief statement of a theory of psychopathology.

VII.     The Experiential Sources of Order in Hellenic Philosophy

According to Voegelin, Heraclitus was the Hellenic philosopher who first explored and articulated the order of the psyche and differentiated the problem of psychopathology.  For Heraclitus a man can augment his psyche by exploring it.  He states, “I explored [or: searched into] myself.” (B 101) [30]   That exploration is both an activity of the logos and a means of increasing a man’s participation in it:  “The soul has a logos that augments itself.” (B 115)  The process is unlimited because the logos itself is without limit:  “You could not find the limits of the soul, even if you traveled every path, so deep is its logos.” (B 45)

Heraclitus saw participation in the logos as the basis for community among men.  “Heraclitus speaks of the logos as what is common (xynon) to all men, in which they all participate qua men, and thus it demands of them conscious homologia,” or agreement. [31]   For Heraclitus the community of homologia includes the moral order, which is nourished by the divine.  The logos “is common to all men who understand (phronein).”  With the latter term Heraclitus anticipates the phronesis, the prudential wisdom in ethical and political matters, of Aristotle.  Heraclitus takes from his predecessors Xenophanes and Parmenides the symbol nous as that by which a man partakes of and speaks truly about the logos, and links the nous to the divine nomos or law.  The logos nourishes the nous as the laws of the polis are nourished by the divine law:  “Those who speak with the mind (nooi) must strengthen themselves with that which is common to all, as the polis does with the law (nomos) and more strongly so.  For all human laws nourish themselves from the one divine—which prevails as it will, and suffices for all things and more than suffices.”

A man’s success or failure in actualizing his participation in the logos determines whether he is capable of existential communication and life in human community.  When those who listen to Heraclitus agree with him, they listen to and agree with the logos itself.  The many who do not listen to and agree with the logos are “fools” who “act and speak like men asleep” and “live as if they had their a wisdom of their own (idian phrosein).” (B 34, B 2)  Heraclitus differentiates the pairs of symbols common-private and awake-asleep and uses them to characterize order and disorders of the psyche:  “Those who are awake have a world (cosmos) one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their private worlds.”

According to Voegelin, Heraclitus uses the symbols of pistis (trust, faith) and elpis (hope) to articulate the sense of direction that makes possible a man’s progress toward actualization of his participation in the logos.   “Through lack of faith (apistie) the divine [?] escapes being known.” (B 86).  “If you do not hope, you will not find the unhoped-for, since it is hard to be found and the way is all but impassable.” (B 18)  Voegelin interprets these fragments as emphasizing the difficulty of finding the divine that we seek and stresses that the “the anticipating urges” of hope and faith orient the psyche’s search in the right direction.

 

Heraclitus calls the divine “the alone wise” (B 32) and says of it that “the Wise is apart from all things” (B 41).  He appears to have predicated wisdom of men but contrasted it to the divine One who is wise.  He also was the first to use the term “philosopher.”  Voegelin interprets the fragments as indicating that, for Heraclitus, “human wisdom consists in the consciousness of a limitation in comparison with the divine” and the “philosopher” is engaged in the search for the One that is wise (pp. 225-6).  With the symbol “philosopher” Heraclitus adds philia (love) to pistis (trust, faith) and elpis (hope) as a third experience that orients the soul toward the divine ground.

Like Heraclitus, Plato used pairs of symbols to articulate his experience of the order of the psyche of the philosopher and the psychic disorders of other types of men in Hellenic civilization.  Plato used the pairs especially to distinguish between the philosopher and the Sophist, whose schools apparently were pervaded in Plato’s time by a general loss of the primary experience of the cosmos. [32]   The key pair of symbols in Plato is the lover of wisdom (philosophos) and the lover of opinion (philodoxos).  In the Republic, the philosophos is said to have knowledge (episteme) of being in itself, of the one in the manifold of things.  The philodoxos has opinion (doxa), which is knowledge of being in the manifold of things, and cannot bear the idea that “the beautiful, or the just, or any other thing, is one” (479).  In the earlier Protagoras, Plato contrasted episteme with amathia, ignorance concerning the consequences of one’s actions.  In the Republic, according to Voegelin, amathia is portrayed in its entirety as agnoia (382b), the ignorance of the psyche regarding its relationship to the divine. 

