From Political Ideas to Symbols of Experience
This brings me to the problem of the history of ideas. At Harvard I had met Fritz Morstein-Marx, who at that time was editor of a textbook series for McGraw-Hill. He was kind enough to enlist me for a textbook of moderate size—I believe 200 to 250 pages were envisaged—for this series. That is how I got beyond teaching the history of political ideas into writing one. I started on the materials, using first, as a model of what had to be included or excluded, the History of Political Theory [1937] by George H. Sabine, which at the time was the standard work. But as I began working more deeply into the materials, I discovered that the treatment hitherto accorded to them was inadequate and my own knowledge of the materials quite insufficient to deal with them more adequately. I actually had to work through the literature from the Greek beginnings to the present. That is what I did over the years. This procedure, however, burst the enterprise of a small textbook for the Morstein-Marx series. I could not deliver on time, because I was still busy acquiring knowledge of sources, and the more knowledge I acquired the fatter the manuscript grew.
But that was not all. In the course of the work it became obvious that the limitation imposed on a history of ideas, the convention of having it begin with the Greek Classic philosophers and end up with some contemporary ideologies, was untenable. About some of these problems I had already found out while I was in Alabama. There I discovered that one could not very well write about the Middle Ages and their politics without knowing a good deal more about the origins of Christianity than I knew at the time, and that one could not properly understand the Christian beginnings without going into the Jewish background. So it was in Alabama that I began to study Hebrew with the local rabbi, who was also teaching Hebrew at the university. The beginnings were hard, but gradually I acquired a sufficient knowledge of grammar and vocabulary to be able to check translations and finally to make my own translations on the basis of the texts. Through these studies on the Israelite background the pattern of a history of political ideas beginning with Greek philosophy had already exploded. Even worse, however, I got acquainted with the splendid achievements in the exploration of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations conducted by members of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. The background thus had expanded to the ancient Near Eastern empires from whom Israel emerged, the Israelites were the background for the Christians, and the Christians were the background for the ideas of the Middle Ages. The pattern of a unilinear development of political ideas, from a supposed constitutionalism of Plato and Aristotle, through a dubious constitutionalism of the Middle Ages, into the splendid constitutionalism of the modern period, broke down.
The pattern, then, cracked along other lines. I had written my History of Political Ideas up well into the nineteenth century. Large chapters on Schelling, Bakunin, Marx, and Nietzsche were finished. While working on the chapter on Schelling, it dawned on me that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences. Moreover, one could not handle under the title of “ideas” an Egyptian coronation ritual, or the recitation of the enuma Elish on occasion of Sumerian New Year festivals. I was not yet in a position really to understand where the concept of ideas had come from and what it meant. Only very much later did I discover that the origin is probably to be found in the Stoic koinai ennoiai. These common, or self-evident, opinions were the starting point of criticism in chapter one of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690]—he protested against them in order to return to the experiences that engendered ideas.
These various occasions for becoming aware of the theoretical inadequacy of my conventional preconceptions about a history of ideas did not arise all at once and did not find immediate solutions. I would characterize the five years between 1945 and 1950 as a period of indecision, if not paralysis, in handling the problems that I saw but could not intellectually penetrate to my satisfaction. The work did not stop. I had to go on exploring sources, and the horizon grew even larger during the war, because China had become fashionable and the department decided that I, with my linguistic facility, would be elected to teach Chinese government. That threw me into the study of Chinese history; and because it was a bit difficult to talk about contemporary Chinese ideas without understanding their classical background, I started learning Chinese and learned enough to understand the symbols of the Classics, especially of Confucius and Lao-tse. This knowledge helped considerably in understanding Chinese thought. It is still helpful today, because I can recognize in the revolutionary operas propagated by Madame Mao Tse-tung the pattern of the ballet libretti of the Chou period, with the slight difference that the Chou authors celebrated the victory of the Chou Dynasty, whereas the modern revolutionary operas celebrate the victory of the revolutionary armies. Still, on the whole it was a period of theoretical paralysis with mounting problems for which I saw no immediate solutions.
A breakthrough occurred on occasion of the Walgreen Lectures that I delivered in Chicago in 1951. Here I was forced, in comparatively brief form, to formulate some of the ideas that had begun to crystallize. I concentrated on the problem of representation and the relation of representation to social and personal existence in truth. It was obvious that a Soviet government, for instance, was not in power by virtue of representative elections in the Western sense and nevertheless was the representative of the Russian people—but by virtue of what? This question I called at the time the problem of existential representation. This existential representation I found to be always the core of effective government, independent of the formal procedures by which the existentially representative government achieved its position. In a comparatively primitive society where the mass of the people is incapable of rational debate and of forming political parties who select issues, a government will rest on traditional or revolutionary forces without benefit of elections. That the government is tolerated is the result of its fulfilling more or less adequately the fundamental purposes for which any government is established—the securing of domestic peace, the defense of the realm, the administration of justice, and taking care of the welfare of the people. If these functions are fulfilled moderately well, the procedures by which the government comes into power are of secondary importance. This existential representation, then, I found empirically supplemented in historically existing societies by a claim to “transcendental” representation, as I called it at the time. By “transcendental representation” I meant the symbolization of the governmental function as representative of divine order in the cosmos. That is the fundamental symbolism, going back to the ancient Near Eastern empires where the king was the representative of the people before the god and of the god before the people. Nothing has changed in this fundamental structure of governmental order, not even in the modern ideological empires. The only difference is that the god whom the government represents has been replaced by an ideology of history that now the government represents in its revolutionary capacity.