Also in Plato is the related pair of justice (dikaiosyne) and injustice (polypragmosyne).  In the Republic, justice and injustice are said to be to the soul what health are to the body (444c).  Health is the establishment of an order by nature among the parts of the body, whereas disease is a disturbance of the natural order of rule and subordination among those parts (444d).  In the Laws, Plato refers to the man who combines agnosticism with pride, self-assertion, and ambition, as suffering from a disease or madness (nosos, 888b).  According to Voegelin, the term is derived from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, where Hermes calls Prometheus’ declaration of his hatred for all the Gods “no small madness” (977).

  There are also the different types of love that form the respective ability to know of the philosophos and the philodoxer.  The episteme of the Platonic philosopher is rooted in love (philia) of wisdom (sophia) and love (eros) of the Good (agathon).  Those experiences are related to that of participation in the philia that, in the Gorgias, is discerned as the formative force that holds together the cosmos:  “And wise men tell us that heaven and earth and gods and men are health together by partnership (koinonia) and love (philia) …” (507e-508a).  In contrast, the doxa of the lover of opinion is rooted in his love of the people (demos) of the polis (Gorgias 481) and of the objects of the people’s desires that he must help them satisfy if he is to satisfy his own.

 

IX.       The Fundamental Problem of Psychopathology

Voegelin’s explicitly addresses the problem of psychopathology in an important essay on “Reason:  The Classic Experience.” [33]   There he observes that Plato and Aristotle inherited from the pre-Socratics the symbol nous as designating 1) the part of man that is constituted by, participates, and is nourished by transcendent, divine being; and 2) the source of intelligible structure in reality.  Parmenides had used the term nous to designate man’s faculty of ascending to the vision of “Is!” in which the knower and the known are experienced as consubstantial.  Anaxagoras had identified the nous as the source of intelligible structure in the cosmos.  Heraclitus had said that the nous is linked to and nourished by the divine nomos or law.  Against the background of those insights, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

 

experienced and explored the movements of a force that structured the psyche of man and enabled it to resist disorder.  To this force, its movements, and the resulting structure, they gave the name Nous.  As far as the ordering structure of his humanity is concerned, Aristotle characterized man as the zoon noetikon, as the living being that possesses Nous. [34]

 

As indicated in the previous section, Voegelin interprets Heraclitus and Plato as having differentiated faith or trust, hope, and love as the experiences that orient existence toward transcendent, divine being.  Reason in the sense of the nous is differentiated from those experiences, which arise from the more compact, prephilosophical experience of the cosmos as an order of love. [35]

“Reason is differentiated as a structure in reality from the experiences of faith and trust (pistis) in the divinely ordered cosmos, and of the love (philia, eros) for the divine source of order; it is differentiated from the amor Dei in the Augustinian sense, not from the amor sui.  Thus, the reality expressed by the Nous symbols is the structure in the psyche of a man who is attuned to the divine order in the cosmos, not of a man who exists in revolt against it; Reason has the definite existential content of openness toward reality in the sense in which Bergson speaks of l’ame ouverte.” [36]

Thus, for the Hellenic philosophers, the order of the psyche depends on participation in the divine nous through the experiences of faith, hope, trust, and love.  According to Voegelin, that insight is

essential for understanding the fundamental issue of psychopathology:  if Reason is existential philia, if it the openness of existence raised to consciousness, then the closure of existence, or any obstruction to openness, will affect the rational structure of the psyche adversely. [37]

 

In “Reason:  the Classic Experience” and other late essays, Voegelin uses the abstract, neutral phrase “the tension toward the ground” to refer to all aspects of the rational structure of the psyche.  (The term “ground” symbol symbolizes the divine pole of the experience of mutual participation of divine and human reality in the movements of the psyche of a man whose psyche is open to that experience.)  In interpreting Voegelin’s comment in the “Reason” essay about “the fundamental issue of psychopathology,” it is useful to distinguish three aspects of that structure.  

·        First, there is the aspect of what Voegelin calls “the concrete modes of the tension,” which the Hellenic philosophers express in symbols taken from ordinary language such as philia, eros, pistis, and elpis, as well as in symbols that articulate man’s existence as a state of unrest, such as the movements of “wondering,” (thaumazein), “seeking” or “searching” (zetein), “questioning” (aporein, diaporein), and “turning around” (periagoge), as well as the state of “confusion” (aporon) or “wonder” (thaumazon) or “ignorance” (agnoia, agnoein, amathia) from which the movements break forth. [38]

 

·        Second, there is the aspect of the mutual participation of divine and human reality that is symbolized more compactly in the symbols of the concrete modes.  This second aspect is designated by the more abstract, specifically philosophical symbols of participation (methexis and metalepsis in Greek, participatio in Latin).

 

·        Third, there is the aspect of the idea of man, which is designated by the still more abstract, philosophical definitions of man as a zoon echon noetikon and an animal rationale.

 

Distinguishing those three aspects of the rational structure of the psyche makes clear that, for Voegelin, psychic disorders originate in the absence of loss of the first aspect—the concrete modes of the tension.  In another important late essay, he calls faith, hope, and love “the virtues of existential tension” and says that those terms are “constant symbols from the pre-Socratic and classic philosophers, through St. Paul and St. Augustine, to the present.” [39]   That statement expresses Voegelin’s own trust in the order of the cosmos and his faith that what he calls the primary experience of the cosmos is the source from which the differentiated symbols of Heraclitus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine emerged.  For Voegelin, trust or faith, hope, and love are the cognitive core of the psyche of the man who lives in openness to reality in all its dimensions. [40]

  Distinguishing the three aspects of the rational structure of the psyche also makes clear that a man’s ability to understand the more abstract terms that articulate that structure, such as the participation of the human in the divine reason or the nature of man as the being that possesses reason, is dependent on the quality of his experience of the concrete modes.  That is, knowledge of order in existence is a matter of the heart and the reason, not of the reason alone, to use Pascal’s terms.  And such knowledge is not something that a man can acquire the way he chooses what to wear each day, but is fundamentally a gift of divine grace, although man can cooperate in its acquisition to the degree allowed by his creaturely status.  Growth in knowledge of order occurs empirically through katharsis, through healing of the soul in the Augustinian sense of a gradual, lifelong turning of the affections toward the divine that is accompanied by and manifest in the unification of thought, will, and feeling. [41]

IX.       The Rejection of Reason

According to Voegelin, the dependence of reason on existential philia, on the concrete modes of the tension of existence, was not clearly articulated until the Stoics of the early Christian era were confronted by existential disorientation as a mass phenomenon in the wake of imperial expansion.  Voegelin recounts that Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations contains the following list of “quite modern-sounding” behavioral syndromes:

restless moneymaking, status seeking, womanizing, overeating, addiction to delicacies and snacks, wine tippling, irascibility, anxiety, desire for fame, stubbornness, rigidity of attitude, and such fears of contact with other human beings as misogyny and misanthropy. [42]

In the same work Cicero related the principal Stoic conclusions about the nature of such phenomena:

As there are diseases of the body, so there are diseases of the mind (morbi animorum); the diseases are generally caused through a confusion of the mind through twisted opinions (privarum opinionum conturbatio), resulting in a state of corruption (corruptio opinionum); the diseases of this type can arise only through a rejection of Reason (ex aspernatio rationis); hence, as distinguished from diseases of the body, mental diseases can never occur without guilt (sine culpa); and since this guilt is possible only for man who has Reason, the diseases do not occur in animals. [43]