The difference just mentioned had to be expressed in theoretical categories. For several years I had been aware, through my studies in the history of Christianity and the Middle Ages, of various sectarian movements not too clearly described with regard to their attitudes and beliefs. During the 1940s and 1950s, I became gradually aware that besides Classic philosophy and revelatory Christianity, as represented by the main church, there existed symbolizations of fundamental creeds that were classified as gnostic by experts in the field. So far as I remember, I became aware of the problem of Gnosticism and its application to modern ideological phenomena for the first time through the introduction of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Prometheus, published in 1937. Ever since the 1930s a considerable literature on Gnosticism had been growing, and incidental remarks concerning modern parallelisms were to be found here and there. I discovered that the continuity of Gnosticism from antiquity into the modern period was a matter of common knowledge among the better scholars of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. I should like to mention the great work by Ferdinand Christian Baur on Die christliche Gnosis: oder, die christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung of 1835. Baur unfolded the history of Gnosticism from the original Gnosis of antiquity, through the Middle Ages, right into the philosophy of religion of Jakob Böhme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
I want to stress that Gnosticism, as well as its history from antiquity to the present, is the subject of a vastly developed science, and that the idea of interpreting contemporary phenomena as gnostic is not as original as it may look to the ignoramuses who have criticized me for it. Generally I should like to remark that if I had discovered for myself all the historical and philosophical problems for which I am criticized by intellectuals, I would be without a doubt the greatest philosopher in the history of mankind. Before publishing anything on the applicability of gnostic categories to modern ideologies, I consulted with our contemporary authorities on Gnosticism, especially with Henri Charles Puech in Paris and Gilles Quispel in Utrecht. Puech considered it a matter of course that modern ideologies are gnostic speculations; and Quispel brought the Gnosticism of Jung, in which he was especially interested, to my attention.
Since my first applications of Gnosticism to modern phenomena in The New Science of Politics and in 1959 in my study on Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, I have had to revise my position. The application of the category of Gnosticism to modern ideologies, of course, stands. In a more complete analysis, however, there are other factors to be considered in addition. One of these factors is the metastatic apocalypse deriving directly from the Israelite prophets, via Paul, and forming a permanent strand in Christian sectarian movements right up to the Renaissance. An excellent exposition of this continuity is found in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium [1957]. I found, furthermore, that neither the apocalyptic nor the gnostic strand completely accounts for the process of immanentization. This factor has independent origins in the revival of neo-Platonism in Florence in the late fifteenth century. The attempt to regain an understanding of cosmic order through a revival of neo-Platonism miscarried; a revival of the divine order in the cosmos in the ancient sense would have required a revival of the pagan gods, and that did not work. What was left of the intracosmic divine order that the neo-Platonists tried to revive was an immanent order of reality—an immanentism that had to become secularist when, as today, following the pagan gods, the Christian God has been thrown out, too.
Hence, the experiences that result in immanentist constructions had to be explored. As historical phenomena, they are not unknown. Perhaps the most important one is the removal of the amor Dei from the Augustinian structure of the soul by Hobbes, and the reduction of its ordering force to the amor sui. This reduction to the amor sui then became dominant in the eighteenth century through the psychology of the amour-de-soi developed by the French moralistes. Although there is no doubt about the phenomenon as such, its interpretation is difficult because the conventional philosophical terminology has accepted the premises of the new reductionist position—that the position is reductionist does not come to analytical and critical attention. Only in recent years have I developed the concept of the egophanic revolt,1 in order to designate the concentration on the epiphany of the ego as the fundamental experience that eclipses the epiphany of God in the structure of Classic and Christian consciousness. I had already used the term apocalypse of man to cover this problem in The New Science of Politics. On that occasion I wanted to stress the discovery of human possibilities that characterizes the modern period. No doubt this discovery was made, but stressing the discovery alone would not take into account its reductionist context. The discovery of man had to be paid for by the death of God, as this phenomenon was called by Hegel and Nietzsche. The term egophanic revolt, distinguishing this experience of the exuberant ego from the experience of the theophanic constitution of humanity, is the best I can do terminologically at present.
The term metastatic apocalypse will require a little explanation. I had to develop the term on occasion of the study of the Israelite prophets. In the prophecy of Isaiah we run into the oddity that Isaiah counseled the King of Judah not to rely on the fortifications of Jerusalem and the strength of his army but on his faith in Yahweh. If the king would have true faith, God would do the rest by producing an epidemic or a panic among the enemy, and the danger to the city would dissolve. The king had common sense enough not to follow the advice of the prophet but rather to rely on fortifications and military equipment. Still, there was the prophet’s assumption that through an act of faith the structure of reality could be effectively changed.
In studying this problem and trying to understand it, my first idea, of course, was that the prophet indulged in magic, or at least believed in magic. That would not have been surprising, because in the history of Israel it had been the function of prophets, for instance, to guide the hand of the king in shooting a bow against the enemy as a magical operation that would result in victory. What happened in the case of Isaiah would have been what in modern psychology, by Nietzsche or Freud, would be called a sublimation of the more primitive physical magic. Still, I felt uneasy about it, and I consulted about the matter especially with Gerhard von Rad in Heidelberg, who was horrified at the idea that a grandiose spiritual prophet like Isaiah should be a magician. I was so impressed by his attitude that I made a concession. I did not use the term magic for the practice advised by Isaiah but coined a new term to characterize the peculiar sublimated magic belief in a transfiguration of reality through an act of faith. And this kind of faith I called metastatic faith—the belief in a metastasis of reality through an act of faith. I am not so sure that today I would make this concession, because this kind of faith is indeed magic, though one has to distinguish this “sublimated” variety from a more primitive magical operation. If one would really draw a hard line of difference between magic and metastatic faith, I am afraid the factor they have in common—the attempt to produce a desired result by means outside of the cause-effect relations in nature—would be smudged.
1. Cf. Ecumenic Age, chap. 5, §2, “The Egophanic Revolt” [CW, vol. 17].