Severe, persistent behavioral disorders derive from disturbances of thought, from doxai in the Platonic sense, that have their origin not in a lack of information, but in a rejection of reason in the classical sense of openness toward the divine ground.  Although the fact of divine grace complicates the matter somewhat, man’s freedom to actualize the order of existence means that, in each concrete case, the rejection is a deliberate choice.  Voegelin reports the following passage of Chysippus:  “This change [of the mind] and withdrawal from oneself happens in no other way than through a deliberate turning-away (apostrophe) from the Logos.” [44]   The movement sympolizes by the term apostrophe, the turning away from one’s true self that is constituted in relation to the divine, is the opposite from the Platonic turning around toward the Good (periagoge).

The Stoices also observed that the rejection of reason is accompanied by anxiety, which statements attributed to Chysippus classify as “a variety of ignorance (agnoia).” According to Voegelin, such ignorance was found to be

an existential state in which the desires become uncontrolled or undirected, a state of fluttering uncertainty and overexcitement of the passions, a state of being scared or terrified because existence has lost its direction.  The description is summarized in the term agnoia ptoides as the Stoic “definition” of madness (mania).  To the zoon noun echon, there corresponds, as its pathological opposite, the zoon agnoian echon.

 

XII.     Conclusion

This paper has presented Eric Voegelin’s key insights into the problem of psychopathology.  To recapitulate, those insights are:

1.      The premise of psychopathology is the idea of man.  That idea is not an arbitrary definition with which one can disagree as he pleases, but articulates a specific insight discovered historically in ancient Hellas and Israel.  That insight is that man is a being that is constituted by and participates in transcendent, divine reality.

2.      Resistance to disorder in existence is present wherever men are formed by their relationship to the divine.  Psychopathology emerged historically as part of the form of resistance known as Hellenic philosophy. In ancient Hellas as at other times and place, psychopathological insights are results of a philosopher’s resistance to the disorder of the age and accompanying attempt to gain his humanity under God.

3.      The sources of order in existence are the experiences of faith or trust, hope, and love of transcendent, divine reality.

4.      The Hellenic philosophers articulated the psyche as the area of reality in which those experiences become transparent, through language symbols, for their origins in the  mutual participation of human and divine reality.  The philosophers used nous or reason to symbolize the structure of the psyche as a whole.  Reason encompasses not only the experience of mutual participation and the nature of man as constituted by it, but also the concrete experiences of faith or trust, hope, and love.

5.      Psychopathology in the narrow sense is the study of the disorders of behavior and thought, the existential disorientation, that occurs when man’s capacity for ideation and reasoning is cut off from those experiences.

            Voegelin’s theory of psychopathology sheds considerable light on the shortcomings of the behavior and life story perspectives of psychiatry formulated by McHugh and Slavney.  They offer no account of the hierarchy of the goods of human action, or of the substantive rationality of action, and no account of the virtues, because they do not articulate the experience of transcendent, divine reality as the end of human action.  They also offer no criteria for evaluating the truth of the images of reality and man that inform the stories that people tell about their lives or the truth of the stories that psychiatrists tell their patients, because they do not acknowledge the truth of such stories to be found in their existentially open participation in the story told by the Whole of which each of us is a part.

Finally, Eric Voegelin’s insights into the order and disorders of the psyche have a very important practical implication for the contemporary psychiatrist and his patients.  For each person is obligated to actualize in his own life, through the experiences of ritual, meditation, prayer, and faith, the order of existence.  The psychopathology of the age consists, Voegelin reminds us, in rejection of that obligation and a refusal to surrender to the human condition.  The healing of psychic disorder in ourselves begins from our awareness of our obligation to participate in reality in all its dimensions and of our freedom to reject or embrace that duty.  If those of us who are mental health professionals accept that responsibility, then we may be able to say, with the great psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:

  It is always a steadying thing to know that one’s work links with entirely natural phenomena, and with the universals, and with what we expect to find in the best of poetry, philosophy and religion. [45]